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A rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

• fredgrott 13y ago
  hmm a launch rescue plan with no room for error from NSA..speed up even..What we want two disasters with one month? Someone's not dealing with reality wish full thinking
  • PakG1 13y ago
    The CAIB asked for options for a hypothetical scenario. They were given options for a hypothetical scenario. It's unknown whether anyone would have had the guts to actually try to do it if the opportunity arose. Furthermore, sacrifice for the sake of rescue is one of the better aspects of humanity that is respected. Otherwise, all risky rescue missions should not happen.
    • fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      It's unknown whether anyone would have had the guts to actually try to do it if the opportunity arose. I'll wager that Astronaut crews would have fought each other for the job, same for ground control staff. NASA managers? Obviously not.
    • gsnedders 13y ago
      A large part of the CAIB's asking will have been based upon the question of, "could NASA have done more to avoid the fatalities, after the issue had arisen?". If the conclusion of the hypothetical scenario was they could not have launched another craft in time, then it is obvious that, even had NASA known the extent of the damage of Columbia, they would have had no means to bring the crew back safely (though, of course, an Atlantis-based rescue mission wouldn't, per-se, be any safer, because Atlantis could easily fall foul of the same issue Columbia had).
  • mortov 13y ago
    The reality would be that if people knew of the extreme threat to life which existed, they would look to leaders such as the President and NASA to show they valued that life. While in a military command and control situation it 'makes sense' to say these people are already lost, we just abandon them and move on, that would not be acceptable to the general public as that's not how things are perceived. Indeed, it would almost certainly destroy the ability of NASA to continue if they were seen to be so impotent and incapable of doing anything when things go wrong. A dramatic, high risk rescue attempt would possibly be the only option, even if that itself ended in disaster and death of all involved (a real risk according to the theoretical plan). I think the public would have been more at ease knowing that a real rescue attempt was made and that genuine heroes had made the ultimate sacrifice in an attempt to save their colleages. People are all mushy and emotional like that. Would it have made sense in terms of risk assessment, as a direct risk-reward evaluation ? Clearly not. But it's not always about that. Besides, this is an alternative time-line scenario which never was. Those always have the benefit of working just like in feel-good Hollywood movies.
  • mikeash 13y ago
    They didn't even try. If you study the problem and start prepping and when the time comes you decide it's too risky, that's one thing. But to just blow off the idea without even looking into it is not smart.
    • DEinspanjer 13y ago
      They surely made a mistake, but I don't believe it is what you are accusing them of here. They had a long history of debris strikes in previous launches. They did not know that there was catastrophic damage to the wing's heat shield. They noticed the strike after the shuttle was in orbit. They elected not to disrupt the schedule of the crew or request additional observation resources (i.e. ground telescopes) to inspect it, and instead, they did some mathematics modeling of the strike which ended up being inconclusive, so they chose not to spend more time and money investigate further. That is not the same as thinking they knew there was a problem and the astronauts were doomed but they decided not to even bother trying to rescue them.
      • mikeash 13y ago
        A lot of the "didn't even try" is buried in your "elected not to" phrasing. Yes, they didn't check out the damage visually, which is another way of saying they didn't even try to assess the damage. At least part of that decision seems to have been driven by the fatalistic idea that a rescue was impossible and so it didn't really matter. Also, I reach the opposite conclusion you do from "a long history of debris strikes". To me, this says that they absolutely knew there was a problem, and had known it for a very long time, but merely got used to it and dismissed it due to the ridiculous idea that it's OK to ignore if it hasn't killed anybody in the past. That history makes them look worse, not better. Same thing happened with Challenger and the O-ring leaks. The leaks were a serious problem and smart people said as much, but the concerns were dismissed on the basis that previous flights hadn't exploded so the leaks must not be serious.
        • dandelany 13y ago
          Agreed. From wikipedia - "Engineers made three separate requests for Department of Defense (DOD) imaging of the shuttle in orbit to more precisely determine damage. While the images were not guaranteed to show the damage, the capability existed for imaging of sufficient resolution to provide meaningful examination. NASA management did not honor the requests and in some cases intervened to stop the DOD from assisting."
  • krstck 13y ago
    The importance of designing the rescue plan was not simply wishful thinking, but to prevent future disasters. After Columbia, a rescue mission was planned alongside each shuttle launch in case this happened again (it didn't).
• mrfusion 13y ago
  Would the ISS have had enough fuel to match the shuttles orbit? I wonder if that was considered?
