9/28/2023 0 Comments Space shuttle columbia wiki![]() How can we do everything better, faster, cheaper, without compromising safety?" This attitude threatened the success of "If it's not safe, say so." ![]() In a speech to his employees during his first year, Goldin challenged them by asking, "Tell us how we can implement our missions in a more cost-effective manner. Pressure from the federal government on NASA to cut costs pushed Goldin to introduce a new culture. He held this position until November of 2001, and NASA underwent many significant changes during his tenure. Goldin, NASA administratorįor many years before the Columbia disaster, NASA operated under the safety slogan of "If it's not safe, say so." In April of 1992, Dan Goldin was appointed as the chief Administrator of NASA. The combined effects of complexity and turpitude resulted in a dire situation for the mission. In the years prior to this flight, NASA leadership began stressing efficiency over safety in what became an deterioration of the initial emphases placed on safety and health. During the flight, engineers’ and managers’ opinions of the consequences of the tile damage varied widely, and this led to confusion and an obfuscation of the complexity of the problem. Uncertainty and failed communication plagued the Columbia mission. Thus, the team was left only with a large amount of uncertainty in their original models and experiential learning from previous shuttle missions. The team was not granted these images after three successive tries. In the end, the engineers determined that high resolution imaging from the Department of Defense would be helpful and necessary in making any conclusive decisions on the safety of the mission. ![]() The assumptions in this analysis, as well as the risk or uncertainty associated with the outcomes of the analyses, were not made public within NASA, and no effort was made to obtain those estimates. Nonetheless, the model predicted complete tile penetration, but the engineers discounted these results based on their previous knowledge of tile damage. To conduct this analysis, engineers used a model to identify tile penetration depth after impact it was later found that this model was not appropriate for use in this context. The Debris Assessment Team, headed by Rodney Rocha, spent several days watching the video evidence of the impact and performing case analysis in order to determine the potential consequences of the debris strike. This uncertainty caused the Debris Assessment Team, the group responsible for analyzing impact damage on the shuttle, and Mission Control to make improper judgments on the safety of the flight. During the remainder of the flight, engineers and managers at NASA investigated the problem but were not completely informed of the extent of damage. Foreign object damage and tile damage were very common in previous missions, but the extent of this tile damage was posthumously determined to be unprecedented. Approximately sixty seconds after liftoff, a piece of foam insulation from the External Tank struck the high-strength thermal tile on the leading edge of the left shuttle wing, creating a large gash in the tile surface. Like the Challenger shuttle disaster before it, the Columbia space shuttle incident was caused by a seemingly insignificant technological flaw that proved to be extremely consequential for the seven passengers aboard the shuttle during the return flight to Earth. Technological Challenges and Uncertainty ![]() 1 Technological Challenges and Uncertainty.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |