Tag Archives: NASA memories

Challenges of Space Exploration: NASA as a Government Bureaucracy

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Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

On January 28, 1986, the U.S.A. experienced a tragedy that has since faded into history. If you weren’t yet born at that time, you may not have even heard of it. I remember talking about the space shuttle to a classroom full of junior high students in the late 90s where I was blindsided by a young man who asked whether one had ever blown up. That something indelibly imprinted on my memory could be unknown to someone, even an adolescent, was incredible. Until I realized the simple fact that the kid hadn’t been born yet.

Wow. To me it felt as if it had occurred the day before.

I was a physics major in college with aspirations to work in the aerospace industry. The day we lost the space shuttle, Challenger, for me was a very bad day. Ironically, that’s exactly what NASA calls such an event, a “bad day.” Well, no shit.

Sorry, I usually avoid naughty words in my blogs, but in that context my expansive vocabulary entirely fails me. Somehow nothing defines NASA’s understatement of tragedy as well as an expletive. And much of why I feel that way is because, subsequent to the Challenger accident, I went to work at NASA as a contractor, ultimately winding up in their Safety Division, which meant I was privy to all sorts of dirty little secrets.

When I arrived at Johnson Space Center in Houston in April 1988, the agency was deep into what they referred to as “return to flight”; RTF in NASAspeak, given their propensity for acronyms. RTF comprised the time while they finished investigating the cause and put together design fixes to avoid a similar occurrence in the future, eventually getting back to what NASA did, i.e., send men and women into space. It’s interesting to consider that we didn’t even refer to it as Challenger; it was 51-L, the ill-fated flight’s official designation, which was less emotionally charged than calling it by name.

When I went to work in the Safety Division at Johnson Space Center in 1990, “The Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident” was required reading. This well-written document covered the technical details in a way that even my teen-aged son at the time could understand. I remember him reading it in the backseat of the car during a road trip. That same copy still resides on a shelf in my home office, bristling with numerous sticky notes and highlights marking the parts that struck me the most. But those are but tips of the proverbial iceberg.

51Lexplosion2As anyone who’s actually familiar with the accident knows, its official cause related to the o-rings in the solid rocket booster which didn’t seal, allowing hot gasses to strike and penetrate the external fuel tank, which resulted in a deadly explosion. A major contributor to o-ring failure was the fact the launch took place when the temperature at Cape Canaveral in Florida was a mere 28 degrees F. This had never before been attempted, Floridian temperatures usually far above that range, even in January. This factor was illustrated dramatically by physicist Richard P. Feynman, a member of the investigation committee, by dropping an o-ring in a glass of ice water to demonstrate how they became brittle and incapable of performing their function at low temperatures.

51Licicles

I lived in Northern Utah at the time of the accident, the manufacturer of the solid rocket boosters (a.k.a. SRBs), Morton Thiokol, located a few dozen miles away. Anyone who lives in such a climate is more than aware of the effects of cold weather. As I recall, the SRBs had never been tested in that temperature range, either.

On the surface, it appears that this tragic accident that claimed the lives of seven astronauts, including teacher Christa McAuliffe, took everyone by surprise. But in reality, as I learned working in Safety for nearly 20 years, it was processes and politics every bit as much as faulty design. They knew; they just ignored it. The true cause was as elusive as missing shuttle pieces still on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. [NOTE:–If you’re interested in more sordid details about the Dark Side of NASA, I recommend “Challenger: A Major Malfunction” by Malcolm McConnell or “Prescription for Disaster” by Joseph Trento.]

Anything that can cause a problem, either critical or catastrophic, is documented on a Hazard Report, with o-ring leakage no exception. Hazard Reports (HRs) contain causes along with controls, though some hazards are simply classified as an “accepted risk” if there’s nothing that can be done to prevent them. Space flight is risky and there are some things you simply can’t avoid or control; bird strikes and meteorites come to mind.

51LMalfunctionO-ring failure was a catastrophic hazard and documented as such. That the design was faulty was likewise known. Engineers had seen leakage on previous flights. Let that sink in for a moment. O-ring failure had happened before. However, earlier instances had not caused an accident. This resulted in a very dangerous and ultimately fatal thought pattern that led them to believe that perhaps it wasn’t as serious as they thought. Previous failures had been investigated, the leakage referred to as “blow-by” and eventually accepted as not a safety issue.

