launch/no lauch decision with crew?

Happened to be watching something about Challenger on Discover which had
Roger Boisjoly on it.. anyway got to doing a little digging on the web and
stumbled across this snipped -

"Boisjoly subsequently won the Prize for Scientific Freedom and
Responsibility from the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. The final launch/no launch decision now rests with the
astronauts, and they have stopped two launches since the Challenger
disaster."

Which are the two launches mentioned?

regards
Paul
--
paul at spamcop.net

From Paul Hutchings:
Happened to be watching something about Challenger on Discover which had
Roger Boisjoly on it.. anyway got to doing a little digging on the web and
stumbled across this snipped -

"Boisjoly subsequently won the Prize for Scientific Freedom and
Responsibility from the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. The final launch/no launch decision now rests with the
astronauts, and they have stopped two launches since the Challenger
disaster."

Which are the two launches mentioned?


Not -107.



~ CT

Not -107.



~ CT
Well OBviously - since there was nothing wrong with the final launch
countdown what-so-ever.

From John (john2375):

Not -107.

Well OBviously - since there was nothing wrong with the final launch
countdown what-so-ever.

Nothing wrong? ET foam impact has been taken as an "acceptable risk"
from the very beginning of the program. One of those Russian Roulette
bullets turns out to be a foam bullet. Here's a link to the CAIB
report if you want to have a closer look at what they had to say:

http://www.caib.us/news/report/default.html

From p127 of CAIBvI, section 6.1 A HISTORY OF FOAM ANOMALIES:
________

One debris strike in particular foreshadows the STS-107 event. When
Atlantis was launched on STS-27R on De-cember 2, 1988, the largest
debris event up to that time significantly damaged the Orbiter.
....
Mission Commander R.L. "Hoot" Gibson later stated that Atlantis
"looked like it had been blasted by a shotgun."18 Concerned that the
Orbiter's Thermal Protection System had been breached, Gibson or-dered
that the video be transferred to Mission Control so that NASA
engineers could evaluate the damage.
....
Damage was concentrated outboard of a line right of the bipod
attachment to the liquid oxygen umbilical line. Even more worrisome,
the debris had knocked off a tile, ex-posing the Orbiter's skin to the
heat of re-entry. Post-flight analysis concluded that structural
damage was confined to the exposed cavity left by the missing tile,
which happened to be at the location of a thick aluminum plate
covering an L-band navigation antenna. Were it not for the thick
alumi-num plate, Gibson stated during a presentation to the Board that
a burn-through may have occurred.
_______




More from p122:
________

Discussion of Foam Strikes
Prior to the Rogers Commission

Foam strikes were a topic of management concern at the time of the
Challenger accident. In fact, during the Rog-ers Commission accident
investigation, Shuttle Program Manager Arnold Aldrich cited a
contractor's concerns about foam shedding to illustrate how well the
Shuttle Program manages risk:

On a series of four or five external tanks, the thermal insulation
around the inner tank … had large divots of insulation coming off and
impacting the Orbiter. We found significant amount of damage to one
Orbiter after a flight and … on the subsequent flight we had a camera
in the equivalent of the wheel well, which took a picture of the tank
after separation, and we determined that this was in fact the cause of
the damage. At that time, we wanted to be able to proceed with the
launch program if it was acceptable … so we undertook discus-sions of
what would be acceptable in terms of potential field repairs, and
during those discussions, Rockwell was very conservative because,
rightly, damage to the Orbiter TPS [Thermal Protection System] is
damage to the Orbiter system, and it has a very stringent environ-ment
to experience during the re-entry phase.

