Five years ago today ...

[unixronin]

"Buildings shook in Texas.  Columbia was coming home."

And no, sorry, no cut here.  Thanks to Master Sergeant wcg for the reminder and the Bill Whittle pointer.  Because we should never forget.

What Bill Whittle says is true:  Those astronauts knew the risks, and they flew anyway.

Also true is that NASA worked wonders making the Shuttle fly, somehow, on a budget not nearly enough to do it right.

But they shouldn't have had to.  We should have done it right.  We owed it to the men and women who were going to risk their lives riding it.

And now we're talking about going to Mars.  Will we do it right this time?

We owe that to the memory of the men and women who flew the Shuttle, in full knowledge of the risks, and didn't make it home.

Comments

[fair-witness.livejournal.com]

I'm married to a NASA brat. My father-in-law, among other things, had to help with the post-Challenger analysis. He doesn't talk about it.

When we called to mourn, as a family, about the loss of Columbia, my father-in-law was very terse. I can't imagine what he was going through to see that happening again, though I suspect he was relieved he'd retired from the agency so that he could simply react, rather than have to try and work on the question of what happened.

All of which, I suppose, is my long way of saying, "No. We shouldn't forget. And though we mourn, we should not falter."

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And though we mourn, we should not falter.

I'll second that. Not only because if we falter, if we stop now, we may not go back; but because we owe it to Husband and Kalpana, to McAuliffe, Scobee, Smith and Onizuka, to Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, and all the others, to finish the job they started.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

And here's to Willie McCool.

It's NASA's curse to have decent, skilled and courageous pilots with awesome names (Gus Grissom and Willie McCool being the two at the top, of course) who die in tragic flight failures.

[glitch25.livejournal.com]

And here not 4 days ago, instead I was remembering 22 years ago.

Its not a perfect world. Things will happen no matter how well we plan.

Maybe this time they'll make those men and women the priority.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

At half a billion dollars per flight, I don't think the question can be reduced simply to one of budget.

The Shuttle has, from its very beginnings, been an aeronautical blunder of colossal proportions.

I wrote an essay (http://sixdemonbag.org/shuttle.html) on this when the Columbia disaster happened. I think all my criticisms are as valid today as when I wrote it.

Our astronauts are intrepid highly-trained professionals. They deserve a system worthy of them.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, now that it's flying, it costs so much per flight to fly, and they can pay the tab, or they can not fly the payload. It's that simple. It's the development budget that they had to cut corners on because Congress kept nickle-and-diming them to death on it.

Ironically, if they'd gone with the original plan, it would have cost a lot less per flight, and would have had a faster turnaround time. Recall that the original concept, with a fully reusable winged booster lifting a fully reusable winged orbiter, was planned to be able to be turned around and re-launched in a week. The initial investment would have been greater, but for the investment, they'd have gotten a more useful launch system that was cheaper to operate.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

The development budget was a victim of feature creep a lot more than it was nickel and diming, at least to my understanding. E.g., the military had a very heavy hand in the design, forcing it to accept massive compromises to its peacetime mission in order to accommodate a highly exotic military mission.

Said mission involved launching a recce sat by surprise during tensions just short of open war, where Sov antisat could be expected to be (a) in existence and (b) in operation. (Given the primitive Sov antisat programs, the former is far more speculative than the latter...) The Shuttle would launch to a single polar orbit, pop the bay doors as soon as it cleared atmo, launch the sat, close doors and re-enter at the end of the first orbit while praying like all hell that their abbreviated pre-landing checklist wasn't leaving off anything blazingly important.

I'm pretty sure you can imagine all the Δv involved, and how much designing for this particular exotic mission compromised other aspects of the peacetime mission. (Ironically, due to the Shuttle's utter failure to be a launch-in-a-hurry vehicle, the Shuttle is not capable of performing this mission, despite being designed for it.)

Of course, now that I think about it, you can make an argument the design was killed by a thousand different special interests because Congress didn't give NASA enough funding of its own to develop the Shuttle without getting cash from other interested parties, and thus giving them a seat at the design table.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

yeah. They tried to make it do too many things without putting enough money into it to actually make it that capable. Conflicting requirements. If the military wanted a fast-reaction launch system, they should have developed their own tailored to their requirements, but they couldn't get the money, so they took over NASA's project instead. The usual thing resulted that almost always happens when you try to make something do too many jobs: it doesn't do any of them well.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

The shuttle is a bastard child of changing missions and priorities. It is a miracle that it flies at all. The new, Orion, capsule is based on old Apollo techniques and technology. I am not sure that is good, but we are giving those who risk all for the dream the best chance we can. Thanks Guys!

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

thanks for the reminder.
i remember reading when the first israeli astronaut went up. that's the only reason i took notice. people had become so routine in their attitudes about these things by then. which i think was part of the problem.
couldn't help but notice when he came down.
particularly as i was living in a town whose major industry revolved around an airbase with space launch facilities. with an uncle working in said facilities. i remember the play by play as they realized there was no way to save them. gut wrenching to remember.

i don't know how we can justify doing something so important, difficult, and dangerous half-assed. i know it's politics and the money game but it still breaks my heart. *sigh*

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

that blog really kicked me in the stomach. thanks for the link.