Shuttle's Left Wing example essay topic

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost due to structural failure in the left wing. On take-off, it was reported that a piece of foam insulation surrounding the shuttle fleet's 15-story external fuel tanks fell off of Columbia's tank and struck the shuttle's left wing. Extremely hot gas entered the front of Columbia's left wing just 16 seconds after the orbiter penetrated the hottest part of Earth's 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 Columbia's nose pointed forward. It's very hard to say what steps, if any, could have been taken 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 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 goal should be a management 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 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 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 northeastern 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. 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 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. The outage had a huge impact on New York City, which relies heavily on electric power. Most New Yorkers commute using subways that run entirely off of electricity.

Also, cell phone circuits were overloaded; making landline phones the only means for communications. Even still, other people were stuck in elevators for hours at a time. On the positive note, operators were able to restart generators and restore the transmission system methodically, so that within two days, power was restored to virtually all consumers. In recent years, the power industry has supported the formation of entities called "regional transmission organizations" or "independent system operators", which operate independently from utilities to ensure reliability and standard operating procedures within the regional transmission grids. This may prevent similar situations from recurring. As long as all the power generators are not tied into one another, it will not cause such a widespread outage in the future.

As a prospective engineer, I would agree that we are progressing in many fields. It is impossible to be perfect at anything and therefore some error is expected. As engineers, our job is to minimize the danger that those errors may cause humanity. I feel that we learn from our mistakes and do our best to not repeat them. In the case of the blackouts of 1965 and 2003, it would not have been feasible to reconstruct the entire network grid for the northeastern United States to prevent this from happening again. As we can see, the benefits do not outweigh the cost.

In the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, NASA is taking major steps at their own expense to keep such incidents from happening again. Engineering, more so than other fields, is continually changing to meet the needs of humanity.