Aldrich described the pieces of foam as "… half a foot square or a
foot by half a foot, and some of them much smaller and localized to a
specific area, but fairly high up on the tank. So they had a good shot
at the Orbiter underbelly, and this is where we had the damage."
_________



....and Columbia's "nail in the coffin", so to speak, is found on p125:
_________

STS-113 Flight Readiness Review: A Pivotal Decision
....
The Board wondered why NASA would treat the STS-112 foam loss
differently than all others. What drove managers to reject the
recommendation that the foam loss be deemed an In-Flight Anomaly? Why
did they take the unprecedented step of scheduling not one but
eventually two missions to fly before the External Tank Project was to
report back on foam losses?
....
_________



Take this foam impact history and reconsider the original quote at the
top of this thread:

"The final launch/no launch decision now rests with the
astronauts, and they have stopped two launches since the Challenger
disaster."

....and see how much glowing praise you want to give the astronaut
corps.

Remember, this is the same organization that pushed so hard to get the
exorbitant MEDS upgrade, even if it meant that the Wing Leading Edge
MMOD upgrade fell below the funding cutoff line.


I fully expect that there were astronauts who protested such backward
priorities. But they clearly failed to protest *enough*. This was
the same failure of Roger Boisjoly. And we have 14 dead astronauts as
a result.


....so let's give them prizes and awards and move on. That's just
peachy.

When the astronaut office gets absolved from culpability in -51L and
-107, then they learn that they don't have to be accountable for these
mistakes.

....unless, of course, they happen to be riding on that particular day.
Ironically, Willie McCool was heavily involved in the MEDS upgrade.
I have a hunch that sometime after viewing the "launch anomaly", he
had a wish that he could have traded in his MEDS for stronger WLEs.






I just now had the strange thought that "WLEs" can be pronounced
"willies". How horribly sad.


~ CT

(Stuf4) wrote in
om:

Remember, this is the same organization that pushed so hard to get the
exorbitant MEDS upgrade, even if it meant that the Wing Leading Edge
MMOD upgrade fell below the funding cutoff line.

At least you are honest enough to include the "MMOD" acronym with the name.
That's good for partial credit. For the rest of the credit, how about
telling us:

1) What MMOD stands for
2) What this particular WLE MMOD upgrade would have involved

and most importantly:

3) Why this particular upgrade would have been utterly useless in the STS-
107 entry scenario.

...unless, of course, they happen to be riding on that particular day.
Ironically, Willie McCool was heavily involved in the MEDS upgrade.
I have a hunch that sometime after viewing the "launch anomaly", he
had a wish that he could have traded in his MEDS for stronger WLEs.

There was no WLE upgrade, either proposed or in-work prior to STS-107, that
would have prevented the 107 accident. You are postulating a false choice
here.

There are proposed WLE upgrades now, but even those do not come close to
the level of impact resistance required to resist a 107-size impact. They
are intended to protect against small impacts, with the assumption that
larger ones would be handled by either in-orbit repair, or by ISS safe
haven.


--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

In article , Paul
Hutchings wrote:

"Boisjoly subsequently won the Prize for Scientific Freedom and
Responsibility from the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. The final launch/no launch decision now rests with the
astronauts, and they have stopped two launches since the Challenger
disaster."

Which are the two launches mentioned?

Hmm. Jenkins lists many, many scrubbed or delayed launches, almost
invariably due to last-minute techical hitches ("that computer's dead,
go fix") or waiting for a break in the weather.

There are none explicitly given as due to crew decisions, at least not
on a quick read-through; there were a few particularly small problems
which caused a hold or a scrub, however, and it's quite possible that
the crew had the final say in not flying. Someone probably does know...

--
-Andrew Gray

From Jorge:
Remember, this is the same organization that pushed so hard to get the
exorbitant MEDS upgrade, even if it meant that the Wing Leading Edge
MMOD upgrade fell below the funding cutoff line.

At least you are honest enough to include the "MMOD" acronym with the name.
That's good for partial credit. For the rest of the credit, how about
telling us:

1) What MMOD stands for
2) What this particular WLE MMOD upgrade would have involved

and most importantly:

3) Why this particular upgrade would have been utterly useless in the STS-
107 entry scenario.

