Whoa. And so close to the 17th anniversary.
A sad day for the US and NASA.
No, it was 6 times the speed of sound. I didn’t get the impression that it was going faster than it was supposed to be at that point.
FUCK.
Fuck. Just FUCK.
I second the motion for a do over for the whole damned centuary.
Fuck.
Um, no.
The Columbia was just past one quarter her design life. ‘Newer design simply for the sake of newer design’ is poor policy. As long as the suttles are up to the job, there’s zero need to scrap them. And every flight they take amortizes and spreads their enourmous cost further, while allowing time to design something that would be a worthwhile replacement.
Age is almost certainly not the cause. Freak happenstance is much more likely, based upon the (very limited) evidence available.
They won’t, because none of them have ever predicted anything accurately.
fark.com was reporting that some jackass had already put up a piece of debris on ebay. It’s been removed now.
I just heard a talking head say something along the lines that the astronauts are, in his mind, kind of a balance to all the evil and sickness inherent in our species. Well put.
The Space Program is one of the few and rare endeavours that any country has taken part in (the motivation of ICBM research aside) that is completely beneficial for everyone on the planet… this makes it all the more tragic. Especially when asshats say they are glad it happened.
This does suck, truly. Challenger comparisons are inevitable for those of us who remember the Challenger disaster. I could be mistaken, but I get the impression that this mission was (like the Challenger) watched more intently than usual by many schoolchildren.
I know it’s a minor deal comparatively, but I keep thinking about all the experiments that were lost. The ants with their crazy zero-G tunnelling, historic experiments with fireballs, a giant tumor I think … all being observed and cataloged (and in some cases planned) by schoolkids.
Sad too for Israel to have lost her first astronaut. (As when the first teacher in space was lost in 1986.)
I want to express thanks and gratitude to the 7 crewmembers. This is a cliche, but they made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the rest of us. They knew the risks going into the mission, and were happy to take them. This was a noble death. God rest their souls.
Well.
Damn.
Count me in among those who really hope that this doesn’t turn popular opinion against further space exploration.
Damn.
Damn damn damn fuckitty-shit-damn.
Damn.
Right after I found out, I said to Robin that some ass would do that very thing.I checked, but there was nothing to that point.
Proof that there are some truly sick people in the world. The actual item was eliminated, but some jerk put some debris up for auction, sure as hell.
:mad:
I mentioned this in another thread, but CNN never could decide what the speed was. They were saying it was going “12,500 MILES, or Mach 6.”
It was actually 12,500 MPH, which corresponds to about Mach 17-18. This was the speed it should have been going at this stage of the descent.
I think it was going at about MAch 18 when it exploded, but Mach 6 on impact with the earth…I have no idea if this makes sense in terms of physics, but that might explain the two numbers that people have been hearing. FTR, I’ve heard Mach 18 repeatedly as the speed at the time of the explosion.
Just for clarification. The crank call was a ‘howard stern crank’, wherein people call in to tragedies and mention Howard Stern. This person said the debris was “BabaBooey’s Metal Teeth”, an injoke for listeners of the show.
It really made me sick.
Tranquilis, it’s not so much that the shuttles were old, themselves. It’s that they’re a 1960s design made with 1970s technology. If Challenger hadn’t stopped the program, and if the X-33 hadn’t been a tailheavy boondoggle, we’d be using something better by now. And I mean in all ways better: More efficient, safer, more durable, improved construction, and more cargo capacity, not to mention cheaper to fly.
That it happened to be Columbia, the first to fly, was a historical tragedy… she deserved to wind up in a museum someday. But it was not an age of airframe issue: We’ve got B-52s flying today that are decades old.
The real question is… how can you slow down reentry?
With a tragedy such as this, emotions are running hot. But that’s no excuse to make an ignorant comment like this. I hope you’re not serious.
Challenger exploded on my college friend Mara’s birthday.
Columbia exploded on my college friend Cathy’s birthday.
Just a weird observation.
Why; what did he say?
That’s really beside the point. They’re more than up to the job, no need to scrap them just to put something else in their place, same as with the BUFFs. Today’s disaster was bound to happen sooner or later. Sorry to sound fatalistic, but when you put something man-made, no matter how new and fancy, into a flight regime like that, sooner or later, things are going to Go Wrong. Flushing bucks down the drain isn’t going to change that, and to date every new, improved, fancy-shmancy new design has run up against one insurmountable problem: They’re way more expensive to design and build that the existing system, and offer no substantial improvements, despite all the hype associated with them.
And the answer is: You can’t.
Not and have the object be reusable. You could make more one-shot capsules, I suppose, but that kinda defeats the whole purpose. When the shuttle hits the atmosphere, it’s doing about mach 25. The air is thin up there, and the heat buildup is limited by that thinness. The shuttle slowly scrubs speed whilst still in the thin air so that by the time it finally hits thick air, it’s going slow enough that the extra friction from the heavier air doesn’t burn the shuttle up like a matchhead. It’s simply physics meets practicality, and considering the mission, that’s what you’ve got. And always will have, as long as you have a winged shuttle.
The real question is what went wrong, and how can it be prevented?
Her design life was 80 some years? I didn’t know that. Seems kind of long to me. I know that B-52s are fairly old frames, but I don’t think every one of their flights rides as close to the edge of their design limitations as shuttle flights do. No matter how well they’re designed, isn’t the strain on the basic frame much more in the space program? I don’t know…
Or a critical failure made catastrophic by a variety of minor (and acceptable) material/frame problems caused by sheer use and strain from the age of the frame. My cynical mind is turning in circles about a series of minimum safety checks passed with no review board saying:
“Excuse me, but there seems to be a preponderance of ‘minimum acceptables’ here. Stop it.”
But it is late; I have brooded over it when I don’t have any real information. I could be driving myself toward conclusions that don’t exist and have no proof. My heart goes out to the suffering families and friends. And may a peroxide enema go to any bastard who may have fulfilled my paranoid fantasy and killed that crew by doing the LEAST they could do.