Engineering disasters :: essays research papers

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle capital of South Carolina was lost referable to structural failure in the left annex. On take-off, it was reported that a piece of foam insulation surrounding the omittle fleets 15-story external sack tanks fell off of Columbias tank and struck the shuttles left wing. Extremely white gas entered the front of Columbias left wing just 16 seconds subsequently the orbiter penetrated the hottest part of Earths atmosphere on re-entry. The shuttle was equipped with hundreds of temperature sensors positioned at strategic locations. The salvaged flight recorded revealed that temperatures started to rise in the left wing leading edge a full minute before each trouble on the shuttle was noted. With a damaged left wing, Columbia started to drag left. The ships flight control computers fought a losing battle trying to trammel Columbias nose pointed forward. Its very hard to say what steps, if any, could have been interpreted to prevent the Space Shut tle Columbia disaster from occurring. When mankind continues to contract the envelope in the interest of bettering humanity, there will always be risks. In the manned spaceflight business, we have always had to live with trade-offs. solely programs do not carry equal risk nor do they exsert the same benefits. The acceptable risk for a given program or operation should be worth the potential benefits to be gained. The goal should be a management system that puts golosh first, but not safety at any price. As of Sept 7th, 2003, NASA has ordered extensive factory inspections of wing panels between flights that could add as much as deuce-ace months to the time it takes to prepare a space shuttle orbiter for launch. NASA does only it can to safely bring its astronauts back to earth, but as verbalize earlier, risks are expected. On August 14th, 2003, a major blackout sweep across portions of the northeastern United States and Canada. It was reported that a series of equipment outa ges in the Midwest led to uncontrolled cascading outages of agency transmission lines and generators serving part of the Northeast, Midwest and Canada. Automatic protective systems operated to open circuits and shut down power plants to prevent further spread of the outages. This is very similar to what happened in The capital Northeast Blackout of 1965. In both situations, the grid system shut down one generator in line at a time to protect a surge from the station before it.