Each of your three points have been covered extensively and are
available in the archives. A quick GoogleGroups search on [stuf4
meteoroid] will give direct hits, so to speak. And here's a link if
you want to go to my first post on the topic:
http://tinyurl.com/2kd8v

...unless, of course, they happen to be riding on that particular day.
Ironically, Willie McCool was heavily involved in the MEDS upgrade.
I have a hunch that sometime after viewing the "launch anomaly", he
had a wish that he could have traded in his MEDS for stronger WLEs.

There was no WLE upgrade, either proposed or in-work prior to STS-107, that
would have prevented the 107 accident. You are postulating a false choice
here.

False choice? For all I know, Willie could have been wishing to have
his teddie bear to hold on to. I would see nothing false about that.

No one is saying that upgraded WLEs would definitely have saved
Columbia. The point was that it would have been a safety improvement
designed to help deal with a known threat. And that MEDS was a tragic
misprioritization of limited funding.

Your rebuttal strikes me as curious...

Perhaps you support the strategy of taking a widely known threat, and
then neglecting that to invest huge sums of money into upgrading a
cockpit that has been of little safety concern to pilots and
engineers.

Perhaps you support Gehman's decision to *not mention* the cancelled
WLE MMOD upgrade in his "extensive" report.

Now if instead you, like many NASA engineers, see MEDS to have been a
horrible waste of money... and that you see it as a gross oversight
for Gehman to fail to mention the WLE MMOD upgrade in his report, then
I would find it refreshing for you to voice agreement here.

There are proposed WLE upgrades now, but even those do not come close to
the level of impact resistance required to resist a 107-size impact. They
are intended to protect against small impacts, with the assumption that
larger ones would be handled by either in-orbit repair, or by ISS safe
haven.

No one is arguing for making a perfectly indestructible shuttle. The
issue here is smart funding decisions vs fatal funding decisions.

There are many people throughout NASA who recognize MEDS as a tragic
waste. I expect that Gehman himself was profoundly baffled when he
learned about the wing upgrade getting cancelled, and *why*.

We could go all the way back to the fatal design decision of not
giving the shuttle a crew escape module. But that mistake happened
back in the early 70s. The MEDS funding just happened to be the one
that Willie got heavily involved in.


~ CT

(Stuf4) wrote in
om:

From Jorge:
Remember, this is the same organization that pushed so hard to get
the exorbitant MEDS upgrade, even if it meant that the Wing Leading
Edge MMOD upgrade fell below the funding cutoff line.

At least you are honest enough to include the "MMOD" acronym with the
name. That's good for partial credit. For the rest of the credit, how
about telling us:

1) What MMOD stands for
2) What this particular WLE MMOD upgrade would have involved

and most importantly:

3) Why this particular upgrade would have been utterly useless in the
STS- 107 entry scenario.

Each of your three points have been covered extensively and are
available in the archives. A quick GoogleGroups search on [stuf4
meteoroid] will give direct hits, so to speak. And here's a link if
you want to go to my first post on the topic:
http://tinyurl.com/2kd8v

That post answers 1) and 2) but not 3). You have repeatedly implied that
the WLE MMOD upgrade (additional layers of Nextel fabric) would have made a
difference in the 107 entry. The aerothermal evidence says otherwise. So
the only possibilities are 1) you know about the aerothermal evidence and
you are lying about it, or 2) you don't know about the aerothermal evidence
and you continue to pontificate ignorantly about it.

For your sake, I will assume 2) until convinced otherwise.

...unless, of course, they happen to be riding on that particular
day.
Ironically, Willie McCool was heavily involved in the MEDS
upgrade.
I have a hunch that sometime after viewing the "launch anomaly", he
had a wish that he could have traded in his MEDS for stronger WLEs.

There was no WLE upgrade, either proposed or in-work prior to
STS-107, that would have prevented the 107 accident. You are
postulating a false choice here.

False choice? For all I know, Willie could have been wishing to have
his teddie bear to hold on to. I would see nothing false about that.

No one is saying that upgraded WLEs would definitely have saved
Columbia. The point was that it would have been a safety improvement
designed to help deal with a known threat.

