widr

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i herd numbers


lupi
@lupi
This post has content warnings for: engineering disasters, human factors, this is still about the subbmarine but first we have to talk about both space shuttle disasters.

NireBryce
@NireBryce

I read the report a decade ago so I'm rusty, but what always stood out to me was we Apollo-13'd apollo 13, but thanks to management culture, budgetary pressure, a lack of imagination, and no communists to one-up, we did not bother to Apollo-13 Columbia. If anything, Columbia had way more resources to pull off an Apollo-13, if NASA was willing to sacrifice the payloads and scientific work.

STS was a heavy lift variant because it wasn't going to dock with the space station ever. It had a large crew of 7 at the time, including a spacehab lab module, and a few other things they could have scavenged if they knew when the NASA debris analysis team first started suspecting. I'm not even thinking about moonshot rescue missions that were proposedwith the reserve shuttle, or the air force classified shuttle. Apollo had 3 people with engineer-brain on it. Columbia had 7. The space shuttle had laptops. It had some form of hand tools, it had a lot more than Apollo did.

managers downplayed the issue, budgetary constraints rushed them and they needed experimental data before the ISS modules launched, etc, sure.

Maneuvering the orbiter to allow its left wing to be imaged would have interrupted ongoing science operations, and Ham dismissed the DoD imaging capabilities as insufficient to assess damage to the orbiter.

Mission management downplayed the risk of the debris strike in communications with the crew.

But they had a spacehab lab module. They had suits for EVA in case something happened -- mention of having to fix an antenna as an example, in a pre-launch Q and A with the public comes up with a cursory websearch.

If we cared about the people and not the payload there was plenty to cannibalize, to create a tether long enough to check, to maybe pull less critical tiles, bring them inside, and hand-sculpt them. There was an entire lab module they could have cannibalized, though I don't know if they had the tools or the time to pull off side panels.

Would it work? Who knows -- no one tried.

And then I found this report tonight, looking for these things, since I was rusty. I'd never seen the followup report. Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report. Somehow I'd missed it when I read the CAIB report. It was released in 2008.

The heated plasma leaking through the wing probably isn't what killed them. I mean it did, but this shows it might have been survivable even if nothing was done in space, were there not a cavalcade of other problems where human life wasn't considered.

which is about how they could have survived the breakup, if people just did a little bit more work on thinking about what might happen. Between poor suit integration and not wanting to rework controls, a lack of upper body restraint and helmets that supported your neck, and parachutes that required manual deployment.

I will put the pull quotes under the fold.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

This whole thing reminds me of this PBS documentary about cell tower fall deaths.

it's, graphic at times.

there's so much subcontracting that by the time the people actually work on the towers, they don't have safety equipment from the last decade. Or at all. And often encourage free climbing, partially due to time pressures.

And all the money for those things are taken by each fractal subcontracting step. You pay nearly the same amount as you did for doing your own towers, and don't think about just how many hops there are hemorrhaging that money.


 
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