Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster from NASA TV 2nd. edit

it's so chilling to watch videos like this and Challenger. They are travelling at such high speeds that no matter what backup system they have in place it won't make any difference. The shuttle is very risky that is why everything has to be to perfection there isn't the smallest room for error. The astronauts know that one simple malfunction has grave consequences. They are heroes who take these risks for the the sake of space exploration.

no escape pod. EPIC FAIL YET AGAIN who makes these shuttles? your killing men and women you know...

Would it be impossible to design the cabin as an escape pod? Something that could blast itself free of any disaster.The early Mercury capsules were very simple and strong.All a pod would need would be some guidance rockets and a heatshield I would think?

Its not impossible. It would have had to be done during the initial design. After the fact it was too expensive (for the politicians) and took too much of the payload capability away (for Nasa). With those two strikes, it was dropped. Remember though, this a video comment with my opinion.

I am not an engineer but with something so risky..it seems impossible not to design with complete failure as a very likely event. Feynman after Challenger said that the odds were 1 in 100 of complete disaster, not the 1 in 100,000 that NASA was trumpeting. The low level engineers knew this...the politicos of course fell for the delusion.

There is a lot of games played with those numbers. I dont pay any attention to them. The shuttles have a lot of back up systems that unmanned rockets dont. The orbiters are more complex machines because they perform more complex missions than unmanned rockets. If you look at the facts, shuttles are as safe as the others with the amount of missions flown. Of course the unmanned rockets dont have to land either.

It seems to me that no matter how redundant the systems..how theoretically safe you have to plan for the day when it all fails for some utterly remote reason.
I wonder what the next generation of Shuttle will look like..have the engineers come up with something? This shuttle seemed to be such a hodgepodge of technology from the start..a plane strapped to a rocket booster.

In your 1st comment, you sound like you want something that is 100% fail safe. Thats not going to happen. Look at cars. Airbags, ABS, crunch zones etc. People still die every day. If you try to get it down to zero risk, you will never launch. 2nd comment, Given the money available and the mission required I think they did a great job. The shuttle was driven by politicians, money, Nasa & the Airforce.

The engineers are superb, the Shuttle is an amazing feat..but still just the sheer amount of things that have to go absolutely right or its curtains is very significant. If my car fails..I walk, if a plane fails..it can glide or you can bailout, in a boat..there is a lifeboat but the Shuttle takes many more risks..and yet their is no escape option. I understand the money and practicality issue, but the seating section of the cabin should have been designed as a breakaway escape pod.

Yep, launching spacecraft to this day is still very hard to do no matter how you try to do it. I predict the Virgin spacecraft will have a deadly accident early on. Its all marketing hype. Their test flights were a little frightening to say the least. Talk about accidents waiting to happen.