Even saying that it *possibly* would have saved Columbia is wrong.

And that MEDS was a tragic
misprioritization of limited funding.

Your rebuttal strikes me as curious...

Perhaps you support the strategy of taking a widely known threat, and
then neglecting that to invest huge sums of money into upgrading a
cockpit that has been of little safety concern to pilots and
engineers.

Oh, really? Which engineers have you talked to? Certainly not any that I
know. The human factors limitations of the existing shuttle cockpit have
been known for a long time. The sim teams have long known that freezing an
indicator on a steam gauge at the right time could kill a crew. That lesson
didn't really sink in until Halsell did a CFIT on an STS-83 sim due to a
ADI pitch needle failure that *wasn't* scripted by the sim team - it was an
actual failure on an actual (Class III derated) ADI. That woke everyone up
damn quick to the fact that NASA needed to get the shuttle off the steam
gauges, and onto a cockpit that the commercial airlines and military had
already standardized on a decade ago. NASA still has a bad case of "NIH"
syndrome, but this time they took the hint and *got it right*.

Perhaps you support Gehman's decision to *not mention* the cancelled
WLE MMOD upgrade in his "extensive" report.

Yes, I do. Because it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference in the
107 accident. And you *know* it.

Now if instead you, like many NASA engineers, see MEDS to have been a
horrible waste of money... and that you see it as a gross oversight
for Gehman to fail to mention the WLE MMOD upgrade in his report, then
I would find it refreshing for you to voice agreement here.

See above. You are way, *way* off base here. I have no doubt that engineers
in other specialties didn't see the need for MEDS. That's natural for
engineers of *any* specialty - they will naturally see upgrades in their
own areas as being higher priority. That does not mean the need didn't
exist.

There are proposed WLE upgrades now, but even those do not come close
to the level of impact resistance required to resist a 107-size
impact. They are intended to protect against small impacts, with the
assumption that larger ones would be handled by either in-orbit
repair, or by ISS safe haven.

No one is arguing for making a perfectly indestructible shuttle. The
issue here is smart funding decisions vs fatal funding decisions.

There you go again. By using the term "fatal" you are implying once again
that there were WLE upgrades proposed prior to 107 that could have
prevented the 107 accident. You are wrong. Had NASA implemented the WLE
MMOD upgrade, the 107 accident would have happened exactly the same way it
did without the upgrade - the proposed upgrade was utterly inadequate to
the foam impact that occurred on 107.

There are many people throughout NASA who recognize MEDS as a tragic
waste.

Evidently, they're all cowards, since they're not willing to publicly
attach a name to their opinions. Fine. Accuse me of "oppression". If
expressing one's opinion vigorously is "oppression", then color me guilty.

--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

Nothing wrong? ET foam impact has been taken as an "acceptable risk"
from the very beginning of the program. One of those Russian Roulette
bullets turns out to be a foam bullet. Here's a link to the CAIB
report if you want to have a closer look at what they had to say:


What I mean is, during the countdown leading to the launch of STS-107,
there was nothing wrong - ET foam impact could not be predicted during
the countdown - Husband and McCool couldnt' look out the window and
say "oh ****, looks like the bi-pod ramp foam may fall and I think
this time it may hit one of the RCC panels - OK, 'Houston, HOLD THE
COUNTDOWN!'"

From Jorge:
Remember, this is the same organization that pushed so hard to get
the exorbitant MEDS upgrade, even if it meant that the Wing Leading
Edge MMOD upgrade fell below the funding cutoff line.

At least you are honest enough to include the "MMOD" acronym with the
name. That's good for partial credit. For the rest of the credit, how
about telling us:

1) What MMOD stands for
2) What this particular WLE MMOD upgrade would have involved

and most importantly:

3) Why this particular upgrade would have been utterly useless in the
STS- 107 entry scenario.

