----- Original Message ----- From: "Russell McMahon" To: Sent: Sunday, April 25, 2004 11:00 PM Subject: Re: [EE:] Excellent O-ring design guide & catalogue > > >I wonder if Thiokol had this info before the Challenger disaster? :-( > > > Sad to say, that' pretty much the first thought I had when I saw the > post... > > Thiokol and NASA were well clued up on O ring performance well before > Challenger. What killed Challenger was politics and engineers bowing to > bureaucracy and finally believing their own revisions of reality, initially > made to keep their masters happy. Easy to see after the event. Near > impossible in advance. Happens to us all. And will keep on doing so. > Columbia was killed by essentially the same thing. Which is not to say that > such things are genuinely avoidable, just more avoidable than we let them > be. The O rings that killed Challenger had been studied to death before the > incident, for precisely the reasons that finally proved fatal. The foam > hazard that killed Columbia was also well known and analysed in frightening > and prophetic detail years before the event. Yes, absolutely, and truly sadly. IMHO the most tragic thing about Columbia is that was indeed basically a case of making the same mistake twice. Bob Ammerman RAm Systems -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads