NASA Columbia survival report question.

None, not even CBS news ever believe 1:10000. I believe the post-Challenger number is more like 1:100, which for such a stack of bailing wire and bubblegum isn't all that bad.

Age has nothing to do with it. Even NASA doesn't pretend it has a mission anymore.

'Boston Legal' on TV last night. William Shatner's character was going on about the legality of using fat from liposuction to make biodiesel. That's what I get for not turning the TV off right after the news is over. I shut it off as fast as I could get to my feet, and to the remote, which is none to fast these days. I need to run a piece of RG/6 to the computer room so the TV is in the same room. :(

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There are two kinds of people on this earth:
The crazy, and the insane.
The first sign of insanity is denying that you\'re crazy.

How much was spent on the shuttle program? A few dozen $billion? That's small change compared to the sums that are sloshing around Washington and Wall Street these days. Let's go to Mars. Manned? Robotic? What the hell - we'll do both! One thing this financial crisis has taught me is that everything can be free if we just print enough cash. Maybe the treasury could get things moving a little faster by issuing blanket licenses and free ink cartridges to everyone.

-- Joe

Well, if dubya can piss away a few trillion in the Iraqi sand what's a mission to mars?

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

Third time in a day I was glad to not have beverages in my mouth while reading sci.electronics.design!

Meanwhile, my TV and my computer are in the same room! And I suspect my liking for riding bicycles and eating veggies will keep me nice and nimble well into an old age!

What I all-too-often see on the TV during the small amount of time (especially other than news) that I have the darn thing on makes me happy that I don't keep bricks, large wrenches, 50-VA - to - KVA range transformers or shooting irons within reach of my TV-viewing seat!

(OK, I would not do such evil deeds to my TV set anyway - the producers of the rubbish ought to be thankful that they tend to be beyond range of viewers throwing bricks, iron or lead.)

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Which was never reasonable, because of the implied reliability of better than 1 in 20,000 for each solid fuel boosters. When did they ever have a reason to think that SRBs were that reliable?

Sylvia.

In any other field, (except war, I suppose) exposing people to those sorts of risks would be seen as criminal.

Sylvia.

Any way to send there the ones still in office and managing to get re-elected? Such as probably a majority of those chairing congressional committees?

=============================================

Then again, my fater proposed a USA Constitution amendment that I now find to make sense:

"No person may be elected to either House of US Congress or elected to be US President during a term of elected political office in the United States or any political subdivision thereof that such person has been elected to."

No exception for resigning from a term of elected office before that term ends.

Politicians cannot be re-elected to a Federal office that they are already serving or less-than-1-term-ago resigned from.

Politicians cannot be elected to Federal office before original expiration date of term of office of the stepping stone that they are running from (usually January, while "general election" is November. Gives a break of usually minimum 9.5-10 months, minimum 21.5-22 months if running while most recent previous elected job position was a Federal one.) I would think it's fine and dandy of politicians that are merely members of township legislative branches or borough legislative branches need to do something else for a living for 9.5-10 months before being elected to a Federal office. Heck, I would be happy to see any restriction on those of the usual types that run for HOA boards!

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Nonsense. Ever hear of mountain climbing?

Doesn't appear to have a 1 in 50 death rate *per climb*. More like 1 in

50 per year amongst people engaged in the sport of mountain climbing.

Sylvia.

Mountain climbing on anything much risker than Appalachian Trail SW of New England and outside NC-VA appears to me to be voluntarily putting life/limbs at risk.

Most Appalachian risks appear to me to be from weather. For one thing, the greatest non-tornado wind ever measured by an instrument on land so far was at the punitive weather station at the top of Mt. Washington, NH, merely 6,288 feet above sea level!

(NC and VA have slightly higher Appalachian peaks, still bgelow 6700 feet above sea level.)

2/3 of days from November to April that mountaintop has winds exceeding hurricane force according to the Wiki article on it!

Along with snowstorms all 12 months of the year!

