Columbia astronauts weren't told of malfunction

[MichaeltheGreat]

That's a bogus argument. The Russians have managed to create a system that is two orders of magnitude or so safer with 1950s technology that was an order of magnitude or more cheaper.

Not quite. They managed to conceal their losses through the Boctok program. The Russians still have no capability of pulling off something like a Hubble Servicing Mission. I'm surprised you'd buy into the "order of magnitude cheaper" part too, since most of the design and development and tooling work was done in the Soviet era, with all the inherent cost distortions that entailed. They were cheaper, yes, but once you take USSR cost games out of the equation, it was a lot closer to you pay for what you get.

STS had serious safety issues, obviously, and those certainly could have been better anticipated and designed around, but the STS program was the most capable space vehicle in the world for over 20 years, and nobody has an equally capable replacement yet.

[MRT144]

Nope, air supply would have run out long before. It would have taken weeks to get another shuttle up, and they didn't have sufficient fuel for the onboard engines to shift orbits to approach ISS. Soyuz craft, even if available, could only have taken off two at a time, and there was no means to direct dock a Soyuz to Columbia.

Couldnt they have shot up canisters of 02

[Alexander's Horse]

I'm glad they didn't show the worst part, for the sake of the families.

[MichaeltheGreat]

No way to retrieve it and nothing ready for launch here or at Baikonur. The thinking was that if they get into orbit, they're ok. Any critical damage would take effect before they got that far. Once in orbit, there was active tracking of space junk, but they could either maneuver to avoid, or worst case, invert the shuttle's attitude in orbit (which was done frequently depending on the specifice of a mission - they could orbit inverted or leading with the rear of the spacecraft rather than the front, so that any hit would affect less critical components.

The idea that you'd absorb fatal damage on launch, get into orbit just fine, carry out your mission, but be SOL simply didn't occur to NASA, or was rejected as too far-fetched. The real tragedy of both Challenger and Columbia was that the losses were avoidable.

[MichaeltheGreat]

I'm glad they didn't show the worst part, for the sake of the families.

Shortly after the wing deformed and then came apart, they started pitching and rolling. They started losing power right after that as the fuel cells in the rear of the spacecraft sheared off their mountings. The camera stopped working at that time or slightly before, as it was on a non-critical power feed without live backup provisions.

The second official report that came out several years after focused on the crew's experience, cause of death info and crew compartment and procedural issues that affected survivability. Pretty disturbing stuff. The only "good" side to it was that unconsciousness and death came pretty quickly.

[DanS]

Hey, Horse. Good to see you around.

STS had serious safety issues, obviously, and those certainly could have been better anticipated and designed around, but the STS program was the most capable space vehicle in the world for over 20 years, and nobody has an equally capable replacement yet.

It was capable, but it was certainly a deathtrap. It was a faulty design. Bad engineering, despite its capability. A real astronaut-killer.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Because it did a lot of things that nothing else in the world could do.

The engineering wasn't bad - it was the management and culture. The O-ring issue was known and ignored, the fragility of the tiles was known and discounted, the icing/foam issues on the ET were known and ignored. A proper safety culture among management would have directed that those issues be fixed and no launches out of window, period, and schedule be damned. I'd say you had a deathtrap culture and mindset, and a vehicle design with some flaws, but all fixable.

[DanS]

The management and culture allowed a death trap to be designed and built. I'm talking mid-to-late 70s, not the 80s or 00s.

Rockets will blow up and have other anomalies. The Shuttle was not engineered to account for this fact.

[snoopy369]

I don't understand not telling them. Was Apollo 13 that long ago? Who knows what kind of idea the crew might've come up with in the time they had.

[MichaeltheGreat]

You engineer the rockets for that, not the vehicle carried by the rockets. The SRB O-rings were fine, within the temperature window specified by Morton-Thiokol. NASA just plain blew that one apart, no pun intended. Way out of the window, they knew it, but didn't give a **** and nobody had the balls to make a stand.

The ET foam containment is problematic, but it's light, low density stuff. Once it was known (about the second mission) that the stuff tended to break off with vibration and ice strikes immediately at liftoff, then better imaging and having EVA capability and the later-developed "tile bondo" kit would have been cheap fixes that likely would have avoided the Challenger issue. Another, more expensive, but feasible approach would have been to tell NRO to go **** themselves and put their payloads up with Deltas, and do the robotic arm conversion to Challenger, so that you had a non-EVA organic means to image the exterior of the spacecraft.

I'm not saying you had a great design by any means, but there was a workable design which could have been made much safer.

[MichaeltheGreat]

I don't understand not telling them. Was Apollo 13 that long ago? Who knows what kind of idea the crew might've come up with in the time they had.

Apollo 13 was lucky. There was literally nothing the Challenger crew could have done - they weren't equipped for EVA and they had no material to patch the thermal tiles.

[DanS]

You must engineer your spaceship so that it doesn't kill the astronauts if something bad happens with the rocket. To not do so is bad engineering. This seems obvious.

I'm surprised that you're focusing on the relatively much smaller issues. There are lots of things that can happen like the o-rings.

[MichaeltheGreat]

If the rocket goes kablooey, you won't even have time to kiss your ass goodbye. Those cute little escape rockets they had on Mercury, etc., were just feel good items.

Crew safety was really not that bad in many respects. Challenger's crew compartment survived intact. The points of vulnerability in the system were those things that could come apart by design, plus the insulating foam on the ET. That was problematic, due to extreme G force, vibration, and the shape/size change of the ET essentially popping loose foam from the inside out. Ice accumulation prior to launch was an issue with temperature, humidity, and time from ET fill to launch.

The other big problem, for which there wasn't any good alternative, was the use of RCC on wing leading edges. (nose damage was less likely and resulted in less vulnerability. RCC has great thermal properties, but it's impact resistance is non-existant.

The flaws in the design were small-scale stuff, not large scale.

[Alexander's Horse]

this is why astronauts were heroes to my generation

[MichaeltheGreat]

I've had the privilege of meeting and talking with four. Every one of them thoroughly impressive.