From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Sun Feb 02 2003 - 20:06:34 MST
It's not just the shuttle. I've often wondered why planes don't have video input into black boxes when every gas station has one.
I bet the only reason they don't have an emergency escape/landing pod is cost and weight. They should have one for obirtal problems that are immediate (too quick for rescue). It's the mighty $ or lack of it. The TV news claimed today that NASA's budget was down 40% from the mid 90s. Meanwhile the US B2 fleet is five times the size and each B2 costs the same as a shuttle.
----- Original Message -----
From: Artillo5@cs.com
To: extropians@extropy.org
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 9:10 AM
Subject: Re: shuttle breaks up on re-entry
In a message dated 2/1/2003 12:43:24 PM Eastern Standard Time, thespike@earthlink.net writes:
Well, hmm, that sounds implausible.
Is this just an attempt to prevent looting/souveniring of the flight
recorder etc?
I was watching yesterday and a reporter asked about if the shuttle had a "black box" flight recorder and the official said that it didn't have one. How many millions of dollars the thing was worth and they don't have BLACK BOXES??? That seems very strange to me, and I know that they have a continuous stream of data coming down through telemetry, but STILL?
Also, doesn't the shuttle have some sort of emergency eject system? Of course, if they were at too high an altitude, or the explosion was too sudden for a crew reaction, this wouldn't be useable in any event, but I would think that the designers would have tried to account for such occurrances. Maybe making the entire crew cabin explosion-proof, sealed off from the rest of the craft during liftoff and reentry, and maybe a redundant chute/airbag kind of system? Does anyone have info on this?
Arti
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