Should We Launch a Kid to Space?

[mikegarrison]

2 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

0.o  I wouldn't claim a ship that flooded and sunk subsequent to a huge internal explosion as being sunk due to flooding either.  In fact, it's actually quite common to describe accidents in terms of their cause (skidded on ice) rather than effect (hit a light pole).  Well, common except when people are twisting definitions in order to reach a preordained conclusion.

Most reasonably complicated disasters involve a chain of failures. Picking out any one of them as "the" cause can be problematical.

That being said, Columbia was pretty much doomed from the moment that foam broke loose.

Edited October 15, 2017 by mikegarrison

[wumpus]

16 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

In this case, the cause of the accident wasn't due to higher peak heating - it was damage to the heat shield.  A capsule with a damaged or flawed heat shielding would suffer the same fate.

The only reason the heat shield was ever in danger was that it was exposed during launch.  This doesn't happen with capsules.  Also the Columbia's heat shield was so large it was built with delicate tiles: something that was never necessary with capsules.  The spaceplane design directly doomed Columbia by exposing the heatshield and doomed Challenger's crew by having the crew cabin an integral part of the oversized cargo bay: every other [capsule based] rocket has had a launch abort system, but the Shuttle was too massive for one (the Shuttle had plenty of abort modes, nearly all with zero chance for survival).

How could falling debris during launch possibly damage a capsule's heat shield?

[DerekL1963]

18 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Most reasonably complicated disasters involve a chain of failures. Picking out any one of them as "the" cause can be problematical.

That being said, Columbia was pretty much doomed from the moment that foam broke loose.

Both of these are eternal truths.  By my version was close enough for the purpose of correcting the people working backwards from a conclusion rather than forwards from the data.

[kerbiloid]

Probably, it's better to say about insufficient mechanical hardness of Columbia, rather than its insufficient heat capacity.