  • ceejayoz 13y ago
    I'd imagine that's pretty unlikely. They don't move it around much, just raise its orbit occasionally, and it gets regular visits from cargo ships so they don't need to keep large supplies of fuel onboard. Its much larger mass would be an issue, too.
    • gsnedders 13y ago
      Orbital changes of the ISS are typically done by firing the rockets of docked space-craft rather than the ISS's own rockets.
  • afreak 13y ago
    The ISS is considerably higher up in orbit and as a result would have to cover more distance. It does not have enough fuel.
    • outworlder 13y ago
      Plane changes at higher orbits cost less. In fact, one of the ways to do them cheaper is to burn fuel to raise the apogee, plane change, then burn back. Still, the ISS just can't do that.
  • Thrymr 13y ago
    Not even close. The ISS is not a vehicle, it only has a limited amount of fuel for boosting its orbit. And even another spacecraft in the ISS orbit would take a vast amount of fuel to match altitude and inclination of the shuttle orbit.
• mrfusion 13y ago
  I wonder if a smaller rocket could have been repurposed to simply send extra supplies to the shuttle (or a repair kit) while they waited for rescue? Maybe a soyez? Even if it couldn't dock with the shuttle, I wonder if it could match orbit and then do a space walk to retrieve the supplies?
  • pilsetnieks 13y ago
    > soyez I take it you have been watching Gravity?
  • Mvandenbergh 13y ago
    Rockets launched from the Soyuz launch site in Kazakhstan cannot reach orbits with an inclination of 39 degrees so there's no way that they could have reached the orbiter from there. An Ariane launch from French Guiana could have worked and there was a rocket there that launched a satellite shortly afterwards but that would have required fabricating a supply vehicle with automatic guidance and navigation capable of docking to the orbiter by itself. (Ignoring for the moment that the orbiter didn't even have an external airlock with docking collar installed.)
    • avmich 13y ago
      Proton rocket with DM booster and Zond - a version of Soyuz spacecraft, without the orbital module - was launched multiple times in 1960s. DM adds about 3 km/s deltaV. Baikonur latitude is 46N, to get to 39N one needs to change orbital plane for 7 degrees, sin(7)*8 km/s is about 1 km/s. So there could be some options there.
      • tanzam75 13y ago
        If you launch from Baikonur directly into a 46° orbit, you will drop spent rocket stages on China. That is why the Russians launch into a 51° orbit, even though their launch site is at 46°. With a Proton, you have enough delta-v to launch into 51° and then make a change of plane to 39°. But the Russians don't just have three Protons and three Soyuzes sitting around, ready to launch. They have to schedule these things. The Soyuz is normally not launched on a Proton these days -- not since the 1970s. They'd have to jury-rig a bunch of things. It would not necessarily have been safer than a NASA Shuttle rescue.
• natejenkins 13y ago
  I've always found the relative impact velocity of the foam piece with respect to the shuttle quite surprising. There is some clarification of this in the CAIB report, chapter 3, page 60 (http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/CAIB_Vol1.html http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/CAIB_Vol1.html): THE ORBITER “RAN INTO” THE FOAM “How could a lightweight piece of foam travel so fast and hit the wing at 545 miles per hour?” Just prior to separating from the External Tank, the foam was traveling with the Shuttle stack at about 1,568 mph (2,300 feet per second). Visual evidence shows that the foam de- bris impacted the wing approximately 0.161 seconds after separating from the External Tank. In that time, the velocity of the foam debris slowed from 1,568 mph to about 1,022 mph (1,500 feet per second). Therefore, the Orbiter hit the foam with a relative velocity of about 545 mph (800 feet per second). In essence, the foam debris slowed down and the Orbiter did not, so the Orbiter ran into the foam. The foam slowed down rapidly because such low-density objects have low ballistic coefficients, which means their speed rapidly decreases when they lose their means of propulsion.
  • grecy 13y ago
    It boggles the mind. I'm also extremely curious to know how much the Shuttle stack accelerated during those 0.161 seconds the foam wasn't attached to it...
    • mikeash 13y ago
      Not a whole lot. The Shuttle's max acceleration during launch was around 3 gees, and at this phase I believe it was more like 2.5 gees. 0.161 seconds at 3 gees is under 5 meters/second change in speed.
      • grecy 13y ago
        Thanks very much. I had always assumed the Shuttle's max acceleration was a lot higher than that, given how fast the thing seems to get moving in such a short amount of time.
        • mikeash 13y ago
• sxcurry 13y ago
  For those interested in a technically detailed fictional account of a rescue mission to Mars, read The Martian by Andy Weir. It raises some of the same feelings as this article.
  • eudox 13y ago
    For those interested in a pretty ok movie, Marooned (1969) is about the rescue of astronauts unable to de-orbit after spending months in a space station.
    • dandrews 13y ago
      Sorry to disagree, but the movie is kind of meh. Read Marty Caidin's book instead. It's hard to put down, and contains a nice section concerning Jim Pruett's finishing school that makes you want to become a pilot yourself.
      • Shorel 13y ago
        Why not both? I find easier to imagine the characters in a book if I have seen someone portraying them before. Actually, the full movie is not necessary, a trailer will do.
  • rkuykendall-com 13y ago
    Note: This is the same Andy Weir who wrote the short story "The Egg" [1] which is often posted to Hacker News [2,3]. [1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489497 (1331 days ago) [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095 (17 days ago)
  • DanHulton 13y ago
    I'm actually reading it right now, and it's kind of eerie reading the things discussed in the article at the same time as the main character in the book is considering them.
• skywhopper 13y ago
  Interesting to remember the Columbia tragedy while recalling Richard Feynman's report summarizing the culture problems at NASA he found following the Challenger disaster. It's clear that NASA ultimately learned very little (or forgot it after 15 years). No matter the state of the shuttle program, it's also a shame that NASA didn't maintain a non-reusable rocket system that could have allowed for expensive but relatively low-risk emergency flights for this sort of thing. If the shuttle's all you've got then it's going to be difficult to address unexpected problems with another shuttle just like it.
  • eudox 13y ago
    I wish something like the ATV SSTO[0] had been built. A small, reusable, single-stage-to-orbit crew transport. [0] http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/atv.htm http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/atv.htm
  • jedc 13y ago
    It seems NASA's safety culture erodes in cycles: Apollo 1 fire - 27 January 1967 Challenger disaster - 28 January 1986 (19 yrs later) Colombia disaster - 1 February 2003 (17 yrs later) There's probably an interesting thought experiment around organizational behavior and deterioration of standards in the cycle time here...
    • HelloMcFly 13y ago
      If you're interested in the topic I recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Challenger-Columbia-Organizational-Communication/dp/0195330447/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1393437485&sr=8-1&keywords=Apollo%2C+Challenger%2C+Columbia http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Challenger-Columbia-Organizatio... Tompkins looks at the differences in what went wrong culturally between Challenger and Columbia. Pretty fascinating.
    • jmount 13y ago
      Henry Petroski has a 30 failure cycle for bridge technologies (see http://www.amazon.com/Success-through-Failure-Paradox-Design/dp/0691136424 http://www.amazon.com/Success-through-Failure-Paradox-Design... ).
• snowwolf 13y ago
  What surprises me is that this contingency was not already in place prior to the Columbia accident. Was it budget constraints or did they really think it was that unlikely that a shuttle would be rendered unable to return from orbit and need the crew rescuing?
  • grecy 13y ago
    I think more likely, at some point, you just have to accept the risk. How far do you take it? 4 launch vehicles all on standby ready to rescue the one before it? Is 3 enough? Maybe 2? Up until then, they had obviously calculated and accepted the risk of having no standby.
    • pwnna 13y ago
      So at one point NASA did have a second shuttle on standby. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-125#Contingency_mission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-125#Contingency_mission
      • grecy 13y ago
        Right, that was after the incident in question. So obviously before the incident they were accepting the risk of no standby, where-as they revised that and decided that for a particular mission where using the ISS as a life-boat was not an option, they needed a standby to accept the risk.
• ryanackley 13y ago
  Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. If we sent a successful rescue mission, we would instead be reading an article entitled. "Columbia Rescue: NASA's finest hour or giant waste of taxpayer's dollars?" with a bunch of supporting evidence on why the rescue was unnecessary.
  • venomsnake 13y ago
    Doubtful. Appolo 13 showed that the public really likes bringing the astronauts alive. And even the most fervent republicans will have hard time presenting saving the lives as waste.
    • ArcticCelt 13y ago
      OP Is not saying that the media would claim that saving their lives was a waste of money, he is saying that the media would claim that their life were never in danger in the first place.
