The Flawed Design That Led To The Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster | Spark

foreign [Music] Columbia Houston we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your last on the 1st of February 2003 space shuttle Columbia fell from the sky it was NASA's worst disaster for 17 years should flight sts-107 have launched at all can the origins of This Disaster be traced to the shuttle's original design is the space shuttle a human time bomb battle this is a story of how political decisions and design compromises may have cost the lives of 14 astronauts over two disasters when the shuttle was designed it had to cover a whole wide range of missions when you do that you don't ever do any one of them well pilot William McCool today's shuttle system is outmoded and costly it has also potentially lethal it's very clear to me we're going to lose other shuttles if things are continue as they've been going [Music] Seven astronauts into space few would have believed that they would never return my name is Scott Altman I was the mission commander of Colombia's previous Mission and am now part of the NASA team investigating the mishap the tape that follows is Flight Deck audio and video that was recorded by the crew of Columbia as they prepared for their planned landing at the Kennedy Space Center okay love take begins at approximately 7 35 a.m Central Time 17 minutes after the shuttle's deorbit burn completed the tape shows the crews going through nominal entry preparations dining their gloves fluid loading and checking suit pressure integrity the tape ends with the shuttle five minutes from crossing the coast of California four minutes prior to the first failure being observed on the ground and 10 minutes before the first failure message was enunciated to the crew less than five minutes later two observers in California it was clear that something had gone tragically wrong oh my God how you described it Chris look at the chunks coming off of it yeah what the heck is that I don't know but I seriously said space shuttle Columbia disintegrated into thousands of pieces as it fell to Earth killing all seven crew you can bet that no matter what the cause was we're going to leave no stone unturned throughout the shuttle system in our quest to return to flight return to flight safely foreign [Applause] we go beyond the technical failings of flight sts-107 and uncover the truth about compromises made in the shuttle design over three decades ago I think that's an interesting thing this one piece will make 52 layers watch on mobile devices or the big screen all for free no subscription required thank you in the early 80s the space shuttle system was widely hailed as the ultimate access to space two two one zero engines are now at 100 of rated power fact its design is flawed and that may have led to two disasters it's an awkward muddle of Civilian and Military requirements further confused by politicians and budgets and we have an award our fellow support flag is on it's a compromise that dates back to the height of the Cold War I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of Landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth in the 1960s America won the Space Race by getting to the Moon before the Soviet Union but it wasn't cheap with every flight NASA had to build a giant disposable Saturn V rocket hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment were thrown away every time a mission was launched NASA's dream was to build a reusable launch vehicle which would make space flight cheap and commonplace you can trace the beginning the origins of the Space Shuttle really at least until the 1950s when Verna Von Brown had this idea of a giant winged spacecraft that you could reuse you could fly it up in orbit Bring It Back Down clean it up check the tires and and launch it again but turning that Vision into reality was not easy NASA's original plan was for a small lightweight vehicle that would be flown into space on top of a fully reusable polished aircraft the shuttle would peel off into orbit as the winged fuel tank flew back down to earth NASA wanted to build the ultimate dream space vehicle but this is what they got a jumble of fuel tanks and Rockets with an airplane stuck on the side when NASA achieved the moon landing there were a lot of people within the agency who thought they were going to continue to get a lot of money to do great things the reality was that nobody in the political circles wanted to pay for this stuff [Music] the space shuttle is designed to carry the astronauts in the airplane-like Orbiter escape the Earth's gravity the orbit has to carry over half a million gallons of fuel in an enormous external tank the astronauts are only a few feet away from a reservoir of explosive rocket fuel even though it's burning one and a half tons of hydrogen and oxygen every second the Orbiter is still too heavy to blast off from the ground for extra lift two powerful Rockets are strapped to the side the solid rocket boosters like a firework once you've lit the blue touch paper there's no way to turn them off thank you liftoff is the most dangerous time to be on a rocket with so much explosive energy around things can go violently wrong this vehicle takes off on seven million pounds of thrust that that's functionally equivalent rough you know in round numbers to between 45 and 55 Boeing 747s stacked end to end with their engines running at Full Throttle from the first moment NASA launched humans into orbit the neutron Escape Route at liftoff was recognized as a top priority [Music] the early Germany capsules of the 1960s were fitted with ejector seats a tried and trusted method of escaping from a stricken vehicle so when Columbia blasted space Woods on the very first shuttle mission in 1981 NASA continued the tradition of Safety First the two-man crew had the benefit of ejector seats built into the cockpit [Music] start from America's first space shuttle and the shuttle has cleared the tower luckily they were never needed and never used [Music] but by the fifth shuttle launch ejector seats were removed for good [Music] for the first time in American space history Crews were being blasted into space with no way of escaping from a launch emergency once you get to a crew of seven as as NASA has been flying there are people down on the mid deck not just on the flight deck and so the amount of the vehicle that would have to be ejected is quite significant and uh a retrofit of an ejection system into the space shuttle would be a very costly and difficult technical undertaking the shuttle vehicle is not well designed to provide High degrees of safety for Crews you could take advantage of the shuttle rocket propulsion system and redesign a modular type of vehicle that could could carry humans in a separate compartment and those humans could be then carried away from the main propulsion system if for example you had some kind of accident not a new idea NASA had installed Escape systems before on the Mercury and Apollo missions the proof that they work is thanks to the Russians cosmonauts titoff and streckeloff were flung clear from an exploding rocket by their Sawyer's capsule in 1983. [Music] with no secure way of protecting their astronauts it would be another three years before NASA would first realize the human cost of the shuttle's imperfect design when NASA first proposed their plans for a space shuttle they were going to need money to get it off the ground this was the era of Richard Nixon at the height of the Cold War Nixon appeared to be a space cadet this was largely to let the fame of the astronauts rub off on him [Music] I have the privilege of speaking for so many and welcoming you back there's a popular myth that presidents can be space Buffs that they they love this stuff they think it's really neat and uh and they want to fund it and the reality is that that you would be very hard-pressed to find a president in American history who was really a space buff they support this endeavor because it serves a political need not because they think it's all that great after they left the moon for the last time NASA were Keen to push on with the next phase of space exploration but Nixon and his officials were more concerned with mushrooming spending budgets the problem was that NASA wanted to build a fully reusable vehicle but this plan was way too expensive and there was no way that the uh the White House was going to agree to fund this the only way NASA would get their shuttle was if they cooperated with the Department of Defense when the shuttle was first being conceived as the national program in the early 1970s NASA went out to every possible user including the dod asking them what kinds of payloads and missions would you like a shuttle quote a shuttle to do now there's also another community that you have to think about and that's the intelligence Community the people who build the Spy satellites [Applause] oh the CIA and the Air Force pushed for a large payload capacity big enough to house their 60-foot spy satellites but a large payload Bay meant a heavy vehicle and a heavy vehicle requires more power and fuel for liftoff what the shuttle is is a large quite heavy Aerospace vehicle that has to be launched into space and a small fraction of the total payload of what's launched at the space actually gets used in space a vehicle of this type is inherently inefficient you can't carry most of the weight into orbit and then bring it back down to earth there are ways of approaching launching things into space that would allow you to get much more payload to orbit with the same propulsive system this decision was made for social and political reasons of some kind that are beyond my knowledge NASA was also under pressure from Nixon's Office of Management and budget began a decreasing spiral of short-sighted cost-cutting measures [Music] one proposal suggested doing away with the reusable launch vehicle instead the system would use a disposable liquid fuel tank and two solid rocket boosters initially NASA dismissed the idea out of hand it might be cheaper in the first instance but it would add to the cost of each successive flight but when the Office of Management and budget heard of this design they insisted NASA accepted [Music] still skeptical NASA researched the failure rate of solid-fueled rockets and identified one potential weakness gas burning through the rubber o-ring seals at the joins between segments of the solid rocket boosters their fix was to use two sets of O-rings for safety but still it wasn't enough on a frosty January day in 1986 as Challenger was about to launch the O-rings were frozen stiff with the cold NASA's concerns were about to be tested the hard way foreign struts [Music] together in an instant the fuel tank is tank exploded [Applause] with Challenger the floor design of the space shuttle system had claimed its first seven victims NASA's worst fears had come true my controller is here looking very carefully at the situation obviously a major malfunction the NASA internal estimates for the solid rocket motors which is what failed in the in the Challenger situation was apparently one in one hundred thousand launches you would have a problem that's absurd I mean there's nothing in the experience we have with these kinds of Rocket Motors that would lead one to believe it's anything close to that reliable and with no means of escape the Challenger crew was trapped inside their cockpit the whole nose of the of the shuttle the Challenger flew further up on its Arc and then came back down during that two minutes of the rest of the flight the crew was still inside sitting in their seats they activated their personal air packs but they did not have pressure suits they did not have parachutes had the challenge crew had pressure suits and parachutes they had plenty of time to actually blow the hatches overhead overhead window and the side hatch and climb out and come down by Parachute since the challenge of disaster every shuttle astronaut flies equipped with a pressure suit and a parachute so they can bail out in an emergency NASA's problems with the shuttle continued in May 1995. the launch of Discovery had to be abandoned when woodpeckers pecked 200 holes into the foam coating on the fuel tank to scare them off NASA employed a Foghorn and six lifestyle's owls bought from the local Walmart the entire system on launch consists of two solid rocket boosters a large tank filled with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in order to keep that cool especially in Florida they need to put on a coating of insulation a couple inches thick on liftoff there is a lot of vibration and it's a rapid acceleration and what happens is some of that insulation May in fact break away from the external tank and fall and hit the bottom of the Orbiter space shuttle Atlantis building the station and our future in space when Atlantis launched in October 2002 eyewitnesses reported insulating foam falling from a fuel tank during liftoff one minute 20 seconds into the flight indented the skirt of one of the solid rocket boosters half miles downrange 17 miles in altitude traveling 2 800 miles per hour but NASA saw the film as no danger and there was no real attempt to stop it happening again booster officer reports a good solid rocket booster separation Atlantis onboard computers actually so when Colombia launched in January 2003 and debris again fell from the tank there seemed little cause for concern [Music] Nasser Engineers examined footage of the falling debris hours later the debris that came off the tank in Columbia's launch and hit the wing several pieces of it hit the wing was noticed at launch and yet the people at Nasa who looked at it in more detail said that they didn't think it was Heavy enough or fast enough to cause damage to the parloring it hit exact reason why Colombia disintegrated is still a mystery but damage to the wing during launch remains at the heart of the investigation crucially the original shuttle design would have avoided this problem altogether the Orbiter would have had much smaller wings and sat in front of any falling debris [Music] foreign foreign [Music] space the Orbiter is comparatively safe traveling around the world 10 times faster than a rifle bullet orbiting the Earth is a lot safer than takeoff or Landing but it has its own inherent dangers [Music] space is little but debris traveling at speeds of over 15 000 miles per hour [Music] shards of metal from malfunctioning satellites dislodge shuttle tiles even an astronaut's glove have all been lost in space this graphic is NASA's representation of the 8 000 pieces of space junk larger than four inches across that pose a threat in orbit but these are just the ones that radar can see there may be Millions more the bigger ones the ones that are really dangerous are tracked on Space Radars and future conjunctions right or near intercepts are are warned about so that the shuttle actually Maneuvers out of the way to dodge some of the bigger pieces and does it several times a year they actually fly the shuttle in a way to minimize the impact they fly it back and forward in orbit so that the most of the intercepts without other debris will be at this end so as Colombia orbited the Earth could a tiny piece of space debris have caused the damage that later led to such a catastrophic failure whether or not something else did happen to hit the left wing coincidentally near the spot where we know the debris from the tank hit the wing it's possible coincidence that do occur in fact shuttles have been hit by space debris on every previous Mission as this footage shows even a Fleck of paint can cause serious damage but one thing is clear the videotape recovered from the wreckage of mission sts-107 shows of crew calmly preparing for a normal descent they appear completely unaware that the Orbiter may have been fatally damaged unable to Shield them from the Searing heat of re-entry since the early Mercury flights re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere has always been fraught with Danger the angle of attack is critical too shallow and the spacecraft can bounce back into space too Steep and the capsule can burn up as it punches through the upper atmosphere at speeds of 18 000 miles per hour for those few minutes the lives of the crew depend on the heat shield the Flames of re-entry is is a real classic image in space flight and builds up a compression shock wave in front of it like a snowplow putting a pile of snow as it goes down the street as the air squeezes it gets hot and what you've got to do is balance yourself over the shock wave without having this hot air getting too close to you or soaking into your spacecraft in the old days you could use a heat shield that would slowly burn off and at the end of it you'd have a few inches left and be safe with the shuttle they had to have a heat shield that would be reusable with minimal repair for many many missions it was a totally new requirement for a spacecraft NASA's ideal spacecraft was a small Orbiter with stubby Wings similar to the X-15 rocket plane of the 1960s [Music] these initial NASA designs with the stubby wings were within the NASA experience of flying those kinds of vehicles they wanted to stay within what they knew how to do [Music] the X-15 touched touch edge of space flew above the height it was destroyed it suffered a short sudden burst of heating on re-entry but the heat quickly dissipated into the atmosphere as the space plane slowed down to subsonic speeds but starved of funds by Nixon's Administration NASA had to share its dreams with the military who had their own ideas the Air Force wanted two big things out of NASA one they wanted a large payload Bay because the air force was launching a very large reconnaissance satellites and they wanted these things to be able to fit me in the space shuttle and the other thing they wanted was what was called a high cross range capability which is the ability of the shuttle to Glide a a fair distance Beyond its initial ground track and that required a large wing and after the Air Force came on board the space shuttle got a lot bigger it had this very long very wide payload Bay and it had this cranked delta wing to enable it to Glide for long distances we may have got their delta wing dream machine with NASA with a new challenge the old style capsules only had to withstand The Inferno of re-entry for four minutes but the shuttle with its Delta Wings has to glide back to Earth At A much slower shallower angle it takes longer to re-enter it s hot period lasts more than 12 minutes [Music] the underside area exposed to re-entry is far greater than their original smaller space plane NASA was faced with developing a totally new heat shield something both light and reusable they opted for a jigsaw of ceramic tiles now what the tile does and it does it extremely well is keep heat away from the Orbiter so if I was to hold this tile in my hand and take a blow torch and Heat this tile up within seconds I could pick up the tile from the other side so it dissipates heat extremely well until you've picked one up you don't realize how soft and how light the tile actually is these tiles are made with silica which is the basic component of sand but it comes out sort of like crunchy styrofoam and if you take your finger you know you can easily gouge the tile with your fingernail it's not an armor plating and it will not keep debris if it hits it will in fact damage the tile right from the Inception the tiles were the shuttle's greatest weakness on a typical Mission uh debris will bang into the Orbiter and do uh damage of about an inch or so greater about 30 of those tiles will be damaged permission another 50 60 up to 100 will have little dings and dents taken out of them in some particularly bad flights they've had up to seven eight hundred tiles that are damaged when they first installed the tiles about 27 000 on the bottom of the Columbia before they even rolled it out of the hangar over ten thousand fell off because of the they hadn't glued them on correctly so they've had this history where the tile system was uh more difficult to understand than they really had thought it was going to be we've gone for main entrance [Music] tiles replaced NASA Blaster the first shuttle Columbia into space in 1981. the whole program to play Roger oh complete but in orbit the crew reported the loss of more tiles but here we do have a uh a few tile missing off of the Skyward part luckily they weren't in a crucial area but the loss of any tiles exposes the airframe to the dangerous hot gases of re-entry the structural framework of the shuttle is made out of aluminum it melts at well let's see a thousand Fahrenheit 500 odd degrees Celsius obviously if if you don't protect that that aluminum you're not going to make it back to the atmosphere so we're totally dependent on these ceramic tiles to protect us almost certainly we can lose a tile anywhere probably and still survive could we lose two tiles yeah three tiles well there are certain parts of the bottom of the shuttle which are more critical than other parts so people have spent a tremendous amount of time calculating you know how many tiles could you you lose at different parts of the shuttle and still survive I did a study almost 14 years ago what we found was that the areas around the landing gear doors are the ones that are very very critical and should be watched very carefully debris is likely to hit there it gets very hot on re-entry and they are protecting hydraulic lines electronic sensors there are some fuel tanks nearby the landing gears are there for instance so there are some very critical and vulnerable subsystems located right beneath those tiles [Music] January 2003 the crew under the command of Rick Husband on the right prepare to launch on Colombia's 28th mission for four of the astronauts this will be their first flight into space we have booster ignition and liftoff of space shuttle Columbia as Colombia blasted into orbit NASA's cameras track the launch engines beginning to throttle back in a three-step fashion to 72 percent of rated performance reducing the stress on the shuttle as it breaks through the sound barrier they recorded foam insulation hitting the Leading Edge of the left wing directly into the danger zone revealed in Paul fishbeck's report [Music] his study exposed that in 27 previous launches falling debris had caused damage to thousands of tiles historically these chunks have been relatively small in this particular case they saw a rather large chunk come off about the size of a regular briefcase weighing up to about three pounds so that was the one of the biggest chunks I've ever seen Kamal now in orbit at 170 miles above the Earth the crew worked in shifts carrying out scientific experiments in the weightless environment of space [Music] after 17 days they prepared Colombia for re-entry okay no rush on the 1st of February at 