New Columbia loss report out today

From Mary Shafer:
wrote:
How's this for a major epiphany... If you don't design your
spacecraft with any way for your crew to survive a huge range of
mishaps, when those mishaps occur then the crew is expected to die.

Acceptable risks. The nation has changed its attitude toward what is
acceptable since the Orbiter was designed, including people here, but
those of us in the community mostly haven't. The STS was never
intended to be perfectly safe. Killing off a crew and losing a
vehicle now and then was expected from the moment pencils first
touched paper. The same is true of aircraft, which is why the USAF
has the Air Force Flight Test Center and the USN has the Naval
Aviation Test Center.

As I said in about 1989, perfect safety is for people who don't have
the balls to live in the real world.

Mary "Thirty years later and it's still the stone truth."

Surely you're aware that egress systems *are* designed in from the
beginning, even with the space shuttle. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo,
early Shuttle and even the X-15 were all designed with egress
systems. And Edwards and Pax River don't go around putting pilots in
vehicles on hazardous missions without having a reasonable egress plan
for when things go bad. A great visual for this was that piloted
cruise missile testing where the dude strapped on top of the missile
had a parachute. It is not a plan for perfect safety. It is a plan
for reasonable safety.

And whether anyone sees such efforts toward mishap survival as either
a waste of time/effort/money/performance/etc or a very smart way to
engineer in your value of human life, such a debate is beside the
point that I was making with that statement. The point was...

AFTER you've made the decision that you aren't going to give your crew
any hope of survival in that part of the envelope, it is incredibly
stupid to put all of this report's effort into detailing how they
died. It reeks of adding insult to fatal injury.

Imagine that the NF-104 was built with no ejection seat. Such a
design decision (for whatever reason) would have made for a starkly
different ending to that Chuck Yeager scene in The Right Stuff. If
the Air Force subsequently published a 400 page report on how they
sifted through the rubble and performed months of simulations and such
to determine exactly how Chuck died, that report would strike me as
about as silly (tragically) as this latest NASA report.

....or maybe I'm not giving Chuck Yeager enough credit here. It's not
hard to picture him insisting on a redesign of the egress system
before strapping into such a death trap.


~ CT

Neil Gerace wrote:

But of course it's a physical (electromagnetic, if you want to be
picky) interaction, not a chemical one.

For the hyper-picky, chemical interactions *are* electromagnetic...

From Monte Davis:
Neil Gerace wrote:
But of course it's a physical (electromagnetic, if you want to be
picky) interaction, not a chemical one.

For the hyper-picky, chemical interactions *are* electromagnetic...

?!

That's like saying that polygamous Mormons are fundamentally the same
as puppy love. There's a stark difference between e-mag attraction
versus *sharing* an electron. In going much beyond Van Der Waals with
your statement, you just dove off the precipice of factual accuracy.


~ CT

On Jan 18, 1:58*pm, Stuf4 wrote:
From Monte Davis:

Neil Gerace wrote:
But of course it's a physical (electromagnetic, if you want to be
picky) interaction, not a chemical one.

For the hyper-picky, chemical interactions *are* electromagnetic...

?!

That's like saying that polygamous Mormons are fundamentally the same
as puppy love. *There's a stark difference between e-mag attraction
versus *sharing* an electron. *In going much beyond Van Der Waals with
your statement, you just dove off the precipice of factual accuracy.

I need to correct my statements above for lacking in open-mindedness.
I reconsidered what you said, Monte, and to categorize chemical
bonding into the four fundamental forces, I have to agree with you.

(To go deeper into that analogy, the attraction that causes puppy love
*IS* the same as the attraction underlying polygamy at some
fundamental psychological level.)


~ CT

On 14 Jan 2009 22:17:21 GMT, LooseChanj wrote:

On or about Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:45:43 -0800, Kathy Rages made the sensational claim that:
In article ,
"Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)"
wrote:

As I said in about 1989, perfect safety is for people who don't have
the balls to live in the real world.

Mary "Thirty years later and it's still the stone truth."

Uh, Mary . . .

It's only 20 years later. But still the stone truth, of course.

Not if she meant 1979.

No, it was a typo. I've never been very good at using the top line on
the keyboard.

Mary "Twenty years!"
--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer
We didn't just do weird stuff at Dryden, we wrote reports about it.
or
Visit my blog at http://thedigitalknitter.blogspot.com/

"Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)" wrote in
message ...

No, it was a typo. I've never been very good at using the top line on
the keyboard.


