Columbia shuttle lost Part II

[Panag]

Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless
It seems like very bad planning indeed if they coudn't send up any sort of rescue vehicle before supplies ran out.

As for the damage to the wing: presumably if insulation fell off the tank and hit the wing, it would have hit the leading edge of the wing.

How can there be "minor" damage to the leading edge of a wing coated with fragile tiles that has to withstand flight at 25 times the speed of sound?

Looks like several dropped balls here.

Even if the problem turns out to be something else entirely: NASA should definitely make sure that EVA equipment (incuding the Manned Maneuvering Unit) are carried as standard equipment on all flights, that ALL astronauts on manned spacecraft have a means of transferring to either the ISS or another spacecraft, and that a rescue vehicle of some sort is always available for launch.

With only 3 shuttles left, that will be difficult to arrange.

hi ,

, its going to be intresting as what they are going to do , build a new shuttle like they did after the Challenger , or go for a new project , .....

in both cases the survival of the crew shall get way more emphasis (!)

have a nice day

[Tolls]

Jack:
What you're suggesting would increase the cost of shuttle launches massively. For rescue you're talking about developing a new standby rocket (the shuttle would not be a good idea since it behaves badly if left standing around for long periods) capable of docking with the shuttle and transporting the occupants back to earth...all for a, what...1 in a hundred chance of failure if that?

The shuttle is not supposed to be a tourist vehicle...it is risky...anyone going on it knows it is risky...it is a glorified bomb.

Just done some more checking and Progress could not get to the shuttle anyway since the shuttle's orbit was too low and the (Soyuz?) can't hit that low an orbit for docking apparently.

[Ned]

It seems to me that they could simply plan all future missions so that the crew could move into the ISS in an emergency.

But it seems that NASA now has a real problem. If it is too dangerous to bring down a shuttle with missing or damaged tiles, and if the tiles are damaged or lost on about 25% of missions, it won't be too long before the entire shuttle fleet is abandoned in orbit.

I note a point made earlier in connection with the Buran. Apparently it had a dramatically higher payload than the shuttle because it did not have main engines - it relied totally on external engines to boost it into orbit.

This seems a lot more sensible approach to me. It was the pattern of all prior space vehicles. If anyone knows, why wasn't the shuttle designed this way from the beginning?

[Jack the Bodiless]

Tolls: Maybe a rescue vehicle based at the ISS?

Something like the proposed ISS "lifeboat", but with a booster capable of changing its orbit to rendezvous with a shuttle not headed for the ISS.

If we're serious about manned spaceflight, and already have a permanently manned station in space: that seems like the logical place to mount a space rescue from.

[Jack the Bodiless]

Ned: Engines are expensive. How were Buran's engines to be recovered?

But maybe "use once and throw away" engines are so much cheaper than ones designed for re-use that it's cost-effective to use them. I doubt if they're as safe though.

As for shuttles abandoned in orbit: the Russians managed to land Buran on autopilot. Maybe NASA should consider that. Inspect each shuttle in space with an EVA, and if there's a problem, transfer the astronauts to the ISS or another spacecraft and try to land it on autopilot. If it burns up, you've only lost a shuttle that would have been useless anyhow.

[TheStinger]

Have they got any more of the shuttles left that they used to blow up that asteroid. I saw them in the doccumentary Armageddon, I think 1 got home, it looked pretty tough, they should use those instead

[Andrew1999]

Originally posted by Mad Bomber


What are you talking about, The Shuttle has been used for crew replacement since the inception of the ISS, and the station was designed around the use of the STS and Progress delivery systems.

The other shuttles were used for the ISS. Columbia was much heavier than the other three.

There seems to be some disagreement among the papers I've looked at. Yesterday it was imposssible, today it was just in the wrong orbit with no docking ring.

[Andrew1999]

Hollywood-style rescue mission ‘implausible, but not by much’
BY MARCIA DUNN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — If liftoff damage to Columbia’s thermal tiles caused the disaster, was the crew doomed from the very start?
Or could NASA have saved all or some of the seven astronauts by trying some Hollywood-style heroics — a potentially suicidal spacewalk, perhaps, or a rescue mission by another shuttle?
Some of the ideas suggested would have been highly impractical, dangerous and perhaps futile.
The shuttle does not carry spare tiles, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration insists that the crew had nothing on board to use to repair or replace missing or broken ones. In any case, the space agency believed at the time that the tile damage was nothing to worry about and thus nothing worth risking a life over.
Still, as James Oberg, a former shuttle flight controller and author who has been bombarded by Armageddon-type rescue ideas by e-mail, said Sunday, "They may be implausible, but not by much." He added, "There’s always the question of miracles."