7 50 am the Orbiter punched through the upper atmosphere traveling 25 times faster than the speed of sound the plasma Shockwave began heating the underside of the Orbiter we have known for a long time that re-entry is problematic that there are many issues that need to be exactly right if you're going to survive re-entry and it was known for it has been known for a long time that there has been the potential for breach of the heat shield in this large vehicle and yet again very little was done even when there was substantial reason to believe there might be a problem and it's really neat it's a bright orange yellow out over the nose all around the other nose wow with the temperature reaching over 1600 degrees Celsius the only thing between the crew and the extreme heat of re-entry are the fragile silica tiles these tiles they're more than just oven tiles they're a special material that as the heat comes into the surface it re-radiates back into space at a different wavelength and so it's actually balancing out the heat flow it's not just insulating them but it's actually absorbing and then rejecting the heat during this long glide back into the atmosphere it's really bright out there yeah you're definitely been able to be outside now if Colombia's tiles had been damaged any failure would be lethal as Colombia roared through the atmosphere Mission Control moderated the re-entry data from the shuttle began to show abnormal temperature rises inside the left wing in less than five minutes it climbed by more than 60 degrees where is that instrumentation located in the app part of the left wing right in front of the alibons [Music] the internal structure of the shuttle's Wings are made up of hundreds of aluminum cross members wired with thousands of heat sensors these struts bear the load of the wing giving it rigidity for the high stresses of launch and re-entry if the Leading Edge had been damaged during launch the this could allow hot gases to blast into the wing cavity if the Leading Edge of the wing was cracked near the fuselage as I believe almost certainly was the case uh you had essentially a blowtorch of superheated air actually air that was much hotter than a blow torch coming in melting the underlying aluminum structure cutting through the electrical lines to the temperature sensors which suddenly failed and basically finding its way throughout the wing with the rise in temperature that was seen across the wing structure right into the well where the where the tires are where the landing gear is bye Max go we just lost the tire pressure on left outboard and left inboard both tires we do not have any valid data at this time once heat enters into the shuttle wings for example it would begin to cause not just the possible loss of that part of the wing but loss of the structure that was carrying that was holding other tiles further back and that once you begin heating through both the air blast and the heat you can begin to have more than a single tile but two three four ten twenty tiles start coming off then you're in a situation where the wing is no longer plane is high drag we know that the shuttle was pulling to the left that would be a result of a slight increase in drag on the left wing relative to the right wing and so the vehicle tends to turn as the vehicle descended to lower altitude Rocket motors on the right rear end of the vehicle tried to correct the orientation of the shuttle so the crew had to know that something was wrong at that point and that's maybe 20 or 30 seconds prior to the breakup at that point the extra deceleration forces on the wing could crack it bend it and eventually break it off about how you described it Chris now know that five pieces of the Orbiter broke off over California ice cream no it just pieces of plasma flight director Leroy Kane was about to utter the words that would initiate the emergency procedures GC flight GC plate why do you think lock the doors tappy Colombia was lost foreign [Applause] as the shuttle began to break up its wreckage spread over thousands of square miles the small town of Nacogdoches in Texas was directly in the line of Fallout [Music] Klein was at home unaware of the drama that was about to unfold it was just before 8 o'clock in the morning and we heard this kind of rambling sound which started off the rumbling was was mild and then it went on for 30 to 45 seconds and as it went on it got stronger and louder and then when I opened the door and got outside at first thought a gas well had exploded and then it kind of faded off the sound was moving away that's when I looked up into the sky and to see if I could tell see anything and there was the big contrail or big vapor trail up in the air reports began some of them clearly segments of the heat shield Ruth Ann Peterson was just about to open the local bank this place right here that we have marked is where the actual piece of the shuttle fell shortly after eight o'clock that Saturday morning I looked up because I saw a big bright ball of white I say fire but it wasn't red it was real brilliant white but I also noticed there was a trail behind it what I would call like sparklers [Music] when the piece of the shuttle fell on the parking lot the bank which is directly behind me it blew open the two glass doors that go that is the entrance into the bank it just blew them wide open a massive recovery operation got underway NASA wanted answers the mystery to why the shuttle broke up could line any one of these pieces of wreckage [Music] whatever the findings of the accident investigation board one chilling question needs to be answered could anything have been done to save the crew well maybe a delicate topic to consider what the crew is doing and whether or not as people