NASA - Columbia accident
 

Nine experts on a NASA space safety advisory panel have resigned in the wake of sharp criticism from the Columbia accident investigation board and by Congress.

From what i have heard/seen they new that some pannels form the space ship where blown off at take-off due pieces of the rocket that came off. Alot of people at NASA adviced that the astronouts should wait for a second space ship to pick them up and not try to re-enter with the damaged one but nobody listened to them and allowed the astronouts to re-enter earth atmosphere with the damaged space ship. As we all know this resuletd in the loss of the lives of the astronouts.

In the days back of the chalenger they where also warned several times that some rings wheren't gonna stand the cold weather but NASA still alowed the chalenger to lift off as planed wich resulted in the loss of the lives of the astronouts because one of those rings was leaking.

You think NASA learned it's lessons this time or that this all will have any effect on the future of NASA and/or their space program?

as someone that lives about 30 miles from the cape... I think Nasa probally learned not to name any more space ships with the letter "C"

As a coastal Floridian that watches those mofo's pump up their tourist attraction for bucks...as usual for NASA...

Their hindsight is "deadly".

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

It's a known fact the statisticly speaking we would lose 1 shuttle in every 70 something missions.

Looks like thay are pretty much on target to me.

Could be but the two last shuttles they lost they had a clear warning from several people that the ships where not safe anymore and they expected a disaster.

I wonder if they received warnings of expected disaster on any of the other flights?

Don't know that but from the footage i have seen of the challenger launche you can clearly see a smoke plume comming out of the part where the ring was leacking (wich they where warned for) so one might think that they would put an extra eye on that.
On the Columbia launch you can also clearly see something hitting the ship on take-off and on top of that they had footage from the ship in space where it shows the area where the pannels where blown off.

I could be wrong but to me it seems alot of people closed their eyes for clearly visible mishaps. :2 cents:

LeeNoga where are you at on the east coast? I'm in Melbourne now was up in cocoa beach..

It is immaterial...as there was no known way to save the astonauts...even knowing that the ship was not fit to re-enter. Sending up another shuttle was not even an option as there was not another shuttle prepared to do so. If the astronauts were told that their ship was not fit for re-entry...they had two options...die slowly or die instantly upon re-entry.

:eek7

Infact sending up another was an option as i recall from the accident aftermath. And for the chalenger accident they had over 30 seconds to stop the launch - 30 secs before launch the smoke plume was visible.
Maybe there was money involved or they didn't wanna give a bad impression to the public for delaying another launch or re-entry.

It was not an option...there was no known way to save the astronauts...even with it being known that the ship was not fit for re-entry.

You where right, it was not an option. I thought i recalled it from the news.
The option was wether the crew was gonna do some repairing in space to patch the hole in the wing. The hole was 6 by 10 inches.
The second option was to get the crew to the international space station and wait untill there was a guarantee for safe re-entry. Neither both of those options where used because engineers who did some testing at boeing found that the shuttle would not be affected by the hole and the heat in the wheelwell would not be of any concern.
However other engineers send several emails expressing concerns about this decision and said the shuttle would not be able to land due to a gear failure in the best case senario. Worst case senario was a shuttle break-up.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/index.html

The Challenger was launched because NASA was out for big publicity on this one.. First teacher to go up, and several other things that were to help bolster the shuttle program..
They knew of the dangers, but felt it worth the risk..


And to top it off.. the ones responsible were promoted and the scape goats got canned.. go figure..

Kinda weird........ launching a shuttle that has a smoke plume comming out a ring that is used to seperate two things that explode when they come in contact with eachother after they have been warned several times for that exact thing is not exactly good publicity :) but i guess you are right, they wanted to launch and take the risk at any cause. It resulted in the loss of lives live on television.

damn... I've seen some bad spelling before, but you take the cake.



:Graucho

My Hubby used to be a quality inspector for NASA many moons ago... So many incompetant people that work there...with this, you will have major error.. :(

I have never seen the major importance of going into space...:2 cents:

Niether of these "options" were options...as niether was viable.