Engineering disasters :: essays research papers

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost due to structural failure in the left wing. On take-off, it was account that a piece of foam insulation surrounding the shuttle fleets 15-story external fuel tanks fell off of Columbias tank and struck the shuttles left wing. Extremely alive gas entered the front of Columbias left wing just 16 seconds after 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 any 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 keep Columbias nose pointed forward. Its very(prenominal) hard to say what steps, if any, could have been taken to prevent the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster from occurri ng. When mankind continues to push the envelope in the interest of bettering humanity, there will always be chances. In the manned spaceflight business, we have always had to live with trade-offs. All programs do not carry equal risk nor do they offer the same benefits. The acceptable risk for a given program or operation should be worth the potential benefits to be gained. The terminal should be a management system that puts safety first, but not safety at any price. As of Sept 7th, 2003, NASA has ordered extensive mill inspections of wing panels between flights that could add as much as three months to the time it takes to prepare a space shuttle orbiter for launch. NASA does all it groundwork to safely bring its astronauts back to earth, but as stated earlier, risks are expected. On August 14th, 2003, a major blackout swept across portions of the northeast United States and Canada. It was reported that a series of equipment outages in the Midwest led to uncontrolled cascadi ng outages of power transmission lines and generators serving parts of the Northeast, Midwest and Canada. Automatic evasive 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 Great 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 grade before it.