A slogan that Mt. Washington has, actually questioned and called into doubt somewhat successfully, is "world's worst weather". It appears to me that ice storms and large hail and notable supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes stronger than F2 probably run low there, and annual snowfall is probably exceeded by that of someplace WSW of Mt. Washington somewhere in NY state closer to lakes Erie and Ontario, but the weather still often gets very bad at the top of Mt. Washington. If you know the daily high temperature at the low end of the hiking trail up that mountain, subtract probably 25 degrees F to get a first-estimate temperature for the air at the mountaintop. Also consider that "polar front jet stream" winds, normally centered 30,000-36,000 feet above sea level, go quite wide from center of where they should be and all-too-often in some spots exist as low as 850-millibar level - merely around 1 mile above sea level!

As for 14,000 foot mountains in/near the Colorado Rockies and anything similar - the weather at 6,000-6,500 feet is a lot milder than that at the top of Mt Washinmgton NH. The main problems are mountaintop-specific ones of cold temperature, wind and windchill, and lightning.

One hazard of high mountaintops is lightning from cumulus clouds that would be obviously short of being thunderstorms elsewhere. Beware of "cumulus mediocris" that is usually a smaller-semi-blowup-becoming-a-non-event "slightly threatening fair weather cloud". Those can zap mountaintops with lightning. Not that they usuallyv do such, but that is a risk in mountaintop areas.

Also beware that there is "cumulonimbus polaris" - cumulonimbus (producing significant surface-reaching precipitation) of more compact size forming where it is cold. Those produce lightning more and more widespread than Cumulus Mediocris does, but I still expect both not much and great discrimination towards mountaintops for lightning from Cumulonimbus Polaris.

After that, mountain climbing is at least sometimes a very vigorous activity with great burning of calories, and then your body "runs out of gas", and 50 F (+10 C) recently was "T-shirt weather" but later became outright chilly... let alone how a human body experiences 20's/10's F (around -10 C) - which is "only a little cold for summertime" at the

14,000 foot level ("on the fourteen-ers") in Colorado.

Thankfully, I have only climbed Appalachians to about 1650-1700 feet above sea level, on and close to the portion of the Appalachian Trail around 20 miles (32 km) north of Reading PA, around 25-30 miles (40-48 km) west of Allentown PA, on and near "Hawk Mountain" - which is the more-straight-eastward continuation of the "Blue Mountain" ridge (for very few miles) from Blue Mountain's fork about 20 miles north of Reading PA. In that general area, the Appalachian Trail tracks along Blue Mountain through the "Blue-Hawk fork" (the Hawk Mountain sidetrack from the Appalachian Trail there is known as the "Pinnacle Sidetrail".

It is officially unpermissible to ride a bicycle on the Appalachian Trail. And the main bike-able road up Mount Washington is a private toll road only permitting bike riding on some specific October day wnen the weather most of the way up is like that of November in Buffalo NY, sometimes as bad as December in Buffalo NY in the upper 1/2 or 1/3 except for need to double or maybe triple the wind that Buffalo NY endures in windier times for that bike-race-"of-time-trial-style" put-up-with by that private toll road on that merely 6,288 foot-above-sea-level mountain.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Yup:-

"The death rate has remained at one death for every 10 successful attempts to climb Everest for many years, the British Medical Journal report states."

That's an order of magnitude worse than manned space travel.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

they

Are leftist weenies recyclable ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
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If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn\'t be called research...
                    -- Albert Einstein

Before you do that, what's the payback?

It's not a "few trillion"...

...but this looks like "fun".

Estimates for the total cost of the Iraq war, including care for the long term disabled, is between 3 and 6 trillion. Iraq is more expensive than Vietnam.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

I guess they "added up" the probabilities of all the known failure mechanisms and that's what they got. Unfortunately, that did not account for the *unknown* ones :(.

I think that's where the notion of MTBF goes wrong - it seems to assume that the actual design itself is flawless.

--

John Devereux

Only with the proper equipment and a liability waiver from the EPA. :(

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There are two kinds of people on this earth: The crazy, and the insane. The first sign of insanity is denying that you're crazy.

Did you include the costs incurred by rioting antiwar freaks?

Vietnam was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away!

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There are two kinds of people on this earth: The crazy, and the insane. The first sign of insanity is denying that you're crazy.