Posted on 07/31/2005 5:34:43 AM PDT by Erik Latranyi
"We are ready to fly."
It was June 24, and William W. Parsons, NASA's shuttle program manager, was speaking to reporters on a telephone conference call from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. Two and a half years of study and struggle, he told them, were over at long last. The shuttle Discovery could blast off in July. At a closed-door meeting that afternoon, senior shuttle managers had ruled that the chances that debris from the giant external fuel tank would strike the Discovery at liftoff - in the kind of accident that doomed the Columbia and its seven astronauts in February 2003 - had been reduced to "acceptable levels."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This article only highlights the continued incompetence by these overpaid bureaucrats.
No heads rolling over the latest Billion Dollar oops?
My husband keeps muttering that the foam that they use now is more environmentally friendly and that the old, less "friendly" foam never fell off. Any truth to that.
Read the entire article. It explains the foam issues well.
"...would have insisted that the administrators be prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter due to their negligence with the Columbia mission."
Does ANYONE ever "pay" anymore when something goes wrong?
The twin towers are gone and not one head has rolled. Did NO ONE see the looming threat AND WARN OF IT? Well, yeah.... Had'nt we been attacked before? Well, yeah.... Had'nt the towers themselves been attacked before? Well, yeah....
The Challenger blows up in front of the whole world. Was not the very thing warned of? Well, yeah...
The Columbia burns up upon re-entry. The cause is ascertained. Was anyone held responsible for the problem? Was it corrected so that it COULDN'T happen again? Will ANYONES HEAD ROLL?
Welcome to the lying PC world where NOTHING is as important as protecting The Faith.
From ... http://www.sas.org/E-Bulletin/2003-02-21/features/body.html
No, he is wrong, according to this article, but be kind and don't tell him. :-)
NASA engineers had already seen how fixes can break things. After they made a minor change in the foam application process in the late 1990's to comply with environmental rules, small divots of foam rained off of the tank during ascent. The phenomenon, called popcorning, was caused by trapped bubbles; NASA solved the problem by venting the foam with tiny holes, but it was a reminder, if any was needed, that seemingly small changes could have profound effects.
That is probably what he is thinking of. However, this was before that.
In the end, the old engineering maxim "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" trumped vague misgivings about a part that had not shed any foam, as far as anyone knew, since 1983.
However, most of the flights after that were at night so it was impossible to know whether the problem persisted.
Typical NYT...the article is so longwinded you fall asleep before you get to the end :) I think this might answer your question:
" At the dawn of the shuttle program, NASA rules said no foam at all should be allowed to hit the shuttle and possibly damage the fragile heat-resistant tiles that cover its aluminum skin.
"But fidelity to those standards was relaxed over time; in fact, foam fell from a PAL ramp in two early missions, including the one in June 1983 on which Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. There may have been many more incidents, but dozens of shuttle missions have been launched in darkness, with no visual record of foam, and the tanks themselves cannot be retrieved from the ocean for analysis."
"...NASA engineers had already seen how fixes can break things. After they made a minor change in the foam application process in the late 1990's to comply with environmental rules, small divots of foam rained off of the tank during ascent."
I am troubled by this emerging pattern in gov't as well.
With regard to the WTC....the intelligence services should not have bourne the brunt of the firings (even though some were needed).
The real culpability for BOTH the WTC and NASA lie squarely on the shoulders of our elected representatives. They are charged with oversight. They shackled the intelligence services and they created a space program with a culture that leads to repeated mistakes and loss of life.
I certainly share the frustration but why must someone's head roll? Read the article. What they did was reasonable. It was wrong in some areas but it was reasonable and within normal procedures. Why should someone be sacrificed other than for PR reasons? That is the cowardly way out.
The twin towers are gone and not one head has rolled. Did NO ONE see the looming threat AND WARN OF IT? Well, yeah.... Had'nt we been attacked before? Well, yeah.... Had'nt the towers themselves been attacked before? Well, yeah....
