Can we have a thread about NASA failures and the toxic culture that precipitated them?

Can we have a thread about NASA failures and the toxic culture that precipitated them?

I was reading up on the Columbia disaster last night and I can't believe no one went to jail over this.

>Space shuttle Columbia takes off
>piece of foam insulation breaks off and damages the left wing
>NASA analysts insist the damage is nothing serious
>mission proceeds
>evidence from computer modelling shows that it might be quite serious
>NASA ignores the data
>DOD offers to photograph the shuttle in space so the crew can assess the damage and consider the prospect of repair
>NASA blocks the DOD from intervening, reasoning that there's nothing the crew can do about it
>NASA bureaucrats led by Linda Ham (who was later dismissed) decide that they're all dead anyway and it would be better not to let them know it
>Quote: You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS [Thermal Protection System]. If it has been damaged it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?
>meanwhile NASA ground control sends the following message up to the crew before they begin reentry:
>During ascent at approximately 80 seconds, photo analysis shows that some debris came loose and subsequently impacted the orbiter left wing. The impact appears to be totally on the lower surface and no particles are seen to traverse over the upper surface of the wing. Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry.
>astronauts are now flying blind into almost certain death
>shuttle explodes over Texas
>Mission control declares a contingency and seals the room. Finger pointing begins at NASA

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster#Possible_emergency_procedures
youtube.com/watch?v=kAmsi05P9Uw
arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station/1/
youtube.com/watch?v=2P1bR6hShJ4
youtube.com/watch?v=XSfHowDgtlQ
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

>nasa in charge of outsourcing labor

>Can we have a thread about NASA failures and the toxic culture that precipitated them?
>all of this is still there btw. its a large bureaucratic, poltical, and sluggish institution like any government agency

Oh look, it's this thread again.

When will they be shut down? When private spaceflight takes over?

Challenger was a much much much bigger failure.
> Be Thiokol Engineers
> Figure out that the O-ring seals on Shuttle SRBs could have serious issues at low temperatures
>See Weather forecast for Launch
>Below Freezing Temp on Pad
>Call NASA and tell them to scrub
>Be told to fuck off as the mission is already behind schedule and NASA just wants to get this shit over with
>Shuttle Launches
>O-ring fails
>Shuttle Explodes

top laff

>losing your entire operation in the most catastrophic manner possible rather than waiting 24 hours

>Thiokol management initially supported its engineers' recommendation to postpone the launch, but NASA staff opposed a delay. During the conference call, Hardy told Thiokol, "I am appalled. I am appalled by your recommendation." Mulloy said, "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch — next April?"

It's OK though user, like any other agile and responsive organization, the people at the top responsible for some of those fuckups were justifiably fired and are no longer at NASA. This will ensure a culture of accountability.

Oh wait, no they weren't. They just got put in charge of other NASA programs so they could keep collecting those sweet civil service salaries and benefits packages. At least we can look forward to the day they retire. Yes, we'll still have to keep paying their pensions for the next 20-30 years but at least we won't have to worry about the toxic culture they foist upon NASA.

You're not ready for the creeping horror of realizing that NASA is not special and our society is dominated by similar incompetent bureaucracies that may have produced impressive results in their first decade, but then became monotonically more and more inefficient.

>fuck up so many launches in such a short period that all programs are indefinitely suspended
>excess rocket fuel for future planned operations has to be stored at a remote location while NASA gets its shit together
>fire breaks out at the storage site, resulting in a massive explosion that kills two people an injures 400 more, in addition to causing 100 million dollars worth of damages

>that moment when you realize everything has gone unspeakably wrong

Ayyy

They had to come up with something. The foam story was for public consumption, like the 'jet fuel'. You cannot say 'we do not understand what happened', you have to come up with something that covers your ass.

...

Nah, they'll become like the FAA ang get to point fingers at private space companies when they fuck up

Just to put things into perspective, because people like to forget putting things into space is actually hard.

Sorry, but what's wrong with the logic behind the handling of Colombia?

There was nothing to be done once the heat tiles were broken. No point in telling the crew, so yeah... Don't. Why would you?

>putting things into space is actually hard.
But NASA told us this thing was going to be safe like an airliner, and that's why it didn't need a launch abort system to carry passengers.

You can't say, "We got this. Don't worry about it. We know what we're doing. You can trust us. We won't fuck up." and then fuck it up and expect people to accept, "This stuff's inherently hard. No matter how good you are, you're going to fuck up sometimes. Don't hold us to impossible standards."

You have to pick one and go with it. If it's inherently failure-prone, you have to plan for occasional failures.

