Re: NASA HONORS LEGENDARY ASTRONAUT VANCE BRAND



Jim Oberg wrote:

Two subsequent space stations were launched but crashed to Earth, and Leonov had trained to command them both.

Actually one crashed to earth, the other blew up or spun itself to pieces in orbit

It can even be argued that the most important lessons learned were harmful. On Shuttle-Mir, NASA watched space crews dodge death on almost a monthly basis and may have subconsciously absorbed the lesson that since nobody had actually died, you could get sloppy with safety reviews and it wouldn't ever bite you.

We'd learned that way pre-Shuttle/Mir. Our Shuttle crews were also able to "dodge death on almost a monthly basis" due to the defective field joints on the SRBs and the shedding foam on the ET. And we are way ahead of Russia in space fatalities at 14 to 4 respectively.
As for life threatening situations on Mir, they had the fire, a near collision with a Progress, an actual collision with another Progress, The Soyuz thermal blanket shedding, and the big glycol leak. They had a lot of trouble with the orientation system and the air recycling system, but if worst came to worst, they could have always abandoned the station via the Soyuz, so those weren't life threatening.

They should have known better-and for most of its glorious history, NASA did know better-but the gradual degradation of NASA's "safety culture" that led to the Columbia disaster was developing during the same years as Shuttle-Mir missions were flying. Dodge enough bullets (as the crew of Mir did in those days), they may have figured, and it proves you're bulletproof forever.



No, the Rogers Commission pointed out that the failed safety culture had pretty much arrived around the time the Shuttle entered service, and warned that NASA had to get its act together or something like that would happen again. They didn't, and it did.
This is an interesting article, but it's a somewhat creative re-reading of history IMHO. The Russians had sloppy safety standards and a lot of close calls due to defective equipment and faulty operating procedures but at least they had an escape system on the Soyuz, unlike our Shuttle.

As far as "not speaking about politics", that may be an acceptable rule in the narrow theater of spacecraft operations, but it is not a technique that can be generalized to apply to international partnerships as a whole. There, national policy requires a relationship with moral law as well as amoral "realpolitik". There are plenty of regimes that the US simply would not partner with in the 1980s and 1990s, and for similar reasons, will not partner with today.



After the ISS debacle, I'm fairly sure we won't be getting too cozy with Russia for some time to come.
Assuming we had gone it alone and built the Freedom station, I still think we would be trying to figure out what exactly to do with it as the whole thing was a reaction by Reagan to the Russians launching Mir, rather than a carefully thought-out and logical program. It certainly gave the Shuttle something to do after the dropping of its military and commercial missions, but what exactly it itself was supposed to do once built was always an open question.

Pat


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