Those whose heads should have rolled were no longer in office. The Clinton administration had put road blocks in place between the FBI and the CIA to prevent cross checking and sharing of infromation. They decided that terrorism was a criminal matter rather than a war declared on us from the outside, as bin Laden most certainly did in 1998. Although the intelligence was there to find and eliminate bin Laden and others Clinton found a way not to do it.
Bush was only in office a short time when 9/11 happened and had been purposely hampered in getting started by the Democrats refusing to release the normal transition money allocated for changes in office until the election was settled, and they drew that out as long as possible. Regardless, I, too, was disappointed that Mueller and Tenet stayed in place but, as I said the work of the FBI and the CIA was sound and the ones who created the problem were gone.
The Challenger blows up in front of the whole world. Was not the very thing warned of? Well, yeah...
As well as I recall, not too well at times, there was a change at NASA after that.
The Columbia burns up upon re-entry. The cause is ascertained. Was anyone held responsible for the problem? Was it corrected so that it COULDN'T happen again? Will ANYONES HEAD ROLL?
As far as heads rolling I don't remember but with something as tricky as space flight you will never be able to assure that nothing will happen. After Challenger we went a long time trying to fix the problem. Read the article to see the process.
Welcome to the lying PC world where NOTHING is as important as protecting The Faith.
I don't understand that but having heads roll just for the sake of it is stupid and cowardly. Want someone's head? How about Sandy Berger's? There is a guy who should be in prison. Want more? How about Bill and Hillary? Each should be in prison on death row.
Let's see: Operation Bojinka, and another plan to crash a plane into the Pope's motorcade in the Philipines, multiple prior SAM attampts and Arrow Air, which was probably a successful shoot-down or sabotage... Yeah, 9/11 was "unimaginable."
Now, instead of security people losing their jobs for incompetence, we get more incompetent "security" people at airports that make us NOT ONE BIT more secure.
On the day of the accident, Sean O'Keefe repeatedly emphasized that the foam strike could never have caused sufficient damage to Columbia. He continued to repeat that a 1.5lb piece of foam was no danger to the shuttle.
Of course, the truth, known by everyone with a rudimentary physics trainig, became evident with real-world testing.
This single fact is proof of the culpability of everyone from O'Keefe on down who refused to acknowledge a simple physics calculation on a 1.5lb object hitting another at 700mph.
When the force is calculated, it was clear that the fragile tiles on Columbia could, and should have been damaged.
The negligent homocide charge should have been leveled at that time.
Absolutely. Sean O'Keefe stated after the "discovery" that it was the foam that caused Columbia's destruction that "there was nothing we could have done" to save the crew.
This is a far cry from "failure is not an option".
"As well as I recall, not too well at times, there was a change at NASA after that."
Yeah? Then WTF happened to the current shuttle up there right now? The only change I recall was on the level of new procedure in terms of input on flights. If they had become anything other than the PC idiots that they have been for years the current flight wouldn't have the problem that it does.
"As far as heads rolling I don't remember but with something as tricky as space flight you will never be able to assure that nothing will happen."
Who said anything even remotely like "assure that nothing wil happen"?
"After Challenger we went a long time trying to fix the problem."
You will recall that "the problem" was that no on listened to the engineer who plainly said: 'Don't try to launch at too low a temp because the "O" rings will fail.' So I am "stupid" and a "coward" for thinking that someone should have paid dearly for the deaths of the crew and the loss of the ship?
"Let's see: Operation Bojinka, and another plan to crash a plane into the Pope's motorcade in the Philipines, multiple prior SAM attampts and Arrow Air, which was probably a successful shoot-down or sabotage... Yeah, 9/11 was "unimaginable."
Remember this as well: An FBI agent was running around telling anyone he could about the Muslim radicals learning to fly planes but NOT land them, and of the radicals probable hope of using them to take out a building. He pretty much predicted what came to pass on 9-11. AND NO HEAD ROLLED!
Would you be happy if a bunch of folks were fired but we still had the same problems? They are obviously trying to solve the problems. How many would you like fired now, whom, and why?
Clearly you have no appreciation for the hard working congresspeople working to get steroids out of baseball. I mean, where are your priorities, man?
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