Here’s a link to Seagate’s web page, which includes specs and a product manual. (If the link doesn’t work, just go to www.seagate.com and enter the model number.)

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=4b925a802efbd010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US&reqPage=Legacy

Also, here’s a COMPUTERWORLD site with better pictures of the recovered drive:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9083478

The ISS was effectively dead when they cut the crew from seven to three.

That is my impression too. First they starved the SST so that it became a nonmilitary-[military] expensive compromise, then they starved the ISS so it became a nonscience-[science] expensive compromise.

Wanna bet they starved the Orion so it became an orbit-[Moon] expensive compromise?

In cases like this, it’s very easy to second-guess the designers’ choices, since the design requirements are not apparent. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of factors that go into the choices of a particular component for space-flight instrumentation.

A likely scenario is that there were few changes between CVX-2 and CVX, flown in 1997 (which meant the design was finalized several years earlier). The maturity of HD technology over commercially available and cheap solid state drives, including rad-hard qualification was likely a driving factor.

In addition, pointing a chiding finger at NASA for what they (the big monolithic THEY) should have done is flat-out wrong. NASA didn’t build the experiment. While funded by NASA LeRC, the design specifics were the responsibility of the PI and whatever subcontractors were tapped to build the experiment.

I worked on an extremely similar experiment that flew twice on Columbia (STS-62 and STS-75). There are tens of thousands of decisions that are made during the course of the years of design. Without insight into those years of work, it’s really unfair to criticize.

On a personal note, one of the things I cherish from those two Columbia flights are the mission patches I have that flew on the orbiter along with the experiments during those flights.

~David D.G.

If Columbia had broken apart five minutes earlier when she was at Mach 20, there would have been much less surviving debris because the higher speed would have meant much greater heating of the debris. Heat rate is a function of speed to the third power, so Mach 16 experiences about half of the heating of Mach 20.