NASA Cuts Impact Shuttle Safety

adpowers writes, "According to this CNN story, NASA was forced to use many outside contractors for safety inspections because of a lower budget. Shuttle inspectors found numerous wiring defects like this one which caused a dangerous short-circuit on Columbia."

well, at least someone's doing something right

[Wigs]

It's good to hear that NASA is taking a more critical look at themselves. Over the past few years NASA has definately come under more scrutiny, mostly due to failures. In my opinion, this is definately a good thing.

As more press (be it good or bad) is generated, I think NASA realizes that they are being watched closely. I've talked with people who work with NASA/USA and from what I heard, they never payed as much attention to all the little things. Actually they did, they just didn't see the need to do anything about them.

When things aren't as they should be, the engineers are called in. They give the people in charge a descision on the effects of the problem. Nine times out of ten this will be something that isn't critical. Well, lately more managers are starting to act like politicians.(Yes, you know what I mean.) They've started to put less trust in their engineers opinions and more into their own fears of what could happen to their careers if something should happen.

I don't know about anyone else, but I remember what happened the last time they disregarded an engineers thoughts. (Hint: Challenger) Now obviously the recent descisions aren't nearly as drastic. I just wonder how much more might possibly get done if they just put their trust in the people who actually know what they are doing.

Wigs
--We're not making the same mistakes twice. No, we're making all new ones.

Re:Bare Wires?

[tesserae]

Shouldn't it be possible to make an insulation that would interact with the wire (as a system), so you could run test-pulses down lengths of wire, that would cause different signals if part of the wire was exposed?

Ah... yeah, that would be possible. One way to do it would be to measure the associated capacitance between the core wire and a conductive sheath that's insulated from it. Practical is a different matter... do you have any idea how many miles of wire there are in the shuttle? And how much that little added mass would reduce the payload of the Shuttle (hint: they started leaving the paint off the External Tank, because it saved them something like 6000 pounds!).

Not to mention the complexity of the testing -- I suspect that you'd seriously decrease the turnaround cycle for launches, if you insisted that each piece of wire in the Shuttle be tested between flights... remember, there isn't anything on that bird that's not fly-by-wire! Everything is electrically-controlled. And you'd have to know the precise length of each wire on each vehicle, because a short difference between supposedly-equivalent wires might show up as a small (but potentially significant) insulation fault... or it might mask one.

One of the reasons why this isn't an issue with commercial aircraft is that they have much less wiring than the Shuttle; another reason is that they are built to be refueled and reflown, not broken down and rebuilt between flights.

I think it's easier to solve the problem in the original engineering, rather than to try to come up with some nifty (and expensive!) new technology to cope with the less-than-inspired engineering.

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