[ale] OT: Space Shuttle Columbia

[attriel]

>     -Kalwana made _several_ mistakes while she was on space missions (I
> don't have links; but if you'd like for me to provide them for
> quantification, I will)

Yah.  Stupid indian people.  always messing up things that HAVE NO
RELATION TO A DAMNED THING INVOLVED IN LANDING!!!

She probably knew people with H1-B's, too.

(please, note the DRIPPING SARCASM before you start ranting and raving at
my "anti-indian prejudice" folks)

>     -NASA laid of _5_ (not 1 or 2 - five) Safety Administrators within
> the past 2 years
>     -1 NASA _official_ resigned from NASA in protest of the "Faster,
> better, cheaper" philosophy and decreasing budget

I'll grant these two.  There's no indication/proof that the former would
have made a difference, and it's not really sure that the latter would
have either.  But I'll posit that they are concerns.

>>B/c the EVA suit is expensive, they weren't using it, and thus there
>> was no point in sending it up?  It's also heavy, which makes it stupid
>> to send up if they're not using it?
>
> Case in _safety_ point.  There should be a threshold for which safety
> concerns (IE: weight) is valued higher than the highest "satellite
> Television" bidder.  You don't have to be a rocket-scientist (no pun

There is.  On this mission, however, they probably saw no reason to send
up a couple of heavy EVA sets in order to run scientific experiments that
were never going EVA.  They did cost & risk assessment, and presumably saw
no need for them.  Not everyone in the government is out to skim cash,
after all.  Some of the people at NASA?  They actually CARE about the
astronauts that were lost :o

>>Then all the armchair "space experts who know more than NASA" would be
>> complaining about them doing a repair that wasn't 100% necessary b/c
>> maybe they coulda made it otherwise :o
>
> Any "armchair" person can tell you that there exists a certain
> cost/benefit ratio to anything worth doing.  In this case, the safety

Yeah.  But most of them don't have access to NASA's risk/gain analysis
portfolios, yaknow?  And there's still no proof that this wasn't a freak
accident where something JUST.  WENT.  WRONG.

> such, I challenge you to sit on your high-horse (as defined by your

yeah.  me and my high-horse of "Let NASA do their jobs and quit telling
them that you know better than they do."  Silly me, thinking that people
who do linux stuff all the time might not be automatically more qualified
to analyze space craft faults better than people who analyze space craft
faults for a living.

>>I think "any other way" meant "they still have to come in through the
>> atmosphere and build up a couple hundred degrees of heat which is
>> probably what caused it to break this time."
>
> I can think of 3 Astronauts that "beat the odds" by coming through the
> atmosphere prematurely and in a "hap-hazzard" fashion:  the Astronauts
> of the Apollo-13 mission.

I'll grant you that.  I don't remember if A-13 had tile damage, but they
had enough other problems :(

OTOH, they had like a 5% chance of making it through the atmosphere alive.
 Pretty much no one /really/ expected them to survive that trip after
things started going wrong.  They got lucky.




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