STS-93 - How NASA nearly lost Columbia in 1999

[MartG]

How Shuttle launch STS-93 nearly went very wrong in 1999

http://waynehale.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/sts-93-w...

Scary reading, how something apparently minor could cause loss of a shuttle

[Eric Mc]

Very interesting. Shows how fragile the whole concept was.

[anonymous-user]

In this case though, the failure was not really "shuttle specific" more a case of "the more complex you make something, the more inter-dependability there is"!

I've done FMEA and created an inter-dependability matrix for an automotive engine control, which was complex enough, but what the same document looks like for a whole space craft, well, who knows!

[Eric Mc]

There is a strong argument to say that the Shuttle's systems were overly complex. The fact that there was no true abort procedures meant that the whole launch phase was massively complicated as they tried to stop any catastrophic failures going critical.

It looks like STS-93 had a whole heap of potentially catastrophic failures that were caught just in time - partly because the systems worked, partly because people did the right things and partly through luck.

[MrCarPark]

Very interesting, particularly the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2c_hEY19n4

Impressive that they remain so matter-of-fact about so many alarms popping up. Then they realise what has just happened. Scary stuff.

[Simpo Two]

Eric Mc said:

There is a strong argument to say that the Shuttle's systems were overly complex.

I think there is a general malaise these days that something complex must be better than something simple. You can probably blame our must-have added-value hype culture filtering upwards.

[Eric Mc]

As the Shuttle concept became more and more compromised as more tasks and capabilities were loaded into the design, it grew more and more complex. And, as I said, because there was no simple abort procedure that could save the crew if a catastrophic failure occurred, a huge amount of effort was put into having the ability to detect serious anomalies before they became critical.

By and large these checks worked, most of the time, but two Shuttles were lost and they came VERY close to losing others at various other occasions - as STS-93 demonstrates.

[rufusruffcutt]

Interesting read, thanks for posting the link Mart.