Attached to tragedy: Tracing Challenger “Remove Before Flight” tags
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Those remains from Challenger being stored. Anyone see or hear any plans for their permanent future burial...some kind of a memorial?
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Genuinely cool story, and yes, they deserve not to be handed out willy-nilly.
I'm wondering if the initial seller actually knew what they were selling.
I'm wondering if the initial seller actually knew what they were selling.
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To be clear, Robert's intent is to give these tags to museums, not profit from them. However, before displaying them, curators would like to have their full story.
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And there's probably not a better custodian in the mean time than Pearlman. A true stroke of luck.
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For all intents and purposes they are buried. They're safe where they're at, and there's no need to move them. A decommissioned missile silo is as good a burial vault as you'll ever get.
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The handwritten note on the left tag looks like a date to me - 01 Aug 85 or 07 Aug 85, maybe?
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It is such an extremely NASA thing to do to mark items so mundane and interchangeable as remove-before-flight tags with individually traceable serial numbers. Not a complaint or a criticism--you can establish that provenance at exactly one point in history. In the distant future, if anyone should ever want to trace anything back, even if you can't imagine at this moment why they should want to do that, you have exactly one shot. As we see here.
It's hard for me to imagine any deeper specifics being unearthed by running this article, but it's worth the old college try, and good on Pearlman and Ars for making the attempt.
It's hard for me to imagine any deeper specifics being unearthed by running this article, but it's worth the old college try, and good on Pearlman and Ars for making the attempt.
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It has to be one of the quality control check points … you know you placed, say, 56 tags for a specific mission. After removal, you can check that all the 56 tags for that mission have been properly removed.
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Uniquely marking items can be important. Imagine not knowing 100% for sure that all of the covers/tags were removed when the tank was mated to the boosters and the orbiter. By being serialized, and keeping meticulous records of which tags are in which locations at tank departure from the manufacturing facility, you can cross check that all tags are removed during stacking by confirming the serial numbers of all the tags removed against the list of what was installed.
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As an intern I worked with some leading sealing engineering reaearchers who were called in to do forensic analysis on the o ring seal described in the article. One of those folks provided me with a summarized report of the completed investigation into the tragedy.
Challenger has always stood out to me a sad demonstration of the Swiss cheese methodology of accident creation. So many ways it could have been avoided.
Absolutely informed my decisions in my own career. I sit here at the other end of 30 years grateful for an influence that meant I was never in a position to call someone’s family member to tell them their loved one wouldn’t be coming home.
Thanks to everyone at FSTU for showing me the true path.
Challenger has always stood out to me a sad demonstration of the Swiss cheese methodology of accident creation. So many ways it could have been avoided.
Absolutely informed my decisions in my own career. I sit here at the other end of 30 years grateful for an influence that meant I was never in a position to call someone’s family member to tell them their loved one wouldn’t be coming home.
Thanks to everyone at FSTU for showing me the true path.
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Similar tags are used on military aircraft and I am pleased that there have never been any incidents involving personnel removing just the tags themselves, rather than the tag plus whatever it is attached to. I suspect it has happened but someone else caught the problem before it became incident-level.
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These kind of service tag-out devices are used all across aviation and much of the tracking and serialized data of how many, where installed, when installed, when removed and cross checked, go along with the methods of flight certification. This is also why every bit of an aircraft is serialized and tracked, not only for total flight hours before replacement but also for possible identification in an incident and failure analysis after the fact.
That NASA came from the roots of test pilots doing Really Dangerous Things With Unproven Things... It fits that they would continue being fanatical about data collection and triple-checking everything at every step of the process. Leave us not forget the lessons they learned from the Apollo 1 fire and the Apollo 13 incident, and all the mission glitches in between and since. They track EVERYTHING so that the extreme dangers can be minimized wherever possible.
That NASA came from the roots of test pilots doing Really Dangerous Things With Unproven Things... It fits that they would continue being fanatical about data collection and triple-checking everything at every step of the process. Leave us not forget the lessons they learned from the Apollo 1 fire and the Apollo 13 incident, and all the mission glitches in between and since. They track EVERYTHING so that the extreme dangers can be minimized wherever possible.
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And as mentioned above, why serial numbers are important. In the article, NASA had crews that would have done a final sweep for the tags which increases the likelyhood of it being caught. Mark each site completed on a clipboard also increases the likelyhood of it being checked. Lot harder to hand wave that it was done when there's proof (apart from straight out lying).
It's why I love names. Even serial numbers are something.
Once something has a mark with intention, it's a lot harder to ignore it or simply not care.
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There are many of us haunting these learned comments, I'd expect.
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Maybe there's a better way to point this out, but the caption in the last image says "Return Before Flight" instead of "Remove Before Flight."
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Pretty unlikely they be moved. Unlike Columbia's remains, Challenger's aren't really stored, they were just dumped in the missile silos and sealed. My understanding is that without maintenance, the silos have almost certainly been flooded for decades, so the wreckage would be in poor shape (beyond already being wreckage). Would there be any point to cracking the silos open and moving the wreckage at this point? There are already memorials at Arlington and KSC (and probably elsewhere), and of course the astronauts have their graves, and would moving the shuttle debris to one of those add anything? Is degraded wreckage appealing or appropriate for a museum?
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That was always a meme on slashdot: Don't wake up the low digit ID users.
(I myself only have mid 7 digit slashdot ID)
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I suspect that Scott "Shuttleman" Phillips would be able to answer Robert's questions. Interestingly enough, Robert wrote one of the quotes on the back of Scott's book "Remove before flight" which talks about Scott's experiences working on the Shuttle's external tank.
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robert.walter
Ars Praefectus
Not long after this happened, Roger Boisjoly** delivered a lecture at my engineering school. His lessons coming from the Challenger Disaster have informed my behavior and ethical orientation throughout my career.
**NASA and Morton Thiokol management to their eternal damnation ignored and then screwed him.
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I was told by people who checked out some of them that went up for sale in the 60s & 70s that a significant number of them had water leakage problems. (The older ones that had propellant leakage problems probably weren't offered for-sale as surplus...)
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And then compounding that screwing over, the engineers got given the drive-by retrospective treatment by Edward Tufte in his book for not presenting their data in the 'right way', and therefore should be held morally responsible for the incident as well, ten years after the fact.
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I have been roused from my slumber. But this is seriously a cool find.
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well, I have a mid 6-digit number (begins with 5).
Seriously though, it's been a looong time since I visited there. Servers were getting seriously slow due to the mind-numbing part of the traffic.
EDIT: There's a reason that "Slash-Dotted" and "Barbra Streisand Effect" have common issues.
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Archaeologists have some pretty amazing ways to read writing which has degraded over time, writing on rolled materials that can't safely be unrolled, etc. Perhaps something along those lines would be able to read the handwriting on the tags?
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Give the remains to Houston to meet the requirements of Ted Cruz' 'steal a shuttle' bill?
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They should have removed all astronauts before flight. The space shuttle was the worst space vehicle ever flown, resulting in the deaths of 14 astronauts
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