>what you don't know can't hurt you

In an alternate reality, DOD actually inspects the Shuttle, deem it unsuitable for reentry.
Crew is told they're fucked, but at least they can say goodbye to their family before either committing suicide or let the air deplete.
Nasa send the next mission to get the bodies back and attempt to repair the orbiter. Have it land on autopilot, just in case.
Billions of dollars saved. Nasa's integrity intact. Shuttle program still OK.

>There was nothing to be done once the heat tiles were broken.
1) attempt a repair with the materials on hand,
2) attempt a rescue with a second shuttle,
3) attempt a resupply with an improvised non-shuttle mission,
4) attempt a rescue with an improvised non-shuttle mission.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster#Possible_emergency_procedures
>Mission STS-107 ... launched on January 16, 2003
>The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster occurred on February 1, 2003
>Atlantis was well along in processing for a planned March 1 launch
>Columbia carried an unusually large quantity of consumables due to an Extended Duration Orbiter package. The CAIB determined that this would have allowed Columbia to stay in orbit until flight day 30 (February 15)
>NASA investigators determined that Atlantis processing could have been expedited with no skipped safety checks for a February 10 launch. Hence, if nothing went wrong, there was a five-day overlap for a possible rescue
>NASA investigators determined that on-orbit repair by the shuttle astronauts was possible but overall considered "high risk", primarily due to the uncertain resiliency of the repair using available materials

So, after observing the foam strike, they had an entire month in which to confirm the damage and come up with some alternative method of bringing the crew down alive.

Ever watch Apollo 13? Imagine it went this way.
>>Houston, we have a problem.
>Uh... negative. Don't worry about it. We've confirmed it's not a problem. Carry on.
...then they go on their coffee breaks.
youtube.com/watch?v=kAmsi05P9Uw

>Have it land on autopilot, just in case.
There is no autopilot. This might sound incredible for a launch in 2003, after Buran completed an unmanned mission in 1988, but the shuttle still absolutely required a human pilot onboard to land.

Also: that is some grim shit. I do not like the way you think.

yeah, let's waste trillions of dollars to save 20 people

Well then just have a ballsy pilot on board.
You may not like the way I think, but I have even better, just for you.

The crew draws the short straw for who dies, so they have enough supply until the next shuttle can launch and rescue the remaining ones.
Same as above, but you saved some lives in the process.

>The crew draws the short straw for who dies, so they have enough supply until the next shuttle can launch and rescue the remaining ones.
Did you see my other post? There was time for an attempted rescue by another shuttle, as well as a possibility of improvising repair. For that matter, the rescue attempt could have brought up proper materials for a better repair job.

It was 7 people, and the whole shuttle program, from beginning to end, cost about $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. A rescue attempt would have been expensive, but the whole shuttle program was uneconomical and symbolic, and the symbolism of callously letting a crew die disgusted the entire world.

>challenger lauch
>engineering team who designed boosters says the boosters cant be used beyond a certain temperature, else destructive failure will occur
>January 28th 1986
>its hotter than the specifications
>nasa "fuck it! Launch the motherfuckwr NOW!"
>The engineering team is pissing themselves, they said its too hot
>the boosters fail, fuel expands explosively, causing the destruction of the shuttle and death of onboard crew
>nasa "we're fucking coming after you fuckers, YOU DID THIS!"

Yea, NASA is a piece of shit. That incident is probably why they are so tame nowadays.

It was too cold. What kind of low-energy trolling is this?

Oh I've read all about this plan.
It's very unrealistic that they would have made it work on the get-go.
I'm sure it was considered, as well as what I proposed. But they choose to just go with it, hoping it would work out somehow.

Can't wait for NASA justifying they killed people on SLS because they didn't have enough funds to properly test it.

While, to be fair, I may be dead by then, at the rate they're going.

Its been years since Ive studied it, so I may not be totally accurate, but you know what I mean. The designer told them what temp range would work, NASA disguarded their specification and then went after them. They even predicted failure in less than a minute, which the failure happened after a minute, which was incredible on its own.

Discarded*

Speech to text

Daily reminder that this is all because legislature gets to worm their grubby little hands into NASA.

It needs to be separate from congress and the presidency in all but the most high levels.

>It's very unrealistic that they would have made it work on the get-go.
What, to move up the schedule of a launch a few weeks and do a simple rendezvous between two operational shuttles is "very unrealistic"?

As of January 16, they were preparing to make a routine launch of Atlantis on March 1. Routine. That means people weren't pulling double shifts, they were double and triple checking things, they were taking their time preparing the payload, etc. Columbus could have stayed in orbit until February 15, just two weeks before the routine scheduled Atlantis launch.

Yeah, stuff got delayed fairly often, but often (especially post-Challenger) the delays were out of an abundance of caution. They'd accept some risk to stay on schedule for a rescue mission.

Come on

SLS will have a LAS and the heat shield will not be located adjacent to lots of falling pieces of foam. The astronauts will be fine.

>Let's rush the launch of a vehicle we absolutely know can get stranded up there because of foam hits.
>Last time we rushed it, the thing simply blew itself apart.
>Ok, do we have volunteers?

Plus, there's always chance it will be cancelled before it ever flies with astronauts on board so that will surely help it's safety record.

Which is pretty much impossible since NASA's may objective today is to serve as a jobs program for certain congressional districts.

This is sad considering that there is some serious talent and brainpower there that is being waisted by incompetent administrators.

SLS ain't going to LEO, though, so surviving a launch vehicle failure isn't their main concern.

The first time Orion carries human passengers, it will be riding on an all-new, untested upper stage and heading on a weeks-long trip into deep space (high lunar orbit).

NASA, nowadays is all but a comfy job program, with the only purpose of supplying jobs to subcontractors.
They're all talk about muh 'journey to Mars', but it took them 10+ years to develop a fucking capsule.
Luckily enough, one of their subcontractor is SpaceX, so we might get some space happening in our lifetime.

>Mars Climate Orbiter probe
>$125 million
>Lockheed Martin uses imperial units
>shit happens
>loses probe
>u srs m8

Why would nasa give a fuck didn't they burn alive a whole crew in the 70s or 80s to cover up something.

Also there was a love affair between 3 astronauts. One of the sluts got mad and drove over 1000 miles to murder the other slut when she got off her plane.

could a rescue mission have happened? A scrambled russian rocket full of oxygen and food followed by another shuttle going up to save them?

Sure. Lol but cost effective nope.

Man, read the thread. Satan has the answers:

You can tell who the millennials are. They are the ones who were not there watching this stuff happen on live TV.

Gene was not flight director during STS-107 right?
That should explain.

>be Russian rocket engineer
>Design gyro unit so that it can only be installed the correct way
>Boris the drunk underpaid technician decides that it must go in the other way, uses a mallet to smack it in, breaking the component that prevents backwards installation
>rocket launches, thinks it's upside down, and attempts to correct
>it says hi to the ground seconds later

True story.

If anyone wants to hear a defeated, strained voice, resigned to its fate, then just listen to the Shuttle Commander's last audio communications before they died.

I think the aspi NASA heads just couldn't accept that they needed to step it up and do something extraordinary to save them.

They simply couldn't believe it, and basically did the closest (read: useless) thing to prayer a bunch of scientists can do- and they died.

I'm still upset about this.

Sorry to the crew. Heroes.

People glass people in bars and ruin lives instead of just, walking away.

We are animals and still falter sometimes with our new-found ability to look forward into time.

Asperger NASA engineers are no different here it seems.

They assessed the possibility of a LOC (Loss Of Crew) scenario happening at about 0.01.

The whole program accepted that the probability of one killing everyone on board was about 1 in 100 launches.

And this sadly turned out to be about right.

Maybe they could have sent up some rescue.

Maybe they should have tried.

Good article about Salyut 7

arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station/1/

Those small space stations are so neat

>He thinks a private company would have behaved differently.

It's not about *a* private company taking over. It's about private companies going out of business when they fuck up badly, so you eventually get competent people.

Private launch was basically not allowed until the early 2000s. Even now, fully private launch hasn't really developed. NASA has picked a few likely winners and rushed them to the head of the line with development funding and favored access to facilities. But SpaceX and Orbital have more distance from their government sponsors than ULA, which has more distance than the pre-EELV launch contractors.

There's another generation coming that's even more separate from government, with many more competing companies.

Here's your (You)

I think user hit it on the head. His scenario would be far better than what happened. Astronauts know what they're signing up for, and it's not the boy scouts. They deserved to know.

>If anyone wants to hear a defeated, strained voice, resigned to its fate, then just listen to the Shuttle Commander's last audio communications before they died.
That's not at all what the final communication was like for either shuttle. For Challenger the final word's were a routine transmission. No one onboard knew they were fucked until it was too late. For Columbia contact with the crew was lost just as a gauges were going dead and they started to figure out how badly they were fucked. Their response to Mission control got cut off, but was pretty calm.

He's right though.
You know how much saving them would cost?

What are the options?

1) Risk having them killed on reentry
2) Risk having millions of people saying "omg save teh poor astaunaught yuo animale" thus creating a double disaster

Would I want to know if I was onboard? Absolutely.
Would I tell them if I was in charge? Probably not.
The crew could go berserk and even broadcast "plz save us they'll let us die" on ham-frequencies.

I thought their primary mission was launching military satellites? Probably why you don't see a lot of privatization except at the grunt level like they do with infantry and death squads.

I think all this other window dressing - mars rover TV, deep space probes and what not is designed to hide the fact NASA is really just part of the US military and a hard without it. Allowing the private sector into an already crowded orbit is probably never going to happen. All that GPS needs a power off button under the thumb of a General after all ,just in case the monkeys need a slap.

Sure he's right, except for that part about "trillions." But hey, a little exaggeration to make your point sound better is cool, right?

>tfw i saw Columbia explode

>I thought their primary mission was launching military satellites?
No, NASA has never had much to do with that. It was specifically founded for non-military activities in space. They only occasionally performed military satellite launch duties when it was the official policy of the US government that the NASA-operated shuttle should carry all American payloads.

Of course, since NASA never delivered the shuttle launch schedule and capabilities it promised, the American military continuously maintained its own separate orbital launch capabilities, which often carried NASA payloads as well.

There were only 8 classified DoD shuttle payloads, out of 135 shuttle missions. There were also a few comsats for military use.

>ITT a bunch of aspis whose closest exposure to space exploration is popping bottle rockets in their backyard know everything about running a space agency and what to do in any situation

You faggots sound like a bunch of Truthers

STYROFOAM CAN'T MELT SHUTTLE WINGS

youtube.com/watch?v=2P1bR6hShJ4

tfw you dodged a bullet

>tests show fires can happen
>Use pure oxygen
>don't fireproof everything
>in a rush so don't test if the doors work
>test with three people
>all burn alive
>oh yeah we also got a budget increase because of this
>kek kek kek

...

sauce sauce sauce

Dunno, saved it from a dank thread in the before times.

I'm sure if you google Shitskin Butane Car Fire or something of the ilk, you shall find what you seek

googling led me to: youtube.com/watch?v=XSfHowDgtlQ

A real missed opportunity for a triple Darwin award.

Who would space on rocket?

It takes serious engines that can go to there and back with no refill, its like pumping gas in car every 100m, what are they trying...

If they have enought snowboard halls, it could go better, with sciencists themselves, so they could have some ionto magnetic engines that accalerate particle backward on the effect it push the ship forward for example... Or just flu in boson field, that somewhere beyond deepfrost dont have to be so dense, so if you fyght at some electrowave ratio; you can go totally different speed witouth all this gravity noise percieved in sollar system...

I think, they are failzors, who dont have enought snowboard hall.

This wasting of burning directly with no recompression getting out more thurst is pure waste...

I cannot even imagine how this kind of guys with no snowboard halls can go beyond deepfrost, where there is no gravity noising this small as planets, they will be thorn apart with their spaceships or something like that.

Respect to them, but they dont have snowboard halls enought scienced so they cannot properly outerspace...

What the fuck

>snowboard hall

what?

I only scanned the thread, so sorry if this has been pointed out already. But seven fully trained astronauts represent seven MASSIVE investments of money and man hours. If not saving them was a money-saving option, like the tin foil hats here believe, it wasn't a very good plan.

They knew.

The tone was an upset one; control was being upbeat (as they are trained to do) but the same thing was not coming from the commander.

He seemed tired, yeah, but that wasn't all of it.

There's a distinct air of betrayal coming through in his tone.

You can have a strained yet calm voice.

Yes, he was 'calm', in tempo, word choice, keeping to the mission, and volume.

But like I said, clearly he knew there was a higher than normal chance he won't make it down.

I think their biggest failure is pretending money is the solution to all problems, you can't throw money at stupid to make it less stupid.

>Literal manned fairing

You nailed it m8.

>It's not about *a* private company taking over. It's about private companies going out of business when they fuck up badly, so you eventually get competent people.

Because that's how it worked in the finance industry didn't it? None of those stock-brokers or bankers are employed anymore at other financial institutions are they?

>Can we have a thread about NASA failures

Well, they didn't go to the moon, that's for damn sure.

They didn't leave a laser retroreflector up there or anything....

>They didn't leave a laser retroreflector up there or anything....

And this wasn't verified by multiple observatories around the world, or anything...

>And this wasn't verified by multiple observatories around the world, or anything...

We went to the moon, dipshits....

DEAL WITH IT.

Check em.

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