Each of your three points have been covered extensively and are
available in the archives. A quick GoogleGroups search on [stuf4
meteoroid] will give direct hits, so to speak. And here's a link if
you want to go to my first post on the topic:
http://tinyurl.com/2kd8v

That post answers 1) and 2) but not 3). You have repeatedly implied that
the WLE MMOD upgrade (additional layers of Nextel fabric) would have made a
difference in the 107 entry. The aerothermal evidence says otherwise. So
the only possibilities are 1) you know about the aerothermal evidence and
you are lying about it, or 2) you don't know about the aerothermal evidence
and you continue to pontificate ignorantly about it.

For your sake, I will assume 2) until convinced otherwise.

Please consider a third alternative:

- It is irrelevant whether or not the WLE MMOD would definitively have
prevented Columbia's destruction.

Again, the criticism is that safety was not the top priority when it
came to upgrade funding decisions. More to the point for this thread,
*astronauts* themselves pushed the MEDS upgrade at the expense of
greater safety concerns.

And they grossly failed to call a "King's X" in the wake of blatantly
hazardous foam strike incidents (STS-27R and STS-112 being two of the
most serious). For this reason, I hesitate to share the praise of
astronauts being given more authority in the post-Roger's era.

...unless, of course, they happen to be riding on that particular
day.
Ironically, Willie McCool was heavily involved in the MEDS
upgrade.
I have a hunch that sometime after viewing the "launch anomaly", he
had a wish that he could have traded in his MEDS for stronger WLEs.

There was no WLE upgrade, either proposed or in-work prior to
STS-107, that would have prevented the 107 accident. You are
postulating a false choice here.

False choice? For all I know, Willie could have been wishing to have
his teddie bear to hold on to. I would see nothing false about that.

No one is saying that upgraded WLEs would definitely have saved
Columbia. The point was that it would have been a safety improvement
designed to help deal with a known threat.

Even saying that it *possibly* would have saved Columbia is wrong.

I'm surprised at the level of certainty you have been expressing here,
Jorge.

Nobody knows with infinite precision what happened to Columbia's wing.
The ground testing only gives limited insight. My understanding of
material failure is that there is some threshold that needs to be
crossed for that failure to occur. So how far across such a threshold
did the foam break the RCC? You may say that the best analysis shows
that it was WAY across the threshold. And I may agree.

....but all engineering analyses have limited precision, particularly
when key variables are unknown. Therefore I am not so quick to
eliminate the possibility (however slim that possibility may be) that
the foam impact may have been just one degree, one deg/s, or one knot
away from being on the other side of that RCC integrity threshold. I
cannot say with your certainty that the WLE MMOD would not have made
any difference.

And once again, that issue is beside the point of misprioritized
funding. Perhaps we can find common ground here in this statement:

"The WLE MMOD upgrade would have resulted in a stronger wing, and
therefore safer wing, than the one that OV-102 launched with on
January 16th, 2003."

And that MEDS was a tragic
misprioritization of limited funding.

Your rebuttal strikes me as curious...

Perhaps you support the strategy of taking a widely known threat, and
then neglecting that to invest huge sums of money into upgrading a
cockpit that has been of little safety concern to pilots and
engineers.

Oh, really? Which engineers have you talked to? Certainly not any that I
know. The human factors limitations of the existing shuttle cockpit have
been known for a long time. The sim teams have long known that freezing an
indicator on a steam gauge at the right time could kill a crew. That lesson
didn't really sink in until Halsell did a CFIT on an STS-83 sim due to a
ADI pitch needle failure that *wasn't* scripted by the sim team - it was an
actual failure on an actual (Class III derated) ADI. That woke everyone up
damn quick to the fact that NASA needed to get the shuttle off the steam
gauges, and onto a cockpit that the commercial airlines and military had
already standardized on a decade ago. NASA still has a bad case of "NIH"
syndrome, but this time they took the hint and *got it right*.

