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Originally Posted by beckychestney
It's hard to imagine ole' Gus going for a spacecraft with such a crappy hatch design (especially after the dog he got on Liberty Bell 7). One account I read said it took 90 seconds to get it open under the best of circumstances. Wally Schirra did refuse to fly in a block one so maybe if there had been a more united front by the astronauts it would have been different.
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Yes, but it was "go fever" and it WAS that point in time when "do it or I'll find someone who will" was the rule rather than the exception... so in hindsight I guess not TOO surprising. Those guys were the "test pilot's test pilot" back then and so they knew a certain amount of risk went with the job, and sometimes they hung it out over the line-- and sometimes could pull it back in, sometimes not... a lot of it was "fate"... You either accepted that and did the job, or you did something else.
Quote:
Originally Posted by beckychestney
Challenger was a warning to us about putting lives into the hands of corporate executives. Engineers were concerned but it seems executives put their corporate image ahead of safety.
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It wasn't so much corporate executives-- it was "mid level NASA managers" and "program inertia"... It was the same sort of thing that led to Columbia years later... That, and a cavalier attitude that had developed that 'nothing bad will happen, because nothing bad had happened YET." I see the aftermath of such thinking walking around farm shows, seeing guys missing limbs or fingers because they took "one chance too many" and lost-- didn't respect the dangers of what they were doing and ended up paying for it, and for every one of them, there's a lot more who aren't around anymore because it killed them.
The engineers from Morton Thiokol who designed and built the boosters, recommended scrubbing the launch due to low temperatures, citing the demonstrated fact that the previous coldest launch of the shuttle boosters at a temperature of 53 degrees showed severe O-ring erosion, and they were overruled... more than that, the very NASA managers they were making their recommendation to did their best to denigrate and intimidate them, saying, "My God, Thiokol! When are we supposed to launch? Next June?" They then went into a separate conference with the "executives" and then they came back and told the Thiokol engineer's supervisor to "take off your engineer's hat and put on your manager's hat", essentially overruling their recommendations. In short, NASA's people put pressure on the company engineers and their managers to "give them the answer they wanted to hear" instead of the "true answer they had been giving". That's the long and short of it... what it all boils down to.
I had the same shuttle book you showed in your post... it was an interesting (if rather fanciful) read, but it reflected the thinking at the time, which was telling. IIRC (it's been a number of years since I read the book, and it's falling apart with age LOL
) but the book basically was telling that the shuttle program expected to eventually fly 50 missions a year-- basically that's WEEKLY shuttle flights. I know I've read in NASA studies and in other materials that at one time they even talked about flight rates of 70+ flights a year, which is a launch about every 5 days (nevermind that there was NO funding or payloads to support such flight rates, they were still used to "justify" certain assumptions about costs per flight and such and give ridiculously low estimates of mission costs...) NASA *was* under enormous pressure to increase flight rates of the shuttle to meet "program performance expectations" and the best they had ever been able to do was 9 flights the previous year (1985) IIRC, a feat they never again even came close to. Of course some of those flights had near misses-- including one SRB on the previous flight (at 53 degrees) that came back with a hole burned in it big enough to stick your head through, due to O-ring burn-through-- thankfully for that crew it happened on the side of the SRB opposite the External Tank, and basically right at SRB burnout.
At any rate, basically the same thing happened with Columbia, which is what is SO sad... it's not like it was something "out of the blue" or some elaborate chain of "unfortunate events" that was completely unforeseen and was a million-to-one shot... No, previous missions had come back with orbiter damage to various degrees due to foam strikes damaging the TPS heat shield, including one flight with a hole burned clean through the belly of the orbiter, thankfully in a non-essential area. Instead of "Oh, WOW! We got lucky-- we nearly lost an orbiter and crew! We better stop and fix this!" it was more like "Oh, yeah, that's happened before, all the way back to STS-1; it's no big deal, just a little extra maintenance after landing... if anything bad was gonna happen it would have already..." Until something bad DID happen.
Later! OL J R