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Feb. 1st, 2016 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolari...fast forward seventeen years.
February 1, 2003. I'm twenty eight years old. Thedot.com bust and resulting economic depression has destroyed my career. I'm living with friends in Austin, trying to find work again. In the meantime, I've gone back to my old sleep schedule - 8AM to 4PM. I miss that sleep schedule.
That afternoon, I woke up, logged into my computer, and knowing STS-107, the Columbia shuttle, was to have landed that morning. Instead, I got a chirp from the Weatherbug app running in my system tray: "Space Debris Watch."
Space debris watch? What kind of alert is that?
It took a few seconds, but then it hit me: Columbia was going to be flying over North Texas. I'd hoped to stay up and find a spot nearby to see it land. That's when I turned on CNN, and watched a single healthy contrail split into multiple ones and burn in the atmosphere. Columbia was gone.
I was still a champion of the Space Transportation System. It grew up with me, had matured along side me, and was now in it's heyday. After Challenger, this wasn't supposed to happen again. And yet it did. But I was still confident in NASA, and it's aging shuttle fleet. I remember specifically saying "We need to launch the next shuttle on time. We need to show the public that this tragedy doesn't stop manned space flight."
In hindsight, I'm glad I don't make those decisions.
Later that year, I began my second (very temporary) stint at Dell. The CAIB report, which detailed the columbia accident, was released, and I decided to tae a chance on downloading it via our super fast connection at Dell (it would have been hours, given my dial-up connection at home). I couldn't wait to read it, in fact, and began reading it at work.
I'd followed the news. I knew, by this time, what had caused the accident. A piece of foam, smashing into the wing with the force of a car crash, smashed a hole in the left wing of the Columbia. On return, hot gasses blowtorched into the wing, deforming it, pushing the ship more and more out of it's aerodynamic rentry. Later, I would find out the blowtorching destroyed the hydraulics system, causing the shuttle to lose it's ability to fly at all, spun out of control, and broke up.
Foam had always been a problem with the shuttle. Something they'd never even considered until after launches started and the first shuttle mission saw foam coming off. Since it never damaged the ship, it was okay. Nothing wrong. Like the O-Ring issue with Challenger. It didn't destroy the ship before, it won't destroy the ship later.
Both the CAIB report, and the later, much more comprehensive, Crew Survivability Report, revealed the same problems as the Challenger acciednt - but this time, it was all on NASA. NASA knew there was problem. The engineers knew there was a problem. They asked for imgaing of the shuttle, but NASA management said "If the ship is fatally damaged, there's nothing we can do, so let's let it land and hope for the best."
This was not the NASA of Apollo 13. Not the NASA of Skylab. They knew there was a problem, but there were no heroic efforts to make sure. This was not ""We choose not to go to the moon because it is easy, but because it is hard." It was "let's sit on our hands, and wait and see." I lost my faith in the program. The faith that had never wavered since 1980. Even after Challenger. Even after Columbia, I had faith NASA could make it right. But my heroes were fallible. Very fallible.
In the end, we ended the shuttle program. Which, to be fair, was a good idea done terribly. Having it side mounted, where debris from the external tank could smash into it. The configuration which made it much heavier, in order to take on military payloads, then ended up not being used on the shuttles anyway. While it was built to make a space station, the ISS is a far cry from it's original mission. For most of its life, it was a truck with no place to go.
The shuttle missions ended in 2011. The ships now sit in museums. The replacements were all cancelled. Five years later, we have no real manned space program any longer. I miss my youthful excitement at watching that bird fly.
The link I gave last week, for the Challenger accident, also has a very good synopsis of the Columbia CAIB report, and detailed timeline of the disaster. It's the bottom half of the report: http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/SRH_Disasters.htm
But, if you want the STORY behind what happened, from someone who wasn't just there, but part of the program as it happened, Wayne Hale's "After Ten Years" series of articles is a gripping read. He's not just telling the story of Columbia. He's telling HIS story of Columbia, as it happened, and with personal knowledge of the people behind it. It's a long read, but one of the most enlightening stories behind the Columbia disaster, and NASA, I've ever read.
