Was there a black box on board the space shuttle that crashed this last Saturday? It seems as though there should be one in the critical manuvers the ship would have to take.
I believe there have been threads on this earlier, but the answer is no. There is no need for one since everything that the Shuttle does is tracked from the ground anyway.
There are voice and data recorders on the space shuttle, but they are not hardened to survive a crash like a black box is.
In the case of Columbia, NASA has stated (yesterday’s technical briefing) that they have an additional 32 seconds of data from Columbia after communications were “lost”. The 32 seconds of data were not of sufficient quality to display on the mission control consoles, but NASA is likely to get some helpful information from the additional data.
Actually, this exact question was answered in Sunday evening’s briefing. Yes, there are both flight data recorders and voice recorders aboard the shuttle. However, neither of them is “armored” (the word they used) so as to survive an accident in the way that airliner recorders are.
WAG: perhaps because any shuttle crash would be so much faster and harder than an airplane crash that armoring them wouldn’t help any?
I believe it wasn’t necessasary as every part of the shuttle is monitored from the ground (all systems) and recorded, making the costly extra weight of a black box (which would probably be destroyed or be someplace off this planet in most accidents) impractical.