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Not to recover 7 astronauts. And that only matters if they were prepared to launch inside of 14 days, which the vast majority of vehicles are not. Regardless,
by secstate 11y ago
Not to recover 7 astronauts. And that only matters if they were prepared to launch inside of 14 days, which the vast majority of vehicles are not.
Regardless, the Soyuz can only hold 110 lbs of extra weight beyond three crew members. So they'd need almost as many skeleton-crew Soyuz modules as there were crew aboard Columbia.
- Grishnakh 11y agoMaybe they could have shipped additional supplies on the Soyuz up to transfer to the Shuttle, to keep the remaining crew alive for enough time to prep additional STS or Soyuz launches to bring them back. Or maybe send up some supplies for them to attempt a repair on the wing in-orbit.
- erbo 11y agoUnlikely. There would have had to have been a Soyuz almost ready to go that could be used for the purpose, and there wasn't. I'm also not sure that a Soyuz could have been launched from Baikonur into the orbital plane that Columbia was flying in; they commonly launch into the ISS' orbital plane, and we already know Columbia couldn't have gotten there. And, even if you could get a Soyuz there in time, Columbia wasn't equipped for retrieving supplies from another spacecraft. It wasn't carrying a RMS robot arm, for instance, nor did they have any SAFER jetpacks for their pressure suits. Getting supplies out of another spacecraft, even one nearby, without either of those would be tricky at best...maybe too tricky for a crew already possibly suffering from partial CO2 poisoning.