Space Shuttle
Columbia exploded yesterday morning taking all seven astronauts with
it. The tragedy occurred during reentry as the shuttle was coming back
home. Although its reminiscent of the Challenger explosion in 1986, I
don't feel as sad as I did back then. I was younger then and it was the
first big national tragedy for me and I was more into space back then.
Now death is something that happens. It's unfortunate and you feel sad
for a bit and then you move on because you have to. Even after 9/11 I
was only depressed for a day -- well, it's hard to feel for people on
the other side of the country. If it had been in California it would
have been worse. In any case, space flight is dangerous and NASA does a
great job with the thousands of details. It only takes a few things
going wrong to pose a grave danger in space.
I don't think NASA will be as adversly affected this time. Maybe that's
the optimist in me. In the wake of the Challenger disaster and the
O-ring controversy (and I side with NASA officials, you can't stop for
every little problem or nothing will get done), it took them two years
before shuttle missions were resumed.
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Initial speculation was that the
underside of the left wing was damaged by debris on take-off. That
probably damaged enough of the tiles that make up the heat shield that
reentry allowed way too much heat into the wing and blew up a fuel
tank. People ask what could have been done to prevent this. It's the
underside of the shuttle and you'd have to do an untethered space walk
just to look at the damage, not that you could fix it with the
materials at hand.
You can wait on the shuttle or possible go to the International Space
Station and wait for another shuttle. The first requires prepping
another shuttle quickly which in itself is both dangerous and
expensive. Going to the ISS also has problems. And if it had turned out
that the damage was minimal and of no consequence (the shuttle takes
damage on every take-off) you just wasted millions of dollars.
Space is dangerous. If you send people up there some of them are going
to die. You have to weigh the risk with every decision and the people
at NASA have been doing this for decades. I'm not going to second guess
them. They thought it was the right decision at the time and it didn't
work out for the Columbia. Learn from it, move on, keep trying. That's
the lesson.
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