28 years since Challenger

[billvon 3,006]

>The challenger crew would have been able to be pressurized with the suit, and bail out with the pole

A friend of mine (Taz Clark, Navy test jumper) tested that system a few times out at El Centro with the suit on and partially pressurized. He said that he had trouble doing it out of the side door of a C-130 flying straight and level. And this was an experienced test jumper/current skydiving instructor.

It is unlikely that a far less experienced crew with fully inflated suits would be able to use such a system in a rapidly spinning fragment of a spacecraft.

[Anvilbrother 0]

Yea forgot about the rigidity of a suit. I looked up some of the egress test videos, and the duck walk out that door seemed really akward.

Postes r made from an iPad or iPhone. Spelling and gramhair mistakes guaranteed move along,

[jakee 1,500]

DanG

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But had they heeded _all_ the warnings, and dealt with all the potential problems before the first launch, they would never have launched to begin with. Spaceflight is inherently risky, and no amount of work will prevent all possible fatal incidents.

You say that as if Challenger blew up on the first SRS mission. The point of the Challenger accident is that the program managers ignored the operating limitations of the vehicle, and the pointed warnings of cognizant engineers.

Yep, IMO the Shuttle managers exhibited willful blindness and self deception about the risks and potential failures of the shuttle. The official estimates of the probability of losing a shuttle were laughably fantastic. They left pie-in-the-sky in the rearview mirror.

Setting a level of acceptable risk is one thing, telling yourself you've removed all the risks and any information to the contrary must be false is another.

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At best you can learn from previous incidents and apply that knowledge going forward, so that your odds of having a recurrence of _that_ incident go down.

Exactly, and there already was previous knowledge about the o-rings' temperature sensitivity. The Challenger blew up because certain people chose not to apply existing knowledge and reduce the odds of a specific, known failure mode.

And what did they do next? They learned the lesson about that specific failure and ignored the broken system of institutional priorities until it took down another crew.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[jakee 1,500]

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The challenger crew would have been able to be pressurized with the suit, and bail out with the pole

Even NASA agrees

No they don't. "Might" is a very big word.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[dorbie 0]

DanG

Exactly, and there already was previous knowledge about the o-rings' temperature sensitivity. The Challenger blew up because certain people chose not to apply existing knowledge and reduce the odds of a specific, known failure mode.

There wasn't just knowledge of the O-ring problem, there was a detailed investigative analysis ignored by managers and some idiots who called the non-burned portion of O-ring on previous flights their safety margin, with pictures of the O-ring cross sections etc. So they had a failure condition on multiple flights and called the remaining ring after the failure their "safety margin". This was institutional madness. It's like flying an aircraft, losing a wingtip that just falls off and then saying you don't have a structural problem because only 10% of the wing fell off, leaving your with a 90% safety margin.

Feynman didn't figure out the O-ring problem after the disaster, Roger Boisjoly and team at Morton Thiokol did an excellent job and figured out exactly what was happening BEFORE the loss of vehicle and delivered a detailed report. He had recognized a correlation between O-ring blow by and launch temperature. He tried to stop the flight when he saw weather reports the day before the flight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly

[kallend 2,027]

I use the Challenger disaster as a case study in engineering ethics in my introduction to engineering class for freshmen.

Boisjoly stated that the caucus called by Morton Thiokol managers, which resulted in a recommendation to launch, "constituted the unethical decision-making forum resulting from intense customer intimidation." He left the company.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.