Semi-Daily Journal

“The most extraordinary and bizarre thing..”

No it’s not! To get along---you go along, is standard operating procedure in the vast majority of human organizations. It is childishly naive to think that most groups are actually run by explicit formulations. On the contrary, tacit understandings usually determine the behavior of the members.

The most natural thing in the world is for people to stick their finger into the wind and see which way it is blowing. It is actually an extraordinary occurrence to witness individuals placing themselves in harm’s way.

The most extraordinary and bizaare thing is the decision to launch shuttle flights when very large pieces of foam often dislodge and hit the shuttle. STS107 was not the first time a shuttle has been hit. Force is proportional to the square of velocity. 529 mph squared times even a small mass is a lot of force on a 1 square foot area.

http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030314readdy/

"In the days after the mishap, shuttle program manager Ronald Dittemore said no request for satellite imagery was made because the resolution of the imagery, based on past NASA experience, would not be high enough to reveal damage to individual tiles and because the Boeing analysis had concluded Columbia could land safely.

...NASA would have to request that support on an emergency or high priority basis. " A NASA request would have meant they believed the shuttle was in imminent danger.

Unless there was a really large gaping hole (unlikely) what would images likely show? Some damage? NASA had already guessed at that. They had seen minor damage before from previous insulation strikes. Would imaging the damage have allowed NASA to model the problem and determine that it would cause the shuttle to fail?

At best, they could get 60 mm resolution and perhaps only 160 mm resolution. This is not much information when the affected area is believed to have been 300 to 500 mm. If the damage was to a seal, the seal would have been smaller than the greatest resolution and therefore not visible. Plus, they would have had to alter the shuttle mission, rotate it correctly, etc to photograph it from the proper angle to see anything at all. So jumping through all those hoops would not necessarily give a better picture of the state of the shuttle than indications from the sensors.

The debris strike was the first anomoly detected. There were no further anomolies detected until the high temperature sensor readings on reentry. If the flight managers had determined that the Shuttle has a 99% chance of returning safely and a rescue mission has a 10% chance of working, they bring them down in the shuttle.

I think the long range visualization by spy satellites is a red herring. The media and people are very visually oriented. However, pictures can be decieving as horse racing fans well know.

Right on Bakho.

Yes, NASA should have asked for pictures, but it is unlikely any damage would have been visible. The bigger issue is whether the sheer complexity of the shuttle and the sheer complexity of NASA make space flight intrinsically unsafe. Space exploration would be much safer and cheaper without humans. Yeah, Capt. Kirk was cool and someday we will travel to the stars, but our technology and our social organizations are immature.

Wouldn't a space walk have been able to determine the extent of the damage?

As for whether sat imaging would or would not have been able to show anything... IMO, that's immaterial. Lives are at stake, so you check...

I found it interesting how quickly the causes became apparent, for both shuttle disasters. With the first one, we know they were warned about the O-rings the night before the launch. The failure of the engineers to pursuade the officials made an interesting case study in one of Tufte's books on quantitative information.

With the Columbia, it seemed like only hours after the disaster that people were bringing up the foam shielding, with the NASA officials arrogantly dismissing the notion that that could have been the cause. "Our engineers looked at that and ruled it out" they said, or something to that effect. I wonder how many such potentially fatal problems arise on a typical mission, and whether it would be possible to fly at all if each was treated with the consideration it deserved.

Self-quoting from a note to a friend on February 4:
"It may be that NASA checked in good faith and concluded the shuttle was probably OK. But its also possible that there was a really remarkable and tense drama going on there. What if the risk of destruction on re-entry is 10 percent, or 90, or somewhere in between? What if there is literally nothing to be done? What if there is a long shot of rescue based on going into a maximum conserve-resources mode and rushing the next shuttle launch -- succeed or fail, an anguished month-long drama? What if you are afraid that any scenario involving publicly known doomed or at-risk astronauts over an extended period of time would destroy NASA, which is the life work of everybody at the table? What if you scare the bejeebers out of everybody for an emotional two weeks with the world watching, conclude there is nothing to do but try it [normal re-entry], and it goes fine? What if you are a political appointee, or even a budget watcher, who knows that the Highest Levels simply to not want a space-flight Armageddon right this very minute? Is any of this absurdly unrealistic?"
Rank speculatin now as then, but . . .

