Word: columbias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ordered to get to the bottom of things, essentially recommended that nothing change. No NASA manager was fired; no safety systems were added to the solid rocket boosters whose explosion destroyed Challenger; no escape-capsule system was added to get astronauts out in a calamity, which might have helped Columbia. In return for failure, the shuttle program got a big budget increase. Post-Challenger "reforms" were left up to the very old-boy network that had created the problem in the first place and that benefited from continuing high costs...
WHAT IS NEXT FOR AMERICA IN SPACE? An outsider commission is needed to investigate the Columbia accident--and must report to the President, not Congress, since Congress has shown itself unable to think about anything but pork barrel when it comes to space programs...
...last words transmitted from Challenger were in the valiant vow: "We are go at throttle up!" This meant the crew was about to apply maximum thrust, which turned out to be a fatal act. In the coming days, we will learn what the last words from Columbia were. Perhaps they too will reflect the valor and optimism shown by astronauts of all nations. It is time NASA and the congressional committees that supervise the agency demonstrated a tiny percentage of the bravery shown by the men and women who fly to space--by canceling the money-driven shuttle program...
...name our shuttles for our aspirations--Atlantis, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavour--the risks built into the very idea. Columbia, the fleet's pioneer, was named after an old Boston sloop that was the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe, carrying a cargo of otter skins to China. Any risk much repeated can become routine, and so it was for shuttle flights, except when they become tragic. That's when we are reminded that knowledge doesn't come easy and that many consequences are unintended, especially when we set off on an adventure...
...much has to work so perfectly and with such precise timing that we should expect them to fail catastrophically every 100 missions or so. That's why NASA must be America's most optimistic government agency, that it can keep muscling forward in the face of such odds. Columbia was the 88th mission since the Challenger was lost in January 1986--one flight lost to the cold, one perhaps to the heat...