That is precisely how New Scientist referred to the issue. 
I beg your pardon.
“Since the shuttle and foam were originally part of the same mass traveling at the same velocity…”
Well, Gom, looks like another conspiracy theory bites the dust in the face of some actual facts.
Your position is that since NASA is just now announcing, “Oh, by the way, more than one piece of insulation fell off during the launch”, that that proves that they were hiding something?
But the foam has always fallen off, in pieces, plural. And none of the other shuttles were brought down by it.
AP article dated February 4.
http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20030205/D7P06L9O0.html
And when the Columbia lifted off in January, the fact that any pieces of foam fell off was so unimportant that it wasn’t even mentioned.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_launch_030116.html
“There were no technical problems.”
Like the man said, the fact that their press statements since February 1 didn’t mention that there was more than one piece of insulation that fell off at launch was just “inadvertent”. Foam fell off the shuttles all the time, and in the face of this tremendous disaster, it simply wasn’t important to mention, “On January 16 a big chunk fell off and hit the wing–and oh, yeah, by the way, a few smaller chunks fell off, too, at the same time.”
So big deal.
I don’t know if it was a conspiracy or not. If so, it was a very short-lived one. The facts are: 1. They knew about three pieces. 2. They only told us about one. 3. They now admit they were wrong.
Being the skeptical type, and remembering Challenger, I prefer accuracy in the information we are given. Sooner rather than later. I think that’s a Clinton quote.
- It isn’t important.
I don’t recall any “disinformation” from NASA regarding Challenger at the time, only “puzzlement” at what could have caused it.
I know I’m going to get flamed over this, but as far as I’m concerned, this accident should be the impetus for an entire reconceptualization of NASA and its mission. From everything I can discern, NASA is essentially a deep hole into which money is poured in order to keep the constituents of certain states in which NASA and its subcontractors are located happy.
I’d like to see an economic analysis of all major NASA expenditures and how they can be justified vs. expenditures toward other national goals.
I’d like for someone to tell me why my tax dollars are going to support an International Space Station which, by all accounts, is an economic sinkhole and has no long term prospective economic benefits to the U.S.
Eddie, NASA’s budget is something like $15 billion/year. That works out to well under 1% of the US Federal budget. A B-2 Stealth Bomber costs nearly $1.2 billion, the USAF has 21 of them and the companies responsible for building the B-2 are many of the same companies that built the space shuttle, so as far as “cash cows” go, NASA’s gotta be pretty far down on the list. By comparison, estimates for what the war against Iraq will cost have ranged into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Of course, until the war starts and finishes, we’ll have no idea of what it’ll cost. Then there’s the $15 billion that the Bush administration has pledged to go towards the fight against AIDS in Africa.
As for the ISS, it is a toehold in space, and that, IMHO, makes it a vitally important endeavour. Humanity is going to expand into space sooner or later, and if we pull out now, it’ll only get more expensive later on.
And has been pointed out in other threads on these boards, a total reorganization of NASA would be more expensive than continuing things as they are.
Tucker, what you’re suggesting is that we throw good money after bad? That makes no sense to me. And $15 billion is $15 billion - period. I for one could find a lot better things to do with it than to throw it at a program which has produced so little in exchange for the investment.
You say we’re going into space sooner or later - fine. Why? What will be the tangible economic benefit of that? There is no reason on earth - none whatsoever - to go to space just because we can. Please tell me just what we will realize in exchange for this expenditure? Better pictures of quasars? Please! We don’t need to be throwing money at the feet of astronomers just because it’s a neato thing to do - this is serious money and it deserves better consideration than you’re providing.
If you were to tell me that the $15 billion was going into research for better sources of propulsion, then I might find some merit in your argument - but we aren’t are we? We’re nowhere close finding a new source of propulsion and everyone knows it. The idea of manned space exploration is just as dim today as it was forty years ago. Without a means of propulsion, there simply is no point in my opinion.
If we could decided where our taxes went, I’d send it all to NASA.
Where would yours go, Eddie?
I think one of the points is that it’s inappropriate to move on, in the sense that we put problems like the Challenger’s O-ring failures out of our minds. Many problems will happen at a low, non-critical level before they are devastating. This can be seen either as evidence that failures are tolerable or as a warning to be investigated carefully.
In light of the O-ring problem, wouldn’t it have been appropriate for NASA to ask “What other ‘small failures’ have we been tolerating? Which of these have even an outside chance of causing a big problem at some point?”
Even if Columbia’s problem proves to be something else, NASA will need to be able to point to a convincing study they did of this, showing that it poses no danger. Anything less is likely to come across as “Yeah, chunks would fall off from time to time – we were kinda hopin’ it was no big deal.”
Sigh NASA really ought to be paying me for the work that I do, I’m telling you. Take a look at this thread which is a debate about shutting down the space program and describes what some of the costs behind that would be. And here’s a listing of NASA pages describing the spinoffs from the space program.
From NASA’s own site, here, here and here are pages detailing NASA’s current work into propulsion research.
As for why humans should go into space, that’s like asking why the hell Columbus should set sail. We don’t know what’s out there, so to categorically state that humans shouldn’t go is preposterous. One of the things we do know, is that there’s a lot of valuable stuff in asteroids. Cite. Further discussion on these boards can be found here. If you want more thread links, I can provide them.
Finally, I’m not saying that there’s no way to improve NASA, I’m saying that if you want that to happen, then it’s going to cost you more money than what we’re currently spending.
I don’t know how you can even claim this. NASA and its contractors are world leaders in linear aerospike engine technology. NASA’s Deep Space 1 probe was the first to use ion propulsion. Can you name anyone else who’s even close to flight-testing a hypersonic scramjet engine? Who else in the world has a serious program to develop nuclear propulsion?
My lame addition to this thread comes from “Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code.” http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.html
He’s talking about writing computer code. But the same idea should be applied to any effort that pushes the envelope, including modern and future spaceflight.
I’m not saying that we should put the O-Rings out of our mind, I’m saying that everytime something goes wrong at NASA, we need to stop screaming, “O-Rings! O-Rings!” And NASA did look at the small problems in the wake of Challenger. One of the things that they found was that workers were spitting in the tile glue to make it dry faster. This had the effect of causing the tiles to be held on less securely. Workers are now no longer doing this. NASA’s also pointed out that when they were refitting the Columbia, they came across several unexpected cases where parts had been damaged, and they replaced the parts and did what they could to prevent it from happening again. That doesn’t mean that they eliminated all the problems, or that they didn’t overlook something this time. The folks that run NASA are, after all, only human, and humans do make fatal mistakes from time to time.
Sorry, but I looked at the NASA “spinoffs”, and they are, to be quite charitable, marginal to say the least. I see nothing which can be used to justify a $15 billion annual investment. Some say that $15 billion isn’t much money - well, if you were to take the annual budget for the last, say, thirty years of NASA’s existence, just what would that equal? And exactly how has that “investment” yielded any tangible economic benefits?
Somehow, Eddie I doubt that you’ve looked at all the spinoffs. For tangible economic benefits from the spaceprogram, all you have to do is look at the computer industry. Every computer currently produced owes its existance to the spaceprogram. NASA’s budget for the last thirty years has been pretty much frozen at the same level. The increases it’s gotten (if any) haven’t kept pace with inflation. How many other of the US government programs can say the same? The problem with NASA is that folks expect it to produce results, but are unwilling to give it the money it needs to create the kinds of results that its detractors demand of it.
How about the entire American aerospace industry? Of course NASA’s part in it is a small one, far smaller than that of the military, but it’s not negligible. If Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, Hughes, etc. didn’t get a chance to develop launcher and satellite technology for NASA projects, chances are all your TV programs would be transmitted by French satellites launched by Chinese rockets.
I have to say that this seems like a bit of a reach. NASA certainly uses lots of computers, though we read that the ones on board the Shuttle tend to be rather primitive. I’ve never understood that they were on the cutting edge in the development of computers. (Is NASA even in the business of chip design?)
Pretty decent (for their day) computers were around well before we got serious about space exploration, and tons of non-space-related applications drove their development.
Do you have any idea of how primitive the computers used in the Apollo program were (state of the art for the era)? Go to the dollar store, buy a disposable pocket calculator, and you’ll be holding more computer power in your hand, than NASA had for the Apollo missions. The push for intergrated circuit designs was led by NASA, because smaller computers means more space and weight is available for other things on the spacecraft.
NASA may not have designed the chips, but they certainly paid for the research.
And yes, much of the computer equipment NASA puts into space isn’t cutting edge technology. (The Hubble’s recent upgrade was to install a 486 processor based motherboard.) There’s a couple of reasons for this. One is that it takes a long time to design something for spaceflight. With faster processors coming out almost every day, the design has to be frozen at some point, which means that the next day, the computer technology inside it is obsolete, but were NASA to continually throw their designs out simply because someone boosted processor speed by a couple of Mhz, they’d never get anything launched. Secondly, NASA prefers using slightly older technology for things because it’s got a history behind it. Years of use of a particular component will tell you more about the failure rate and nature of failures of that component than lab testing. Critical, if you’re sending something into space where repairs would be difficult if not impossible to complete. AFAIK, none of NASA’s mission and spacecraft computers use MS Windows. The reason being that it’s not a stable enough OS. Can you imagine the hell that would break out if it turned out that a group of shuttle astronauts (or civilians on the ground) were killed because someone at NASA got a BSOD?
Until NASA came on the scene, the prime push for computer development was the military. Eventually, computers would have been as prevalent as they are now, but without NASA, it no doubt would have taken much longer.
The transistor and the semiconductor were developed long before the space program. For the record, what I’m specifically referring to is the space program SINCE the Apollo missions - the mission to the moon was a horse of an altogether different feather than the shuttle program, which has no apparent mission other than its own self-perpetuation.
The idea that computers descended from the space program is just as silly as the oft-repeated (and totally erroneous) assertion that the space program is responsible for teflon. By point of interest, teflon was discovered in 1938 by a DuPont scientist.
I have yet to hear one compelling reason to continue to drop multiple billions of dollars into a program which cannot produce a real and significant economic benefit to our nation.