You know, I've always wanted to capitalize my numbers. Don't ask me why,
but sometimes I figure SHIFT 1979 would be more approriate than just plain
old 1979. But every keyboard I try that on it comes out as !(&(. Someone
needs to fix that.




--
Greg Moore
Ask me about lily, an RPI based CMC.

Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:

You know, I've always wanted to capitalize my numbers. Don't ask me why,
but sometimes I figure SHIFT 1979 would be more approriate than just plain
old 1979. But every keyboard I try that on it comes out as !(&(. Someone
needs to fix that.


What's really spooky is that now we don't have to say "back in the last
decade" or even "back in the last century"... but rather "back in the
last millennia".
Boy, you want to talk about feeling _old_. :-D

Pat

Stuf4 wrote:

:From Mary Shafer:
: wrote:
: How's this for a major epiphany... If you don't design your
: spacecraft with any way for your crew to survive a huge range of
: mishaps, when those mishaps occur then the crew is expected to die.
:
: Acceptable risks. The nation has changed its attitude toward what is
: acceptable since the Orbiter was designed, including people here, but
: those of us in the community mostly haven't. The STS was never
: intended to be perfectly safe. Killing off a crew and losing a
: vehicle now and then was expected from the moment pencils first
: touched paper. The same is true of aircraft, which is why the USAF
: has the Air Force Flight Test Center and the USN has the Naval
: Aviation Test Center.
:
: As I said in about 1989, perfect safety is for people who don't have
: the balls to live in the real world.
:
: Mary "Thirty years later and it's still the stone truth."
:
:Surely you're aware that egress systems *are* designed in from the
:beginning, even with the space shuttle. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo,
:early Shuttle and even the X-15 were all designed with egress
:systems. And Edwards and Pax River don't go around putting pilots in
:vehicles on hazardous missions without having a reasonable egress plan
:for when things go bad. A great visual for this was that piloted
:cruise missile testing where the dude strapped on top of the missile
:had a parachute. It is not a plan for perfect safety. It is a plan
:for reasonable safety.
:

It's not even a plan for reasonable safety. Until the development of
0/0 ejection seats, there were big pieces of flight envelopes in early
jets that were simply considered non-survivable. So yes, Edwards and
Pax River DID "go around putting pilots in vehicles on hazardous
missions without having a reasonable egress plan for when things go
bad". This is why in the early days, they killed about 7 test pilots
a year.

:
:AFTER you've made the decision that you aren't going to give your crew
:any hope of survival in that part of the envelope, it is incredibly
:stupid to put all of this report's effort into detailing how they
:died. It reeks of adding insult to fatal injury.
:

Heaven forfend they actually try to LEARN anything from it!

:Imagine that the NF-104 was built with no ejection seat. Such a
:design decision (for whatever reason) would have made for a starkly
:different ending to that Chuck Yeager scene in The Right Stuff. If
:the Air Force subsequently published a 400 page report on how they
:sifted through the rubble and performed months of simulations and such
:to determine exactly how Chuck died, that report would strike me as
:about as silly (tragically) as this latest NASA report.
:
:...or maybe I'm not giving Chuck Yeager enough credit here. It's not
:hard to picture him insisting on a redesign of the egress system
:before strapping into such a death trap.
:

You're kidding yourself. Yeager tended very much toward the "kick the
tires, light the fires, and GO" mentality. He had an almost
preposterous confidence in his ability to fly his way out of trouble.

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
dakotatelephone...


Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:

You know, I've always wanted to capitalize my numbers. Don't ask me why,
but sometimes I figure SHIFT 1979 would be more approriate than just
plain old 1979. But every keyboard I try that on it comes out as !(&(.
Someone needs to fix that.


What's really spooky is that now we don't have to say "back in the last
decade" or even "back in the last century"... but rather "back in the last
millennia".
Boy, you want to talk about feeling _old_. :-D

Saying "back in the last millennia" when you mean back in the 1990's may be
accurate (to the measure of a millennia), it surely isn't precise.

Jeff
--
"Many things that were acceptable in 1958 are no longer acceptable today.
My own standards have changed too." -- Freeman Dyson

Jeff Findley wrote:
Saying "back in the last millennia" when you mean back in the 1990's may be
accurate (to the measure of a millennia), it surely isn't precise.


Eh? Can't hear yeh, son... the ears go after a century or so.
Well, I remember back on 1066 when them Normans started acting up...

The Ancient Of Days :-)