Category: school

Apparently, sense of direction runs in the family.

My sister T is absolutely terrible with directions. In one particular story, she went to a friend’s wedding rehearsal. After the rehearsal they were all headed over to a restaurant for dinner. She brought directions. In fact, she was the only one to bring directions. A few of her friends were looking for instructions on how to get there so Tree copied the directions and passed them out to virtually everyone.

Everyone pulled out of the parking lot and everyone arrived at the restaurant – except Theresa. She got horribly horribly lost.

well, if I didn’t already know, last night was a great indicator of my equally poor self-location skills. I went over to a classmate’s house in Avon to work on a project. We finished up around 10:45ish, and I left to head home. This is where I needed to go:

I took my turns, and got on what I thought was CT-177South. It was, instead, CT-167N.

I got lost. After 30 minutes I was able to get myself turned around and back on track. But by this time, I’d nearly run out of gas so I stopped in New Britain to fill up the tank. I had heard rumors that Darcy, Viv, and Irene were gathered at Irene’s place for a movie so I stopped by and enjoyed some nachos and banter before heading out again – at which point I promptly got lost in downtown New Britain. Driving down alleys and random one-way streets, I eventually got back to route 9. Only to find myself going the wrong direction on route 9. Thankfully I quickly fixed this error, turned around and was immediately pulled over for a headlight being out.

Ugh. what an annoying night.

I finally got to bed at 2am. This was my path:

sigh. My next big purchase was going to be a watch – it looks like it will be a GPS instead.

As we all know, the crew didn’t survive the re-entry. But how much did they suffer? That question was asked to Captain Dan Burbank when he was here. He was directly involved in the recovery of the astronauts on the ground, so he had some very sad but interesting details.

As the shuttle entered the atmosphere the speed was so furious that at the flaw point of the wing, an “anaconda of 5000 degree plasma started working its way through the shuttle’s interior.”

The first thing that went were a few temperature sensors. They spiked and then dropped to a zero reading fault. Next, some tire pressure sensors went nuts and then dropped to a zero reading fault. At this point the crew was probably concerned, but not very concerned. During this time the automatic adjustment of the shuttle was furiously trying to correct for the fact that one wing was failing. Since most of the shuttle’s wing structure is aluminum which gets some play at a mere 400 degrees Fahrenheit, it was getting bad fast. Within a few minutes the wing probably failed completely. Once that happened the shuttle tumbled and broke apart. Just like the challenger, the crew cabin broke off from the rest of the shuttle.

Captain Burbank told us that there was evidence that both of the astronauts in the front of the shuttle had grabbed their joysticks to try and control the shuttle. It’s clear that they new something was very wrong. Mercifully, the crew had the visors on their space helmets up. That means that as soon as the shuttle cracked, the air was pulled out of the cabin and they would have been knocked out. One can presume that there was likely some panic, but hopefully it was short. Had their visors been down, the space suits would have protected them from the pressure change etc. and they would have suffered much more from the heat and fall.

The failure of Columbia is a tragic story, but it’s one from which we can learn a lot. We asked Captain Burbank how safe space travel is now. He responded that it’s safer than it has ever been. Talking about failures, Dan said “We’re not a 1 in 10000 organization. We’re not a 1 in 1000 organization. I’d guess we’re about a 1 in 300 organization. Every time we launch, we’re still rolling the dice.”

Could we have saved the crew of Columbia? In Captain Dan Burbank’s opinion, yes. In space, had we taken a close look at the wing of Columbia where the foam struck we probably would have seen a gaping hole. But how can you save people that are orbiting Earth?

Connecting up with the space station never would have worked. There wasn’t the fuel available to change the space shuttle’s trajectory. But, had they dropped the shuttle into ‘sleep’ mode they would have had the energy to last about 30 days. The carbon dioxide levels would have made life very uncomfortable on the shuttle, but no one would have died. In those 30 day’s it’d be possible to rig up the space shuttle Atlantis and send it up with more oxygen. Atlantis could refresh the O2 levels, and then cart a few of the 7 member crew back to earth.

Then they could have sent up a second shuttle to bring back the remaining crew.