would prefer to think they knew nothing and died instantly but the both on Challenger and Colombia the evidence is very strong that in neither case was this instantaneous or merciful with Colombia they are much higher and much faster and after the vehicle came apart the cabin itself would probably still be in a single piece the crew would be in their seats as the cabin pressure was lost the suits would pressurized feeding them emergency oxygen they have their own parachutes they have the ability to blow the hatches to get out but they realize they have to get down below 40 000 feet before it's safe to be on a personal shoe so they'd have to sit in their seats waiting hang together baby hoping the cabin can hold together as the cabin got lower because of its great speed it was encountering much stronger crushing deceleration forces than it was ever built in the stand and structure heated perhaps by the outside shock wave just couldn't have held up [Music] it seems to have held up part of the way because the debris from the cabin and the crew appears to have been found in a relatively small area not spread across most of East Texas like the rest of the shuttle how close they came to riding that cabin in and jumping out we don't know and they never know but what we do know is that data reveals in the last few seconds the pilots may have been fighting to get the shuttle under manual control has to do is to bridge the gap between not being able to survive on Colombia and being able to survive a similar accident this will accident next time was this horrendous accident avoidable could NASA have investigated the possible damage to the wing more thoroughly before re-entry they saw the debris hit the hit the bottom of the Orbiter they commissioned a study to in fact look and try to determine if it was going to be a problem came back and said that the tiles might be damaged but that the damage would not be life-threatening everything that's been made public certainly makes me question the optimism that was used in that study as a result of having seen what we did on on the film of course we kicked off the engineering analysis just uh for completeness just to make sure that we had assessed what possible damage might have occurred and over the course of the next several days the engineering analysis was dispositioned that it was no safety flight issue well it's it's a very interesting attitude given that they lost the vehicle [Music] they knew that the heat shield could be damaged and they just basically did very little they had no contingency plans at all when they've had Decades of knowledge of this potential problem it's very clear to me we're going to lose other shuttles if things are continuous as they've been going we're looking for exactly what caused this accident if it turns out to be the thermal protection system the shuttle tile you bet we're going to we're going to do whatever it takes to beef those up before we return to flight space flight is is risky it doesn't mean that we ever tolerate mistakes I never call a challenge or an accident Challenger was a consequence of bad decisions people at the time knew were bad decisions Colombia looks a little more ambiguous it looks like a combination of a series of things no no single oversight no single event but enough of them pile on top of the other to result to add up to catastrophe whether we break another one with or without losing the crew or even break two more it may well happen but the end of this shuttle program's flight history is pretty much clearly now in sight we'll do as much as we can to improve the reliability of the shuttle as long as we fly it but eventually we need to develop new space transportation and the reliability and safety will be right at the top of the list and hopefully not the sort of compromises we had to make with the shuttle the question is what is the best way to reduce the risk and make it as safe as possible for a reasonable amount of money and that's that's a question that I think that NASA has to look at very very carefully ironically NASA's Design Concepts for the shuttle replacement are looking more like the original version from the early 70s a smaller stop your winged Orbiter mounted above the launch system having a much smaller vehicle the heat shield problem becomes much more manageable and that would make the vehicle enormously more safe for re-entry and at the same time you could attach pieces other sections to the to this capsule-like structure that could be payload if you wanted to use uh lift very heavy payloads with human Crews to orbit you can always argue after an accident that more could have been done up to you know and including not flying so the safest thing would have been to leave Columbia on the ground [Music] but we all have to recognize that flying humans into space is a very Risky Business if we want to continue a space program that's robust we want to take technology that we have well in hand that's highly reliable that is tested and we want to just simply shape it to the mission we have and we can do it if we make the right choices technically who willingly face the dangers of space there see you look at that yeah you definitely don't want to be outside now

Channel: Spark

Views: 164,299

Keywords: Aerospace Disasters, Aerospace Research, Aerospace Safety Standards, Astronaut Deaths, Engineering Analysis, Fateful Day, High Speed, NASA, Orbiter, Shuttle Breakup, Space Disasters, Space Flight, Space Mission Failure, Space Recoveries, Space Shuttle Development, Space Shuttle Disaster, Space Technology, Space Technology Development, Spacecraft Safety, Spark, Upper Atmosphere

Id: q6BZe98ai3M

Length: 49min 3sec (2943 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023