How wrong they were. In reality, they were playing Russian Roulette. Just because they got away with it a few times did not mean it wasn’t a hazard, only that they’d dodged a bullet. A Thiokol engineer named Roger Boisjoly had written a memo before the accident pointing out the seriousness of the problem. It was essentially ignored, most likely for budget and scheduling reasons. Unfortunately, his sordid prophecy of impending disaster was fulfilled almost exactly six months later. Later, to cover their sins, Morton Thiokol and NASA decimated Mr. Boisjoly, typical behavior employed to discredit whistleblowers.

I’d like to point out that for many accidents the public sees Safety as the culprit. Wasn’t it safety’s job to prevent such a horrific occurrence? Yes, it certainly was. And I must say that we did everything possible to assure safety of flight. We were the ones who made sure all risks and hazards were properly controlled and documented. This more refined process, however, was instituted after and because of the Challenger accident. The full rigor of the safety process recommended post 51L by the Presidential Commission was never fully instituted, however. A plethora of subsequent reorgs were supposed to make safety more of a priority, yet somehow eroded, as proven by the Columbia disaster 17 years later. An accident which has a strikingly similar administrative postmortem.

If you remember the movie, “Deep Impact,” you might recall the line where the female member of the crew on that fictitious shuttle flight, charged with protecting our planet from a collision with an approaching asteroid, noted that if they died in service to their country that all they’d probably get was a high school named after them, which is more truth than poetry. So let’s take a moment to remember those seven brave individuals by name who died so needlessly 30 years ago. They represented different genders, races and ethnicities, some professional astronauts, others not.

51LPatch

Francis R. (Dick) Scobee (Commander)

Michael John Smith (Pilot)

Ronald Erwin McNair (Mission Specialist)

Ellison S. Onizuka (Mission Specialist)

Judith Arlene Resnik (Mission Specialist)

Christa McAuliffe (Payload Specialist & school teacher, winner of the “Teacher in Space” competition)

Gregory Bruce Jarvis (Payload Specialist & aerospace engineer, bumped to this flight by a U.S. Senator who took Greg’s original spot)

As they say, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And repeat it they did, within four days of being exactly 17 years later on February 1, 2003 when we lost Columbia.

Watch for more on that tragedy on the 13th anniversary of that disaster.

Challenges of Space Exploration: A NASA Insider’s View of “The Martian” (Movie Version)

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martiancover

[Spoiler Alert: This constitutes one massive spoiler if you haven’t already seen the movie. I comment on specific situations depicted onscreen based on my experience working as a NASA contractor for over 20 years. So if you’re even slower to see movies than I am, are planning to see it, and prefer to thoroughly enjoy the suspense, then bookmark this blog and read it later.]

First of all, I want to say I thoroughly enjoyed this movie which I finally saw over the holidays while visiting family. My intent here is not to criticize since I believe it was exceptionally well done. It employed a lot of fascinating details, ingenuity and great suspense throughout. Fortunately, Hollywood has come a long, long way depicting NASA-related movies since the movie, Armageddon, which I considered a complete debacle as far as the technical details were concerned.

I suppose being a physicist and geek who worked for NASA as a contractor from 1988 – 2009 are what drive me to pick at technical details, perhaps as a matter of ego to show my knowledge. Whatever it is, I can’t help it, and to me such details are interesting while most normal people would simply enjoy the movie for what it is and give me one of those looks that screams, “What’s your problem, Bozo?” I’ve mellowed on this a bit myself, but I still maintain that a certain level of scientific accuracy is important. But I’m a geek, so what do I know other than it was science fiction that inspired me to become a geek in the first place? Does it really matter if it’s factual? Probably not.

IDL TIFF file

Anyway, “The Martian” is based on the book of the same name by Andy Weir, whom you can learn more about on his Amazon Author page. There’s also an interesting forum on Amazon where various readers have commented on the technical accuracy of the story (or lack thereof), which of course appealed to my inner geek. Having seen and enjoyed the movie, I plan to read the book. I assume that the author did a lot of research putting this story together and can thus take credit for the fact the movie was realistic enough to be credible and even admired by someone like myself. Based on my experience, here are a few comments.

1. My first job with NASA was in the Life Sciences Division at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Part of their purview was the well-being of the astronauts. The majority of their experiments conducted on the space shuttle and International Space Station were directed primarily at how exposure to microgravity, increased radiation, close quarters and isolation affected an astronaut’s mind and body. Colonization of distant worlds such as Mars has been a topic of NASA research for many years, including what crops would grow and thrive in conditions different from Earth. Needless to say, being self-sufficient is the ultimate goal.

That said, I suspect that if we had an outpost on Mars that by that time we’d know enough about such things as potential crops that there would have been more for the story’s hero, Mark Watney, to work with besides potatoes which were intended to be consumed as food. I’m reasonably sure that part of the mission would entail planting a variety of things, perhaps for the benefit of the next crew.

