OK, I usually take a middle road when the NASA-bashing starts, but this is ridiculous.
Here, a guy says that STS-114 was a test flight. “This was a test flight. We needed to go back to flying to see if all the fixes we implemented did what they needed to do,” said Angel M. Otero, chief of the space operations division at NASA’s Glenn Research Center.
This idiot has a serving of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans where his brain ought to be. Here’s an idea: If there is significant uncertainty whether your fixes are going to work, and you feel the need for a “test flight,” it might be a good idea to launch an unmanned shuttle, or one with just a commander and pilot (like they did with the first Shuttle launch back in '81) instead of one with seven astronauts on it.
I note that the decision wasn’t Otero’s; he just happened to pick up the phone when the New York Times called looking for comments. STS-114 wasn’t a test flight and everybody knows it. They ought to bust this guy down to bottle washer for saying what he said.
I’m no defender of NASA, especially in the last few years. But I can’t get on the bandwagon for this one.
I would agree that this is a test flight. One might even argue that EVERY shuttle flight is a test flight of sorts, given the complexity of the vehicle. The Apollo missions I would most definitely characterize as test flights, every one of them. Because the shuttle flies relatively often, we may forget that it’s still a pretty hazardous system.
And also, think of the cost of sending one up. You may as well send up people as long as you’re launching it to get maximum benefits for the effort. Nobody is forcing the astronauts to go, and they know the risks better than anyone. Heck, I’d go if the odds were only half as good (they stand at 1-in-57 for a catastrophic failure according to astronaut John Young in the latest Air & Space Magazine).
This reminds me a bit of the Apollo 12 mission. It was struck by lightning as it left the pad, and the controllers feared the pyrotechnics that fired the landing parachutes had been damaged. They decided to send them to the moon and back anyway on the logic that they’d be just as dead 12 days later as they would if they brought them down immediately. But more importantly, if they were wrong about the damage, which they thankfully were, they’d gain benefit from the mission and not have it be a waste.
I stand by my OP. STS-114 was absolutely not meant to test the new foam design. With seven astronauts on board, the foam has to work the first time. If NASA wasn’t confident the foam would work, it should have done more ground testing, and failing that, should have flown an unmanned shuttle through the ascent phase (that certainly can be done; the astronauts are just along for the ride until they reach orbit.) If they didn’t want to do that, they should have scrapped the whole program.
There is a distinction between the expected outcome and the actual outcome. You never know what the actual outcome is until you fly. That doesn’t make it a test flight. If it did, every time you get on an airliner it would be a test flight. A test flight is when you don’t know what to expect. When an airline makes a major repair and doesn’t know what to expect, they fly a test flight- with no passengers.
Suppose Mr. Otero had made his statement before the launch: “We’re trying some new methods of attaching the foam, but we don’t know whether it’ll hold until we fly.” Astronauts have been accused of being adrenaline junkies, but I daresay none of them would get on the shuttle if it were really the case that the new foam design was unproven.
The phrase “test flight” has also cropped up in other NASA releases about STS-114. But in those cases, it’s reasonably clear that they are talking about testing the new repair techniques and damage survey methods. The expectation is that those techniques will not be needed on this flight. That is a test.
Hyper, this is the way NASA has always worked. You design something, you do what simulation and ground or unmaned tests you can, then you do a test flight to see if it works. The mission objective is to see if your new design is acceptable. The mission objectiove of Mercury 1? To see if they could put a man up there. That was it. The mission objective of Gemini 1? The see if they could put two men up there. Then Apollo – there were four manned Apollo missions before (not counting Apollo 1) before we landed on the moon. The purpose of Apollo 7 was to test if the vehicles could work in space. Apollo 8 was to test if we could get to the moon and have the engine bring the astronauts back home. It was a test, and if it hadn’t worked, Frank Borman and his crew would still be circling the moon today. Apollo 9 – to see if the LEM would work in space. Apollo 10 – to see if the LEM was manoverable and dockable. If any of those failed, it would have meant the death of astronauts. That’s how flight test works. You test every change before you rely on it, and those tests require putting the lives of pilots and others at risk. That’s what is going on here.
But “test flight” as I have heard it used in the past usually doesn’t involve extraneous people - you take only essential crew. You don’t need 7 astronauts to fly a shuttle.
On the other hand, government run programs are capable of amazing stupidity.
Yeahbut… Cost and risk management. Just think, the SHUTTLE program. the cost of just one launch… Come on, you want to waste that much money and time and … most folks are screaming about the costs now.
1 in 57 risk ratio and they are standing in line to go and folks are saying no, not worth the risk… Let them go…
Have you ever had a passenger the first time you drove down a hill after having your brakes worked on? That is called risk management. ( or not ) Now, if some people never take any chance at all, fine, I’m glad, but I don’t want them in a flying machine like the SHUTTLE because they can’t get their minds outside the box when necessary to overcome the unexpected.
I personally think the whole thing was done wrong from the get-go but this is where we are and now, IMO, it is not the time to waste what little time and money there is left.
It seems they are grounding the fleet again and the whole program is probably dead now. I just hope they do not stop space exploration nor manned flight. I really think that would be a mistake.
Yeah, but… And there’s ALWAYS a “yeah, but” in engineering–ask an engineer, at least one who ahs talked to a lawyer professionally, if the Sun will rise tomorrow and if you’re still awake when he’s done explaining how the Sun doesn’t actually rise and IF you find one who is willing to go WAY out on a limb you’ll get an answer like, “While we have a 99.99999% success rate on sunrises I cannot guarantee the sun will rise, as you have defined a sunrise, tomorrow.” To an engineer every use of something he has designed is a test and Otero is sounding like an engineer.
There is a misconception here and I am not getting it across. Every NASA mission is expected to meet certain objectives. Those objectives range from just getting the people up and down, to certain essential subsytems performing their intended functions. Now, whether those things actually happen cannot be known until the flight is over. But the expectation is that they will perform at some acceptable level.
Testing implies that you do not know whether the tested system is going to do what you want it to do. You don’t expect it to work, if you’re being honest with yourself. You try something and see if it works. Examples of this were the docking maneuvers in the Gemini program, or the damage repair techniques on STS-114. When you have to do this, you set it up so that even if the test fails, you can still get the people down safely. The only exception to this I can think of is in the early days of aviation, when simulation and analysis were so primitive that they really didn’t know if a new design was going to fly unless they went and tried it. So those early test pilots really were putting their lives on the line. That’s why so many of them got killed. We don’t do that anymore.
It was absolutely expected that big chunks of the foam would not fall off the tank. If NASA was unable to sign up to that, there is no reason for them to have flown a shuttle with seven astronauts. STS-114 was in no way a test of the insulation. Otero is damaging the reputation of NASA to imply that the foam was being tested on this flight. He is in effect saying, hey, it’s not that big a deal that the foam fell off, because we really didn’t know whether it would stick anyway. He is wrong. It’s a huge deal that the foam fell off. It’s now questionable whether there will be any more shuttle flights.
Mercury-Redstone 1 was an unmanned test flight. Mercury-Redstone 3 (Freedom 7) was its first manned, suborbital flight with Alan Shepard as the victimeer. Gemini 1 was also an unmanned test flight. Gemini 3 (Molly Brown) staring Gus Grissom and John Young as Crash Test Dummies #1 & #2 was the first manned flight of Gemini.
The point Hyperelastic is attempting, I believe, to make is well illustrated by looking back at those development programs. Each modification or additional mission component was tested in situ before moving onto the next thing. These programs were never considered “mature”; they staged forward tenatively (although audaciaously) with every new mission component. BTW, while the Mercury 7 and Gemini 9 astronauts (who were all experienced test pilots) knew the risks of flying what was effectively test hardware, every effort was made to mitigate the consequences of failure; Gemini VIII (Neil Armstrong, David Scott), for instance, was aborted after the spin-control issues forced the crew to shut down the primary RCS even though there was a backup system.
The Shuttle, on the other hand, is being touted as a “delivery truck” as others have noted in recent threads on the topic. It is alledgedly a mature design in which the major flaws have been ironed out. The trouble with this viewpoint is that not only have the flaws not been addressed, they’ve actually been supressed by an organization that feels (perhaps correctly) that admitting any mistake or necessity to back up and make a change is a death sentence. For instance, the issues that have come up recently–the falling foam and tile failures–aren’t recently discovered. They’ve been occuring since the first launch. They’re a concern to many people, but NASA has deemed them to be of no concern even though many engineers have raised specific concerns about the extent of damages and the possibility of failure.. The reason they were surpressed is simple: NASA has four Orbiters, all of essentially the same design and with the same issues, that it can’t admit to being intrinsically flawed, perhaps critically. Had the Shuttle development program proceded with a more extensive conceptual test phase these problems might have been identified and the design changed eliminate the root cause. Instead, NASA built a test article (Columbia), flew it up in space, and then proceded to build four more just like it.
In this case, knowing that foam issues have been an ongoing problem, the prudent thing to do would have been to launch a single test flight with pilot and commander, up to the ISS, deliver supplies and orbital boost, inspect and return. Instead, they made a full mission out of it, putting seven astronauts at risk. It’s a bad way to proceed, and as Mission Commander Eileen Collins said, if they’d known this was going to happen they wouldn’t have flown. (And if she’s saying something like that in public I can just guess what kind of language she uses in private.)
The Shuttle is a test platform that was forced into service by an agency and its benefactor. The specifics of the design were settled on even before a single flight test article was built. The attitude now is that we have to live with the problems; in contrast, when Apollo 1 suffered its fatal launchpad fire, the capsule underwent a virtually complete redesign to eliminate the problems that lead to the disaster. For NASA to do the same with the Shuttle (or rather, with the remaining three Shuttles) would be extravagant; and with a test flight costing upward of $600M, they’re unwilling to limit the flight to just a test run; instead, they’ve made a full-on mission of it.
Spaceflight will always (at least, for the foreseeable future) be risky. And there will always be unknown or previously unconsidered hazards to contend with. But the falling foam (and failing tiles, and o-ring blowthrough, and dozens of other issues) are known risks that should be mitigated by addressing the root cause and then tested to ensure that no other problems have transpired from the fix, instead of applying a Band-Aid solution and telling the astronauts to smile and express their confidence in the Shuttle. That a test launch of the Shuttle costs too much to check the fixes is a big flashing indicator that something is broken with the whole concept, and indeed, the Agency in general. At mid-nine figures per flight we should have been dedicated to looking for a cheaper and more effective system for delivery payload and people to orbit long ago. That we haven’t indicates how much politics, rather than technical issues or even economics has come to dominate the space program.