FOAM STRUCK LEFT WING

NASA knew from the second day of Columbia’s 16-day research mission that a piece of the insulating foam on the external fuel tank peeled off just after liftoff, struck the left wing, and possibly ripped off some of the tiles that keep the ship from burning up when it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere.
A frame-by-frame analysis of launch video and film clearly showed a clump of something streaking away from Columbia 80 seconds into the flight.
Engineers spent days analyzing the situation and saw no reason for concern. Leroy Cain, the flight director in charge of Columbia’s Jan. 16 launch and Saturday’s descent from orbit, assured reporters as much Friday.
Hours after the disaster, shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore acknowledged that NASA might have erred and that wing damage on launch day might have contributed to or even caused Columbia to disintegrate on re-entry.
"It’s one of the areas we’re looking at first, early, to make sure that the investigative team is concentrating on that theory or that set of facts as we are starting to unfold," NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe said Sunday.
Dittemore himself said, "My thoughts are on what we missed, what I missed, to allow this to happen."
Some facts remain:
NASA did not try to examine Columbia’s left wing with high-powered telescopes on the ground, 180 miles below, or with spy satellites. The last time NASA tried that, to check Discovery’s drag-chute compartment during John Glenn’s shuttle flight in 1998, the pictures proved of little use, Dittemore said. Besides, he said, "there was zero we could have done about it."
Similarly, NASA did not ask the crew of the international space station to use its cameras to examine the wing when the two ships passed within a few hundred miles of each other several times over the past two weeks.
NASA did not consider a spacewalk by the crew to inspect the left wing. The astronauts have neither training nor equipment to repair tile damage anywhere on the shuttle, least of all on a relatively inaccessible area like the underside of a wing, Dittemore said.
Could NASA have sent another shuttle to rescue Columbia’s five men and two women?
In theory, yes.
Normally, it takes four months to prepare a shuttle for launch. But in a crisis, shuttle managers say, they perhaps could put together a launch in less than a week if all testing were thrown out the window and a shuttle were already on the pad.
Columbia had enough fuel and supplies to remain in orbit until Wednesday, and the astronauts could have scrimped to stay up another few days beyond that. With shuttle Atlantis ready to be moved to its pad, it theoretically could have been rushed into service, and Columbia’s astronauts could have climbed aboard in a series of spacewalks. If Atlantis flew with the minimum crew of two, it could have accommodated seven more astronauts.
Could Columbia’s astronauts have abandoned ship and climbed aboard the international space station?
Because Columbia was in an entirely different orbit from the space station, it lacked enough fuel to fly to the orbiting outpost. Even if the shuttle could have limped there, it could not have docked. Columbia had no docking ring, since it was never meant to go there. So the shuttle astronauts would have had to float over in space suits to get there.


NO TILE-REPAIR KIT

Could Columbia’s astronauts have gone out on a spacewalk to inspect and perhaps repair their own ship?
That assumes that the astronauts could have rigged up something, Apollo 13-style, to replace the missing tiles. But there was nothing on board, according to Dittemore and others. Back in the early shuttle days, NASA considered a tile-patching kit that was essentially a caulking gun, but the gunk undermined the performance of the tiles and never flew.

[Tolls]

Andrew:
It was also not possible due to the lab inside...the extra weight of that would have made it impossible to get to the ISS on launch...having said that, since it was not launched to dock with the ISS there was no way they were going to be able to get there.

Jack:
(Apolyton ate my reply!)
We could use a ship on the ISS, but that would require all missions to be launched as if they were going to the ISS, otherwise you wouldn't be able to link up (fuel wise) for a rescue attempt. The Columbia mission (for example) would not have been possible.

[Willem]

Originally posted by TheStinger
Have they got any more of the shuttles left that they used to blow up that asteroid. I saw them in the doccumentary Armageddon, I think 1 got home, it looked pretty tough, they should use those instead

I really, really hope you're joking here!

[Tolls]

Andrew:
That article covers most of it.

"...NASA did not ask the crew of the international space station to use its cameras to examine the wing when the two ships passed within a few hundred miles of each other several times over the past two weeks."

But the speed they were passing each other sort of precluded getting a decent look. Even then, does the ISS have cameras that could resolve the STS wing sufficiently to make out damage?

I'm not sure what the James Oberg quote is supposed to say?

[Mad Bomber]

Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless
Ned: Engines are expensive. How were Buran's engines to be recovered?

But maybe "use once and throw away" engines are so much cheaper than ones designed for re-use that it's cost-effective to use them. I doubt if they're as safe though.

As for shuttles abandoned in orbit: the Russians managed to land Buran on autopilot. Maybe NASA should consider that. Inspect each shuttle in space with an EVA, and if there's a problem, transfer the astronauts to the ISS or another spacecraft and try to land it on autopilot. If it burns up, you've only lost a shuttle that would have been useless anyhow.

The shuttle lands on auto-pilot, the pilot in re-entry keeps one eye on the flight controls (in case of failure of auto-pilot) and the other on the view.

[Dis]

Yes we still have 3 more shuttles we can use to land on an Asteroid and drill and plant bomb if such a need arises like in the documentary Armageddon.

[Ned]

I am still bothered by the fact that I woke up at 5:52, the very moment that the shuttle was directly overhead and began to break up. Could one of the crew reacted to whatever happened and I sensed his our her reaction? We will never know. But, this is more than strange.

[uh Clem]

CNN now saying they've isolated the problem: