I read it around the time of her death so I will probably struggle to find it again. Particularly if it has been scrubbed from the web which seems possible.
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Yeah, because of inherently bad decisions made in its design. Like I said, strapping the vehicle to the side of a huge fuel tank flanked by solid rocket boosters is a known risk that can be largely avoided or at least mitigated with capsule-based designs.
A large part of the Engineering Ethics class I took in college was a deep dive into all the ways that poor decisions at many levels led to the Challenger disaster. And more recently some former NASA engineers came to give a really good presentation at my work diving into the history of failures and close calls over the history of NASA. Some of these incidents ended up being useful lessons learned, but many were lessons that were forgotten and repeated.
The issue of foam striking and damaging tiles on the shuttles was known for years. NASA just didn’t take it seriously because it hadn’t caused any disasters yet, only some close calls.
There’s simply no way to defend the Shuttle program as being a safe design, and you can’t even say that there was no way to know these risks except in retrospect.
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The report from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board went into depth on how the culture of safety changed over time to the point where safety issues were being disregarded. The report is worth the read, a real page turner, and available online.
https://history.nasa.gov/columbia/CAIB.html
I also work with some former Shuttle engineers, and used to work with some of the program managers tasked to get Endeavour into a flight configuration after Challenger
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i tried some new search ideas, interestingly the one that popped up was the advocate. the nasa official links seem to cover the arc of her career, while the mainstream coverage are either about her career or her coming out.
fitting that an lgbt publication was able to focus on what seems like such an important act by her:
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Yep, NASA learned nothing as an institution from the disasters and near-misses prior to Columbia. The shuttle-Mir program in the late nineties, for example, came very close to producing corpses on numerous occasions, but for dumb luck. We should have learned from that experience, but the lapses in safety during that period look point-for-point like the ones the CAIB later determined contributed to the loss of Columbia. NASA had an opportunity to apply lessons learned, and blew it, resulting in the deaths of an entire crew.
Oh, there’s always lip-service paid, but as Tim Krieder says: “We Learn Nothing.”
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Thanks for that, a quick search on the phone wasn’t helpful for me. I had thought it was common knowledge but apparently not at all.
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That’s a bold claim. What are your sources for it?
How would you have designed a large reusable space-plane, then?
Capsules are safer, yep. That’s not what they were designing for. The payload bay of the shuttle was huge, which was crucial to its mission goals.
The armchair engineering is strong in here today. Didn’t know we had so many aerospace experts.
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That’s a silly distinction to draw. A program that wipes out half its scientists in a single explosion is still a pretty dangerous one. God knows how many test pilots and other “non-cosmonauts” or “cosmosnauts not in the act of being on a spaceflight mission” died, but we know it’s a lot. You have to look at the safety of the whole program to be fair about it.
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The point isn’t that NASA had a worse overall safety record than the Soviet space program, the point is that even after NASA was done with all the design and testing phases the shuttle was was an inherently dangerous vehicle—even compared to vehicles like the Soyuz.
A vehicle design that put passenger safety at the top of the list of design priorities would not have resulted in something like the Space Shuttle.
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Ok, even if you’re asserting that the risks weren’t known or knowable ahead of time (which is easy to dispute) how can you possibly say that a vehicle that had 1.5% of its flights end in tragedy wasn’t dangerous by design?
There were many problems with the design but probably among the biggest was the basic assumption that we needed a large, reusable space plane at all to accomplish the goals that NASA was trying to do. Russia and China have clearly proven that you can build a space station without one, and we’ve launched huge objects like the James Webb Space Telescope without needing a spaceplane.
It didn’t take very many years of shuttle flights to clearly demonstrate that they were neither cost effective or safe. The Russians made the right call in abandoning their own shuttle program after a single uncrewed flight.
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It is my point.
Compared to what? Nobody else has built a reusable heavy-lift space plane. It’s a dangerous thing to try and do.
They are completely different vehicles with different mission goals. You can’t compare them like that. Bicycles are safer than cars, too.
How would you have designed it better? What’s your basis for knowing that it can be safer with the technology available at the time?
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Because nobody had tried to do that before and space is really really dangerous.
That’s shifting the goalposts. Whether NASA built the right thing for their goals is a separate question from whether that thing can be safer.
The Russians didn’t abandon it because they feared for the safety of their people. They ran out of money fighting a Cold War in space that they knew they couldn’t win.
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Well considering that two of the 135 shuttle missions resulted in total loss of crew and vehicle I’d say “compared to almost any other crewed vehicle that ever went into operational service.”
I wouldn’t have designed it at all because I’m not an aerospace engineer. But it seems kind of crazy to continue insisting that the shuttle wasn’t an inherently dangerous vehicle design when it very clearly was.
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Both vehicle losses were managerial failures, not technical ones, though. Both times the engineers had warned them (even pleaded with them) not to launch. If an organization has managerial culture problems, no vehicle will be very safe. Shuttle-era NASA was a managerial nightmare.
To me this is like saying motorcycles are too dangerous to exist because a lot of people die on them trying to jump canyons.
The claim that needs defending is not that the shuttle was dangerous. Of course it was. All spaceflight is incredibly dangerous. The claim is that it could have been safer than it was.
The shuttle was way out on the bleeding edge of spaceflight. Maybe that can’t be safe with the technology of the time. We don’t know because nobody else has ever tried it.
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At this point I’m honestly not clear on what your main argument even is. The program was a failure by just about any measure: safety, cost effectiveness, launch cadence, etc. You seem to be conceding that there were other options for accomplishing what the shuttle was meant to do. So what are you even defending here? You’re asserting that this specific design, which NASA chose to pursue, couldn’t have been done safer? That’s a strange argument to make in defense of the program, and is also wrong according to a number of aerospace experts both inside and outside of NASA.
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If there was no safe way for NASA to build a reusable heavy-lift spaceplane with the technology of the time, but NASA did have the technology to accomplish their core science missions with other kinds of vehicles, then it seems to me that maybe they shouldn’t have built a reusable heavy-lift spaceplane at all if they were really committed to putting passenger safety at or near the top of their design priorities.
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I disagree with most of that. The shuttle was far from perfect and missed on many of its goals, but the ISS would not exist without it and it did an enormous amount of useful science. It gave us a model for what future commercial LEO industry could look like.
I think the program was a net win. Clearly you disagree and that’s okay.
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Well nobody knew for sure how hard (and thus dangerous) it was going to be. Nobody set out to build a dangerous thing, of course. Until Challenger it was going okay except for the slow cadence. They thought they improved the management problems after Challenger, but Columbia proved they really hadn’t, so they pulled the plug.
Humans do lots of things that turn out to be hard, too dangerous, or beyond what we should be trying right now. It’s how we know where the limits are.
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Just because they made use of the shuttle to help built it doesn’t mean they needed a shuttle to build it. A version of the ISS definitely could have been built without a shuttle, as Skylab and MIR had already proven long before construction of the ISS had begun.
My first reaction to that is “god, I hope not…” but maybe you can clarify what you mean by that, exactly. Which specific aspects of the program are a model to follow?
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