Supposedly they were not equiped for a space walk, since that was not called for in their mission.

By the way, even if you've got only 60mm resolution on a 300-500mm affected area, that's potentially 25 or more pixels of information, which is quite significant. Wouldn't expose every conceivable damage profile, but would be well worth rotating the shuttle a bit.

I wrote about this failure in risk management shortly after the loss of the Columbia. I also pointed out that there were serious concerns about the foam and that particular shuttle, and that it was a new foam that was unproven but selected for environmentalist "reasons."

See my weblog entries for
Apr-24
( http://radio.weblogs.com/0103811/2003/04/24.html#a1297 )
Mar-27
( http://radio.weblogs.com/0103811/2003/03/27.html#a1253 )
and
Mar-13
( http://radio.weblogs.com/0103811/2003/03/13.html#a1205 )
and
Feb-05
( http://radio.weblogs.com/0103811/2003/02/05.html#a1027 ).

I believe that poor comunication during the technical and exterior workmanship was at fault. When human life is involved, human as well as computers should do multiple checks during construction and before the space shuttle leaves earth. The problem is comunication between people involve in construction of the shuttle. When comunication fails it's everyones problem and nobodys fault. When lives are involved comunication should be perfect as humanly possible. The computers are only as good as the person programing them. I believe the quality in workmanship and other areas of our lives have become as poor as comunication. Someone had to know that there was a problem in workmanship. People seem to only care about the paycheck and not pride in their workmanship and rush just to get the work finished by the deadline. When there is no pride in your work or care for your fellow human beings the line of comunication is obviously dead. The punishment is"regret" as we bury our dead.

I believe that poor comunication during the technical and exterior workmanship was at fault. When human life is involved, human as well as computers should do multiple checks during construction and before the space shuttle leaves earth. The problem is comunication between people involve in construction of the shuttle. When comunication fails it's everyones problem and nobodys fault. When lives are involved comunication should be perfect as humanly possible. The computers are only as good as the person programing them. I believe the quality in workmanship and other areas of our lives have become as poor as comunication. Someone had to know that there was a problem in workmanship. People seem to only care about the paycheck and not pride in their workmanship and rush just to get the work finished by the deadline. When there is no pride in your work or care for your fellow human beings the line of comunication is obviously dead. The punishment is"regret" as we bury our dead.

I believe that poor comunication during the technical and exterior workmanship was at fault. When human life is involved, human as well as computers should do multiple checks during construction and before the space shuttle leaves earth. The problem is comunication between people involve in construction of the shuttle. When comunication fails it's everyones problem and nobodys fault. When lives are involved comunication should be perfect as humanly possible. The computers are only as good as the person programing them. I believe the quality in workmanship and other areas of our lives have become as poor as comunication. Someone had to know that there was a problem in workmanship. People seem to only care about the paycheck and not pride in their workmanship and rush just to get the work finished by the deadline. When there is no pride in your work or care for your fellow human beings the line of comunication is obviously dead. The punishment is"regret" as we bury our dead.

I believe that poor comunication during the technical and exterior workmanship was at fault. When human life is involved, human as well as computers should do multiple checks during construction and before the space shuttle leaves earth. The problem is comunication between people involve in construction of the shuttle. When comunication fails it's everyones problem and nobodys fault. When lives are involved comunication should be perfect as humanly possible. The computers are only as good as the person programing them. I believe the quality in workmanship and other areas of our lives have become as poor as comunication. Someone had to know that there was a problem in workmanship. People seem to only care about the paycheck and not pride in their workmanship and rush just to get the work finished by the deadline. When there is no pride in your work or care for your fellow human beings the line of comunication is obviously dead. The punishment is"regret" as we bury our dead.