Space engineers jettison cargo8/5/2023 It seems obvious to me that you'd want to burn through a few test hulls characterizing the fatigue limits and verifying they are at least consistent hull-to-hull with a deterministic failure point you can plan for retiring before approaching. No, cyclic stresses are a different animal altogether.īut considering it's just a matter of attaching ballast to sink it, dropping ballast to raise it, there's nothing preventing cyclic testing vs. > Although, couldn't they just leave it at the bottom for a month and see if it implodes? They were denying any risk at all, asserting that their real-time monitoring procedures would catch any failures before they became critical. With everything we now know, there is no way in hell that OceanGate had any level of risk calculation. NASA decided that was an acceptable level of risk for their mission profile and went ahead (it would have been way safer if the air force hadn't put insane mission profiles on it) Third, NASA engineers actually quantified the risk all the way back in the design stage and had it at ~2%, remarkably accurate in retrospect. Companies shouldn't be able to hide behind liability wavers (well, not for a ~2% risk and absolutely not for a 20% risk) as even with a waver explictly stating death is an option, they will under estimate it. Consumers have an expectation that if a company is offering a service to the general public, that service will meet a minimum level of safety. I'm very much of the opinion that the second you start accepting paying passengers, the safety standards should massively go up. Second, the space shuttle never carried any paying passengers. That would put the failure rate for dives to this depth closer to 20%. I'm finding it really hard to find any solid numbers, but I've only found reference to only 3 or 4 previous dives to the Titanic, a test dive and a few dives to much shallower depths. I have no doubt you would have had 100 or more volunteers among the past and present astronaut corps to fly it though.įirst, it did way less than 50 dives. I get chills even thinking about that kind of mission, but the shuttle was obviously a temperamental vehicle, and if NASA had cut the normal months of prep time into a handful of weeks, who knows what could have gone wrong with that launch. The most glorious plan would have been putting the Columbia crew on a minimal sustenance/activity schedule right away and then rushing the next orbiter scheduled to fly (Atlantis, I think it was) into orbit on a rescue mission. One plan would have been to send the Columbia crew on a spacewalk to try to fashion whatever kind of shield they could jerry-rig to cover the ceramic tiles - like bags of frozen water. * There were a handful of high-risk options that in all probability would have resulted in one or more dead astronauts. As I recall, they modified the reentry procedure somewhat to possibly reduce stress on the affected wing. With Columbia, Mission Control knew there was a potential issue pretty much as soon as the shuttle reached orbit, but because there was basically nothing* that could be done about it, they essentially were going to not worry the crew too much about it and hope for the best. So to return back to your point, I’d rather take a shuttle after a few dozen flights than get inside a Titan II after a few dozen dives. These were not all members of the Explorers Club - a former head writer for the Simpsons went on a dive, for goodness’ sake. They recklessly sold tickets to fund their experimental craft, inviting people aboard who were definitely not made fully aware of just how flawed the design was up front. They foolishly thought that strain gauges would detect issues well in advance of failure, while completely ignoring how immediately and catastrophically composite structures are known to fail. OceanGate full on admitted that its carbon fiber hull, a major red flag component at the center of its design, was highly experimental and did not know exactly when it would fail. They were both devils hiding in the details, neither one the result of reckless hubris. Unlike Titan, neither one of these failures were due to the inevitable cyclic wear of the primary pressure vessel. The other loss of crew was caused by a genuine oversight in the design of the system, in that the orbiter was always susceptible to strikes from insulating foam falling from the external tank. If that requirement was honored, the failure rate could have been halved. One of the shuttle missions that resulted in loss of crew was caused by operating the vehicle outside of the rated temperature envelope (for the SSB O-rings).
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