NASA releases Columbia report

[Moonwalker]

Obviously people are looking for absolute safety. But safety is an absolute illusion, especially in manned space flight and aviation, no matter how the design looks and works like.

May the STS-107 crew rest in peace.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Obviously people are looking for absolute safety. But safety is an absolute illusion, especially in manned space flight and aviation, no matter how the design looks and works like.

Maybe, but that doesn't mean we should just throw up our hands and not try to move toward that goal. That's the whole point of the report.

 

[Andy44]

Not to mention NASA's mission, which isn't to run a monopoly on manned spaceflight, but to develop technology, and the attendant test data, for use by private parties. They publish all this engineering data on shuttle ops and incidents for a reason, even if they never intend to use it for STS v2.0, it'll be available for folks to look into when they decide they need to learn from it.

 

[Piper]

Reading the report, I was quite surprised to see how many safety systems required manual input to work (suit pressurization, parachute deployment, etc.), many of which could easily be automated. Even if NASA (or anybody else for that matter) never decides to make another shuttle type spacecraft, lessons such as these should prove valuable to any manned spacecraft design.

 

[BHawthorne]

Man that was a nausiatingly detailed read. One thing that struck me as being particularly odd in design was the configuration the control surfaces are in when the hydraulics completely fail. In my uninformed mind, why would they have the control surfaces pitched like that in failure mode by design? Dumb design in hindsight. It nausiated me thinking about the melted suit and restraint detail pictures although no human remains were shown at all in the public report. The stark detail of the whole report was sort of unsettling. Makes me glad that many things were redacted in the public report.

 

[Urwumpe]

A decompression is still more likely than a full disintegration of the cabin, that's why you use such suits. They buy you the chance to survive more failures than no suits. Also, the suits are also fire protection and help if you have toxic vapors. And they are far better than the old pre-STS-51L suits. Additionally, the suits allow floating in ice cold water... before challenger, there was no thought about such risks.

 

[Pilot7893]

This thread reminds me of that video on Youtube, "UFOs shot down Columbia". It was a serious video, too. It was in seperate parts, they did in-depth analysis (and phailed epicly), I'm pretty sure the guy even released it on DVD. Son of a