Engineering disasters :: essays research papers

On February 1, 2003, the post Shuttle Columbia was lost due to structural chastisement in the left wing. On take- come to, it was reported that a piece of spark insulation surrounding the shuttle fleets 15-story external fuel tanks fell off of Columbias tank and struck the shuttles left wing. Extremely hot gas entered the anterior of Columbias left wing just 16 seconds after the orbiter penetrated the hottest bring out of Earths atmosphere on re-entry. The shuttle was equipped with hundreds of temperature sensors positi unrivaledd at strategic locations. The salvaged relief valve recorded revea guide that temperatures started to rise in the left wing leading bump into a full minute before whatsoever 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 hard to say what steps, if any, could have been t aken to prevent the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster from occurring. When mankind continues to push the envelope in the interest of bettering humanity, there will always be risks. In the do work 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 gratifying risk for a given program or operation should be worth the potential benefits to be gained. The goal should be a focal point system that puts safety first, but not safety at any price. As of Sept 7th, 2003, NASA has ordered extensive factory inspections of wing panels among flights that could add as much as three months to the time it takes to break a space shuttle orbiter for launch. NASA does all it can 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 cascading outages of power transmission lines and generators serving parts of the Northeast, Midwest and Canada. automatonlike shelterive systems operated to open circuits and shut down power plants to prevent advertize 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 station before it.