Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space Twenty-five years ago, Space Shuttle Columbia launched the Chandra X-ray observatory and nearly ended in catastrophe. As the then-ascent flight director John Shannon observed: "Yikes. We don't need another one of those." Space Shuttle Columbia was launched from Kennedy Space Center's LC-39B on the morning of July 23, 1999. Two …
Reminded me of a remark of Prof. Geoffrey Loftus from the "Doctor in the House" TV series (not in the books) which I cannot clearly recall and was, I think, in response to one of Stuart Clark's more bizarre diagnoses.
Something along the lines "the common is commonplace, the unusual is to be expected, the rare is as rare as rocking horse shit."
In space it would appear even rocking horse excreta have to be accounted for. :)
NSF Spaceflight on YT posted a video yesterday that discusses this incident as well as a number of others that happened during the Shuttle program
It seems miraculous that only 2 Shuttles lost
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZptbxaHBIA
I have (had?) a t shirt from NASA which has all of the important rocket science equations on it. The engineering is by comparison, an art form.
I have a fantastic book on the scientific legacy of the spare shuttle; which once you get past the first few pages of flag waving is a thoroughly deep dive into the development of the hardware and the many missions that flew on it, warts and all. Into the Black by Rowland White does an excellent deep dive into the problems encountered by Columbia over it's whole lifetime.
As amazing a set of results as it has produced, the more one reads about it, it is a wonder how they got away with two hull losses in it's lifetime. However, that said, the art of refining that engineering and learning from what was wrong is incredibly valuable.
Looking at the failings of Boeing-McDonnell Douglas in particular here.
To be fair,’rocket science’, is trivially easy.
At the time the phrase was invented, fuel development was cutting-edge chemistry, and rocket science was the specification and characterization of rocket fuels. Rocket Science was cutting-edge science, and it wasn't trivial. It's Brain Surgery that isn't Rocket Science.
So the fix was to no longer pin defective posts, but to replace them completely, which was REALLY difficult, thus the original decision to pin them.
Anyway, a story I've never heard elsewhere was told to me by a friend.
The Shuttle training simulator was composed of flight-worthy instruments, displays, switches, and other console bits. Back when they were still using "steam gauges" rather than the full digital displays they got as an upgrade, one of the astronauts dropped the Shuttle into the swamp off the end of the runway. Wait, what?
In the postmortem, it was determined an instrument had failed. And if it failed like that on a real Shuttle, we'd have a real Shuttle in the real swamp off the end of the real runway.
I don't know the fix, but I do know they spent a lot of sweat working on it.
No need for life support systems, which complicate the missions to no end, and if you lose one, well, nobody ever flew the flags at half staff for the loss of a machine.
Maybe if NASA stops wasting time, money, and effort on flying crewed missions, it might be able to afford to figure out hoe bring back the Mars samples already collected by Perserverance (and avoid contaminating Mars with human DNA as we search for life).
We need meatbags in space because latency makes it a bugger to control anything more than 200ms away (as dial up gamers will remember). Maybe quantum entanglement based Comms is the answer to that.
And while Boston Dynamics & others are making good progress with movement, they're still a bit limited at carrying out complex operations autonomously.
It's hard to imagine a platform more ill-suited to space exploration than humans. Fragile. Require massive elaborate support systems for even the simplest tasks. Adequate sensors, but they cover only a very small selection of EM wavelengths. Poor and erratic recording capability. Moderately flexible, but not all that reliable.
Aside from which, our exploration machines get smarter every year. Humans on the other hand ...
The only thing that humans have done in space that seems to me to justify the costs and risks are the Hubble repair missions. And it won't be all that many decades before we'll have machines that do things like that adequately and less expensively.
I think walking on the moon was worth it.
Also, Hubble couldn't have been repaired unless we had experience of being in space (not saying that particular one was worth it for the effort, just that your example isn't independent of other efforts).
I'm inclined to think the moon walk was worth something, too. Especially at the time, since the options of robots was very limited.
But I'm having trouble explaining why. Most of the given reasons just don't hold up. "humans can do things machines can't" yep. Including die. If you have a limit of one probe/human landing, ok, sure, the human can do stuff not-planned at launch better. But you can just send another probe later with the lessons learned from the previous one. And probes are less likely to contaminate other places. Contamination on the moon? probably no big deal. Mars, which has an atmosphere, water, and still questions about what life may have been or might still be there -- That could be an ecosystem changing event.
As for Hubble... What if...instead of being built to fit inside the Shuttle, it was built to fit on a more versatile rocket...put higher, and when it was found to be fatally flawed, de-orbited and replaced, or left in orbit a while to find the other weak points (i.e., gyros) to make the next version better? Each shuttle flight was very expensive, and apparently had a more than 1% chance of the death of the crew...how did the cost (including risk of loss of life) of all those supporting shuttle flights compare to just replacing Hubble? Just think of the telescope we could have put into orbit on the top of a Saturn V instead of trying to cram something into the Shuttle (and the Saturn V, it turns out, probably would have been CHEAPER!).
I love what Hubble did...but I'm not sure it was the best way to do it. How about...instead of trying to get 30+ years out of it, we just put cheaper stuff with current tech out there, and replace it when we can do significantly better?
I thought it would be appropriate to mention Richard Feynman's Appendix to the report on the Challenger disaster. It's at https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm" and I'll just quote the first three sentences "It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management." Sound familiar?
Anyway while looking for the URL for Appendix F, I came across this https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf which turns out to be Feynman's informal article on how the analysis was done. It's highly perceptive and well worth reading.
> A bit of wiring within the payload bay had chafed against a burred screw head
What was a wiring bundle left so exposed that such chafing could happen. Seems a little complacent by the designers. One would have assumed the designers would have allowed for some failure modes. But then again both Shuttle losses were cause by such complacency. The O-Rings would never fail under low temperature. And foam insulation would never break off the fuel tank and strike the Shuttle wing.
MentourNow has some very interesting videos regarding air accident investigations. One such, the captain tripped a circuit breaker with his foot, on the wall to the rear of the left seat. This wasn't noticed until later on when trying to land.
There's a series of one hour documentaries (OK, OK 50 minutes plus commercials) called Mayday that occasionally are shown on documentary channels like Quest. Mostly aircraft crashes, but a few train crashes and at least one shipwreck. They're very well done.
The history of railway signalling in the UK is fascinating because it chronicles the evolution of fail safe systems during the Victorian era as a response to accidents. Murphy's Law is universal, anything that can go wrong will eventually go wrong, and as a rider to this anything that involves manual procedures will inevitably find someone who doesn't do them and invariably gets away with it -- most of the time.
This history is actually a good background for anyone who has to design a fault-tolerant system because it reminds us that no matter how exquisitely designed we make our machinery, how detailed we make our procedures and processes, there's always someone out there who's going to screw it up, usually without realizing it until the sky falls in on them.
It just illustrates that the Space Shuttle flying spaceship concept is extremely fragile and fraught with dangers. Also, there are many CRIT components the failure of which would lead to an immediate death of all astronauts.
The Shuttle Program was conceived to make space travel seem more "airliner"-like, which is something people hoped for. We now know this was a ruse, a pipe-dream. Space travel is inherently dangerous because of the enormous energies involved. Yes, those same energies are also inherent in airliner travel, but we've managed to solve these at the cost of many human lives. Since space travel involves energies at least thirty times those of airliners it will take some time (and many more lives) to solve these problems.
astronautix.com has a list of shuttle incidents (search the page for the "sts" word) that is absolutely terrifying. If those missions' crews were aware of the ones previous to their own, they truly had the right stuff to dare board the vehicle.
http://www.astronautix.com/t/thehardroadtospace.html
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