![]() Though the weather was cold and rainy throughout the days and weeks that followed the crash, searchers, many of them volunteers from throughout the South (and around the country) stayed out for twelve hour shifts. The response of the communities of deep east Texas, an area of the country with some very problematic and sad history is nothing short of phenomenal. The memories of the shuttle response are still quite raw - all of my coworkers worked on nothing BUT shuttle recovery for the first 3 months of the response, and many of my coworkers continued to work on the response for years later (I work for a federal response agency). Posted by Annika Cicada at 11:06 AM on Febru It's regularly used as an example of how not to run your engineering organization. This is well documented, understood and known in engineering circles. But the culture at NASA couldn't be arsed enough to care to prevent them. Which is to say, there was a 100% certainty the catastrophic failures could have been prevented and were KNOWN prior. Those numbers in engineering terms are ghastly appalling, but really it wasn't an engineering failure at all, it was a failure of NASA executives to foster a culture to care to do better than that, and it could be argued they actively prevented it. Yes, space flight is hard, and you can say 2 out of 135 is good enough, but that's a 98.5 percent success rate and a 40% vehicular failure rate. Morton Thiokol (they refurbished the booster between launches) had provided engineering documentation prior to the challenger explosion stating exactly the failure point, predicting that it would occur around the launch that it did and prior to the challenger launch engineers at MT were making desperate pleas to abort the mission. Weirdo: the levels of engineering required to build and maintain the shuttle program generated mountains of factual, data driven, reality-based evidence that were ignored by NASA executives. The controllers were in the front three rows, with FLIGHT in the center of row three, able to see everyone.Īrs Technica has two killer articles on the MOCR, one about the consoles and one about what is was like being at one of them, with Apollo EECOM Sy Liebergot They reported to the Program and Mission director, and were there to advise and monitor, not to control. But that console was in the last row of MCC, and those were the consoles that were Mission, not Flight - PAO (Public Affairs Office) DFO (Director of Flight Operation) HQ (NASA HQ rep) and DOD (Department of Defense. In the Gemini/Apollo era, there was a DOD position in the MOCR for the liaison to the Department of Defense, since they controlled the Naval resources used to recover the spacecraft after splashdown. External resources, however, are the responsibility of the Mission Director, who authorizes the flight, and the Program Director, who runs the entire spaceflight program. * The flight directors (3 or 4, depending on how many MCC teams are assigned) run the flights, and they have absolute authority over the flight. They might have even been able to save the orbiter, if someone found a clever way to cover that hole - though they would have probably just deorbited into the Pacific to make sure nobody was hit by anything. It just so happened that another orbiter stack was close to flight, and could have been made ready for a rescue mission, without skipping safety checks, before Columbia ran out of consumables. The real tragedy was that if the NASA mission director * and program manager had authorized more detailed looks, we would have seen the hole, and we might have saved the crew. If it hadn't punched through, the airflow did the rest of the job and left the hole. And when you see the foam hit on the film, it very clearly shatters - almost into a cloud.Īlas, the RCC panels weren't tough, they were brittle, and by the time the foam shattered, itwas able to deliver enough KE in a short enough time constant to break it. But the foam had already proven to be friable - it had shed from the ET ramp, after all - so they thought that if it did hit the much tougher structures of the shuttle, it would just shatter and most of the kinetic energy wouldn't be delivered. It was clear that a mass of that density, if it held together, could do so. The issue is that nobody believed the foam would have the cohesiveness to actually deliver the energy. There's having the energy to do X, and being able to deliver the energy to do X. ![]() Basically he says that it was shocking that a lot of very intelligent people could not wrap their minds around the F=MA formula and believe that a piece of foam could bring down the shuttle. Wayne Hale, former STS Program Manager and long time NASA employee, has a great blog post talking about the testing that was performed.
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