I hope he writes a book: https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/after-ten-years-dramatis-personae-part-1/
February 1, 2003. I'm twenty eight years old. Thedot.com bust and resulting economic depression has destroyed my career. I'm living with friends in Austin, trying to find work again. In the meantime, I've gone back to my old sleep schedule - 8AM to 4PM. I miss that sleep schedule.
That afternoon, I woke up, logged into my computer, and knowing STS-107, the Columbia shuttle, was to have landed that morning. Instead, I got a chirp from the Weatherbug app running in my system tray: "Space Debris Watch."
Space debris watch? What kind of alert is that?
It took a few seconds, but then it hit me: Columbia was going to be flying over North Texas. I'd hoped to stay up and find a spot nearby to see it land. That's when I turned on CNN, and watched a single healthy contrail split into multiple ones and burn in the atmosphere. Columbia was gone.
I was still a champion of the Space Transportation System. It grew up with me, had matured along side me, and was now in it's heyday. After Challenger, this wasn't supposed to happen again. And yet it did. But I was still confident in NASA, and it's aging shuttle fleet. I remember specifically saying "We need to launch the next shuttle on time. We need to show the public that this tragedy doesn't stop manned space flight."
In hindsight, I'm glad I don't make those decisions.
Later that year, I began my second (very temporary) stint at Dell. The CAIB report, which detailed the columbia accident, was released, and I decided to tae a chance on downloading it via our super fast connection at Dell (it would have been hours, given my dial-up connection at home). I couldn't wait to read it, in fact, and began reading it at work.
I'd followed the news. I knew, by this time, what had caused the accident. A piece of foam, smashing into the wing with the force of a car crash, smashed a hole in the left wing of the Columbia. On return, hot gasses blowtorched into the wing, deforming it, pushing the ship more and more out of it's aerodynamic rentry. Later, I would find out the blowtorching destroyed the hydraulics system, causing the shuttle to lose it's ability to fly at all, spun out of control, and broke up.
Foam had always been a problem with the shuttle. Something they'd never even considered until after launches started and the first shuttle mission saw foam coming off. Since it never damaged the ship, it was okay. Nothing wrong. Like the O-Ring issue with Challenger. It didn't destroy the ship before, it won't destroy the ship later.
Both the CAIB report, and the later, much more comprehensive, Crew Survivability Report, revealed the same problems as the Challenger acciednt - but this time, it was all on NASA. NASA knew there was problem. The engineers knew there was a problem. They asked for imgaing of the shuttle, but NASA management said "If the ship is fatally damaged, there's nothing we can do, so let's let it land and hope for the best."
This was not the NASA of Apollo 13. Not the NASA of Skylab. They knew there was a problem, but there were no heroic efforts to make sure. This was not ""We choose not to go to the moon because it is easy, but because it is hard." It was "let's sit on our hands, and wait and see." I lost my faith in the program. The faith that had never wavered since 1980. Even after Challenger. Even after Columbia, I had faith NASA could make it right. But my heroes were fallible. Very fallible.
In the end, we ended the shuttle program. Which, to be fair, was a good idea done terribly. Having it side mounted, where debris from the external tank could smash into it. The configuration which made it much heavier, in order to take on military payloads, then ended up not being used on the shuttles anyway. While it was built to make a space station, the ISS is a far cry from it's original mission. For most of its life, it was a truck with no place to go.
The shuttle missions ended in 2011. The ships now sit in museums. The replacements were all cancelled. Five years later, we have no real manned space program any longer. I miss my youthful excitement at watching that bird fly.
The link I gave last week, for the Challenger accident, also has a very good synopsis of the Columbia CAIB report, and detailed timeline of the disaster. It's the bottom half of the report: http://www.cbsnews.com/network/news/space/SRH_Disasters.htm
But, if you want the STORY behind what happened, from someone who wasn't just there, but part of the program as it happened, Wayne Hale's "After Ten Years" series of articles is a gripping read. He's not just telling the story of Columbia. He's telling HIS story of Columbia, as it happened, and with personal knowledge of the people behind it. It's a long read, but one of the most enlightening stories behind the Columbia disaster, and NASA, I've ever read.
I hope he writes a book: https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/after-ten-years-dramatis-personae-part-1/