You are citing a single failure of Class III hardware during a
simulation. I have pointed to the CAIB report's citation of multiple
incidents from flight missions. I suggest that we keep a clear
distinction between justification vs excuse. It's clear to me that
the astronauts wanted sexy looking displays, and they were willing to
couch a justification for funding that in terms of safety at the
expense of upgrades which had a _primary_ intent of safety.

And I've stated before that the biggest downfall of MEDS lies in its
dollar-for-dollar lack of benefit! If your opinion is that MEDS was a
*cost effective* way to make the shuttle more safe to fly, then I
would be very curious to see any data you have to support that
position.

Perhaps you support Gehman's decision to *not mention* the cancelled
WLE MMOD upgrade in his "extensive" report.

Yes, I do. Because it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference in the
107 accident. And you *know* it.

Gehman's report went on for hundreds of pages discussing many things
that wouldn't have made a bit of difference. Now if you are saying
that the WLE MMOD upgrade program and its subsequent cancellation was
*irrelevant* to the CAIB mandate...

....well, I'll just simply disagree with you here.

Now if instead you, like many NASA engineers, see MEDS to have been a
horrible waste of money... and that you see it as a gross oversight
for Gehman to fail to mention the WLE MMOD upgrade in his report, then
I would find it refreshing for you to voice agreement here.

See above. You are way, *way* off base here. I have no doubt that engineers
in other specialties didn't see the need for MEDS. That's natural for
engineers of *any* specialty - they will naturally see upgrades in their
own areas as being higher priority. That does not mean the need didn't
exist.

I know of more than one NASA engineer who works with MEDS and sees it
as a waste of money. I know of more than one *pilot* who works at
NASA and sees MEDS as a waste of money.

(And again, there would be tragic irony to learn that Rick or Willy
were among those who voiced objection to how money was spent on MEDS
while other upgrades got axed.)

There are proposed WLE upgrades now, but even those do not come close
to the level of impact resistance required to resist a 107-size
impact. They are intended to protect against small impacts, with the
assumption that larger ones would be handled by either in-orbit
repair, or by ISS safe haven.

No one is arguing for making a perfectly indestructible shuttle. The
issue here is smart funding decisions vs fatal funding decisions.

There you go again. By using the term "fatal" you are implying once again
that there were WLE upgrades proposed prior to 107 that could have
prevented the 107 accident. You are wrong. Had NASA implemented the WLE
MMOD upgrade, the 107 accident would have happened exactly the same way it
did without the upgrade - the proposed upgrade was utterly inadequate to
the foam impact that occurred on 107.

Taken with the rebuttal above, consider this...

Had NASA divided their limited cash pot by axing MEDS and funding
stronger WLEs and then -107 gets destroyed anyway? I don't see myself
as calling that a fatal funding decision. I would see myself saying
that the threat was addressed, but addressed inadequately.


Now of course we could hypothesize a scenario where MEDS gets dumped
at the expense of the other upgrades... and that some other mission
tragically ends in CFIT where the board determines that some steam
gauge needle got stuck, or some such pre-MEDS anomaly, or any of
hundreds of other LOCV failures in hundreds of other systems. That is
the conundrum facing those in key management positions who make such
decisions as to whether the shuttle should be designed with an escape
capsule, what upgrades to fund, etc.

I do not fault them for not having a 100% accurate crystal ball. I
fault them for misreading the writing on the wall. Or more likely,
*neglecting* to give due weight to the writing on the wall that they
clearly read.

There are many people throughout NASA who recognize MEDS as a tragic
waste.

Evidently, they're all cowards, since they're not willing to publicly
attach a name to their opinions. Fine. Accuse me of "oppression". If
expressing one's opinion vigorously is "oppression", then color me guilty.

I can't recall seeing anything you've ever posted that was oppressive.
This post included. -Insisting- doesn't cross the line. -Demanding-
does. Making a demand on someone fails to respect their option of
refusal. It oppresses their range of choices.

You want me to disclose sources. I have the option to share or
withhold.

My answer to you is that I would be glad to continue this part of the
conversation in private.


~ CT