Which brings me to my next comment, the length of the movie’s mission being 60 days.

journey_to_mars

2. It takes a long time to get to Mars, depending on the available propulsion technology, but let’s just say using currently known or at least acknowledged sources, it’s going to be around a year or more. I suppose for the very first mission to the Red Planet that a duration of two months is possible, but I suspect that it would be longer. I also suspect that the habitation module constructed would be one that would be designed to be permanent, part of an elaborate colonization plan and not a primitive throwaway. Given the sophistication of their space vehicle, Hermes, which even had sectors that rotated to create artificial gravity, it’s more likely that part of that spacecraft would have constituted their living quarters and been left behind when their mission ended. This would have lightened the return load as well.

3. I thoroughly enjoyed the connections to previous Mars missions and how they provided resources for Mark to contact NASA. Whether that could actually be achieved I don’t know, but for me it was feasible and clever enough that I had no problem with it.  If you’re not at least partly awed by these previous accomplishments that comprise sending and then actually controlling a vehicle on another planet, then you simply don’t understand what it entails.

marsrover4. NASA has definitely been known to blow up rockets, not only in the early days of the initial space race with Russia to get to the Moon in the late 50s and 60s, but even more recently as many of you may recall with the Space Shuttle Challenger accident on January 28, 1986. Private rocket companies more recently are having a similar problem. Rocket fuel is highly volatile, systems complex, and problems are inevitable. Thus, when the rocket they put together in record time to send supplies blew up it wasn’t much of a stretch. Anyone who didn’t see that one coming hasn’t been paying attention to the space industry and its explosive history (pun intended).

But there’s more to it that that. Having worked in Safety and Mission Assurance for most of my years at JSC, I was privy to quite a few dirty little secrets. NASA makes every effort to identify every possible hazard and document them all in Hazard Reports. These go far beyond acknowledging the problem itself. Some are classified as Critical, i.e., could cause a problem but not a lethal one, while others are classified as Catastrophic, which entail loss of life and/or millions of dollars worth of equipment. Once hazards are identified, it’s mandatory to identify preventative controls. The severity of the consequences of failure determine how many controls need to be in place. Systems that can cause a catastrophic hazard are required to be three-fault tolerant, meaning three things need to fail before the worst case scenario can occur.

InSight in ATLO with back shell

The back shell of the InSight spacecraft is lowered onto the lander in a clean room at Lockheed Martin.

However, there are some systems that defy that level of safety via controls and are thus considered an accepted risk. For example, unless you’re a pilot you probably would never think of a “bird strike” as being in that category, but if a spacecraft on takeoff or landing strikes a bird, it can have dire consequences. Other risks are accepted for a variety of reasons, but it gets complicated so I’ll save further explanation for a future blog, such as some of those “dirty little secrets” that relate to the two space shuttle tragedies. [NOTE:–With the 30th anniversary of the Challenger accident coming up this month, you can watch for one soon.]

Back to the point of the rocket blowing up in the film, besides the inherent danger of propulsion systems in general, bypassed quality assurance inspections or those performed by over-worked technicians would increase the likelihood of problems, making that unfortunate event quite feasible.

5. The next safety-related situation would be the malfunction and subsequent explosion that destroyed Mark’s potato garden. Certainly he did some modifications beyond its original intent, but it’s still unlikely it would have been that fragile. Considering some of the nasty substances that go along on a space mission, explosions are always a possibility. This also refers back to the fact that I doubt their outpost would have been so makeshift in the first place. Mars’ thin atmosphere is not as efficient at destroying meteorites as Earth’s, plus the main asteroid belt lies between Mars and Jupiter, so they’re a bigger problem by proximity as well. I sincerely doubt that NASA would ever erect such a cheesy structure as part of a planetary outpost. This, of course, applies to the matter of the antenna being destroyed as well. Furthermore, as mentioned in the Amazon forum, the force of the Martian wind is lower, given the reduced atmospheric pressure compared to Earth’s.

6. Several of the means employed in the movie were theoretically feasible but unlikely, such as ditching the capsule nosecone and replacing it with canvas or blowing the Hermes module for some extra propulsion. A gravity assist is certainly a possibility since that technique is used routinely for interplanetary exploration missions.

mars1

7. Lastly, I’m really skeptical about Mission Control not telling the crew earlier that Mark was alive. That just doesn’t make sense to me. However, NASA employees, no matter what rank they happen to be, are human and subject to bad judgement calls and mistakes, so it’s certainly not impossible. Subsequently, such individuals tend to quietly disappear, probably reassigned to the USA equivalent of Siberia.

In a situation like that in the movie, such a decision would undoubtedly be routed through the Astronaut Office and I suspect that the returning crew would be given that information posthaste. It’s important to know that communications between Mission Control and a manned craft are channeled through  a single source known as the Capcom, short for “capsule communicator”, a vestige derived from the early days of the space program.  This individual is traditionally an astronaut.  This person would undoubtedly be aware of the situation and thus wield considerable influence.

Not distracting the returning crew from their mission simply wasn’t sufficient rationale. Astronauts are human, too, and certainly have emotions which can drive them to do some crazy things in their private lives, but given the story’s circumstances and my experience at NASA, I really believe they’d be treated as the professionals they are and given all available information. They’d be far beyond pissed off to find out they’d been kept out of such an important loop.  Whether they’d go “rogue” or not is a possibility but doubtful without full ground support.  Spacecraft systems are beyond complex with each one having a team of experts who would assist with calculations for possible solutions.

Consider, as stated in the end of the movie credits, that it took 15,000 people to produce that movie.  Far more than that support the space program with each system component typically having a dozen or more engineers that know it inside out.  Astronauts couldn’t possibly have the necessary knowledge to make technical decisions that deviate from their training for a specific mission.

If you’re still with me at this point, thanks for listening. I really loved this movie, technical and operational flaws notwithstanding, because this is exactly the kind of film I love. My hope is that it inspires future generations, the ones who will someday walk on Mars, hopefully with a three-fault tolerant infrastructure as opposed to what astronaut Mark Watney had to deal with in “The Martian”.

You can pick up a DVD of the flick on Amazon here.

Mars Photos courtesy of NASA

 

 

RIP Space Shuttle Columbia: Picking Up the Pieces

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sts107patch

At 8:59:32 a.m. Columbia was approaching Dallas, Texas, at 200,700 feet and Mach 18.1. At the same time, another broken call, the final call from Columbia’s commander, came on the air-to-ground voice loop. —Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, p. 43

Some things you remember with your heart and some you remember with your head. Events with an emotional impact are timeless, their memory as clear as yesterday, while those random facts that are processed through your brain are more transient. For example, I can’t remember how to “divide and conquer” a differential equation but I can remember my relief at getting a 28% on a test in that class affectionately called “diffi-que” that turned out to be a “C” thanks to grading on the curve. I can’t remember the specifics of chemical covalent bonds but I can remember discovering a chunk of tartaric acid crystals in a quart of homemade grape juice that represented a major “Aha!” moment when they conformed perfectly to theory.

You have probably noticed that memories with an emotional component are vivid and often come back with all the feelings of the moment. This is because they are not only stored in your brain but also in your heart. Literally. Those of you who don’t believe that should read “The Heart’s Code” by heart surgeon, Paul Pearsall which recounts the remarkable experience of heart transplant patients who experienced it.

One memory stored in my heart is 1 February 2003, the day the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on entry over Texas skies. It was a Saturday so I wasn’t at work. That morning I was in my workout clothes vacuuming, which ironically kept me from hearing the phone the first few times someone tried to deliver the tragic news. Needless to say I was in shock and left immediately for my office, dressed worse than I would for a visit to Walmart and no makeup, which actually came in handy because tears were inevitably going to be shed that day.

sts107memory

I worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and lived only a mile or so away so it didn’t take long to get to my office. I was employed by a contractor and managed Payload Safety which assured that payloads flying on the shuttle complied with all NASA safety requirements. Payloads comprised everything from satellites to small self-contained experiments. Our involvement on that fateful day involved compiling a list of any toxic materials onboard any payloads that could be a risk to the initial recovery effort. The engineers who were responsible for that mission came into work to compile this information with the assistance of our outstanding administrative support staff, who were amongst the first to arrive at the office.

Only those responsible for payloads onboard were required to report to work, yet I am still touched as I recall those who came in regardless, simply because they felt that was where they were supposed to be, to see if there was anything they could do to help, and to mourn with those who shared their grief. Yes, this is definitely an emotional memory because I am tearing up as I write, seeing those dedicated individuals gathered in my office. I don’t know where all of them are today but I do know at this moment they are in my heart.

ColumbiaTribute

Since the space shuttle vehicle had broken up over a wide swath across Texas, they put together a major recovery effort to gather the debris. This was important to the investigation as well as for safety reasons because there were various dangerous substances associated with the shuttle. To quote the Columbia Accident Investigation Report, “From the start, NASA officials sought to make the public aware of the hazards posed by certain pieces of debris, as well as the importance of turning over all debris to the authorities. Columbia carried highly toxic propellants that maneuvered the Orbiter in space and during early stages of re-entry. These propellants and other gases and liquids were stored in pressurized tanks and cylinders that posed a danger to people who might approach Orbiter debris.” Besides that there were several explosive devices known as pyros used for such things as deploying drogue chutes upon landing.

The debris field stretched from south of Fort Worth, Texas to Fort Polk, Louisiana and covered over two thousand square miles. Base camps were set up in Corsicana, Palestine, Nacogdoches and Hemphill, Texas where search efforts were coordinated. Something drove me to join this effort, even though at 55 I was no spring chicken but in reasonably good physical shape. NASA employees were needed in the field to identify debris. I volunteered and was deployed to the Hemphill camp which operated primarily out of the Sabine County Veterans of Foreign Wars Post Number 10351 facility.

I was a member of one of several twenty-man teams that walked a grid pattern across the debris path. Most of the members were Forest Service workers who had little to do in the spring. Throughout this effort 10,630 Forest Service personnel were involved in both ground search efforts and logistics. The majority were Native Americans known as “smoke jumpers” who would bail out of helicopters to fight fires in the southwest. You can see some of them in the photo below, lined up to get their duds for the following day.  These were some of the most wonderful people I ever met in my life. They could also spot a copperhead sunning itself on a rock from fifty yards. Fortunately most of those critters were still in hibernation and plant life such as poison ivy was barely beginning to emerge from its winter sleep.

sts107recoverycrew

The ground we covered was primarily brush and thickets. We could not use machetes, only walking sticks to avoid giving the entire area an unsightly crew-cut, if you will. We dressed in U.S. Forest Service clothing suited for resisting moisture and hostile plant life such as thorns. Of course boots were part of the garb and it was a bit of a ritual each day to use duct tape to seal your pants to your boots to keep unwanted stickers or critters out. Hardhats and goggles were a required part of our fashion statement. We walked in a straight line regardless of what might be in our way and one time this took me into a tangle of brambles such that I didn’t know how I would get out. I actually got claustrophobic in this vicious web of briars. Fortunately, one of my team members came to my rescue and opened up an escape route.

We took an hour lunch break each day and for many it was nap time, including myself. That was the only time in my life when I could lay down on the bare ground, head on my forty-pound backpack, and sleep like a baby. I awoke one time to see three of my teammates trying to figure out how to wake me up. Maybe they thought I was dead. There were times I thought that maybe I was.

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I was one of the lucky ones, I had a hotel room while many stayed in a tent city set-up at the VFW facility. I remember one of many long days which started at 6 a.m. and ended about 7 p.m. with twenty miles of walking inbetween after which I went back to my room to shower up and then go find something to eat. Breakfast and lunch were provided but we were on our own for dinner. This wasn’t easy in a tiny Texas town where there was only one restaurant that was open after seven or eight o’clock. I sat at a table and a small group came in a bit later that I recognized from my team and so I smiled and nodded at them. In return I got a trio of blank looks. Too tired to pursue it at the moment, the next day I asked them about it and they laughed and said they didn’t recognize me without my hardhat, shooting glasses, boots and classy Forest Service yellow shirt and green pants.

toledobendres

The experience was physically, mentally and emotionally demanding. My group found items that ranged from an intact spherical oxygen tank about six feet in diameter to smaller bits of composite structure. One of the massive shuttle main engines fell into nearby Toledo Bend Reservoir (shown above) while the other landed on a golf course in Louisiana, creating a new unexplained water hazard which was eventually investigated to reveal its cause. There was one day when just about everything we found was a personal item of the crew. I tear up again as I remember logging a recovered food bag which had Astronaut Laurel Clark’s name on it.

shuttlemourning

Periodically we were assigned to the base camp to sort smaller debris and determine for certain whether it was shuttle related or simply junk. A teammate reached into one of the huge black garbage bags filled with the previous day’s efforts and removed a baseball. When he held it out for me to see, I scowled and shook my head, thinking it didn’t belong. Then he turned it so I could see the back, which was singed black and partially melted from re-entry, apparently being flown for a Little League coach, crew family member or some other individual. Crew personal items such as that were returned directly to the astronaut office in Houston while everything else went back to Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

I could go on and on but this is probably long enough if your eyes haven’t already glazed over. Fortunately I kept a daily diary during that time which will aid me in my next writing project. When I get my science fiction books properly launched I’ll probably start writing my NASA memoirs of which there are many stories, not only about Hemphill but numerous others. Meanwhile, for today, 1 February 2015, while others celebrated Superbowl Sunday, I found myself wandering down Memory Lane, reliving an experience preserved within my heart that I’ll never forget.