      • Crito 13y ago
        The unmanned Columbia orbiter would still burn up a few [weeks/months?] later. Of course even an intact unmanned NASA Space Shuttle would burn up... but since we are hypothesising irrational reactions the emotional impact of seeing the unmanned orbiter burn up on TV would have likely stemmed much of the criticism. All NASA would have to do is point to the pictures of a burning up unmanned Columbia and say, "With or without people on it, that was going to happen." Particularly after Challenger, I think it would be pretty easy to dismiss any talking heads that criticised the rescue mission as total asshats.
        • deleted 13y ago
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    • blisterpeanuts 13y ago
      >> even the most fervent republicans God, how I despise it when people have to bring their petty partisan politics into every discussion. No sane person in the United States of whatever political party or creed would have said a rescue mission that had a reasonable chance of success was not worth the money and risk. [EDIT] Assuming it was understood that the spacecraft was in mortal danger. According to the article, it would have been highly unlikely that the Atlantis could have rescued the Columbia astronauts. Possible, but just barely. Should they have tried? Maybe. Should they have planned for the contingency? Of course--if they had an extra couple billion dollars budget for such a project. 20-20 hindsight. You can't go to space on the cheap. The old Nasa slogan to promote the Shuttle--faster, better, cheaper--is proven incorrect by historical events. You can have 2 of those, not all 3.
• deleted 13y ago
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  • barkingcat 13y ago
    Lack of energy budget. You should read the article. It's a good story. "Columbia's 39 degree orbital inclination could not have been altered to the ISS 51.6 degree inclination without approximately 12,600 ft/sec of translational capability. Columbia had 448 ft/sec of propellant available." Columbia had 3% of the propellant needed in order to get to the ISS - the article says that sometimes to execute a plane change it may take more than the energy needed to get an object into space in the first place.
    • mikeash 13y ago
      Nitpick (that doesn't change your conclusion at all): they had 3% of the delta-v needed to get to the ISS. Fuel requirements increase exponentially with delta-v, so it was actually way less than 3% of the required fuel.
  • cecilpl 13y ago
    That would have required a plane change maneuvre that cost much more propellent than they had on board.
• rdl 13y ago
  Seems like they could have rushed the development of RCO to allow a shot at bringing the empty Columbia back, too. In parallel with all the other preparation efforts, fast-tracking something like that where an already-100%-written-off craft might get saved seems worthwhile.
  • gus_massa 13y ago
    In an emergency like that, you just put all your engineers and technicians to work in whatever is critical to save the crew. If you have some spare personal, you put them in whatever is very important. Don't worry, you would not have enough people to cover the important task, you must hope that they doesn't mater.
• thearn4 13y ago
  It's really difficult to imagine the proposed approach panning out as intended - the infrastructure for STS wasn't set up for really quick turn arounds. STS's conceptual design was pitched that way (shuttles going up several times a week), but that didn't pan out in design. And the Challenger accident can be blamed in part on a management culture that took too long to accept their engineers telling them that. As terrible as the Columbia accident was, I think this approach (with so many checks skipped to get Atlantis up as quick as possible) would have ended in the loss of both crews & orbiters. And I think if the Columbia crew knew the full extent of the situation, and also knew of this sort of rescue in the works, they probably would have pressed mission control to just let them try the re-entry themselves.
  • krstck 13y ago
    > As terrible as the Columbia accident was, I think this approach (with so many checks skipped to get Atlantis up as quick as possible) would have ended in the loss of both crews & orbiters. Agreed. The article touches on the fact that the Columbia disaster has its roots in decisions that were made far in advance of its final launch. Not that this excuses what happened, but I almost wonder if the reason the photographs of the damage were never taken ("miscommunication") was that the people involved knew there was no possibility of rescue, so better to not know and hope for the best.
    • twoodfin 13y ago
      The Wikipedia article on the disaster[1] strongly suggests that this kind of fatalism had permeated the culture: Throughout the risk assessment process, senior NASA managers were influenced by their belief that nothing could be done even if damage were detected. This affected their stance on investigation urgency, thoroughness and possible contingency actions. They decided to conduct a parametric "what-if" scenario study more suited to determine risk probabilities of future events, instead of inspecting and assessing the actual damage. The investigation report in particular singled out NASA manager Linda Ham for exhibiting this attitude. In 2013, Hale recalled that Director of Mission Operations John Harpold told him before Columbia's destruction: "You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS [Thermal Protection System]. If it has been damaged it's probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don't you think it would be better for them to have a happy successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done, until the air ran out?" Hale added, "I was hard pressed to disagree [at the time]. That mindset was widespread. Astronauts agreed. So don't blame an individual; look for the organizational factors that lead to that kind of a mindset. Don't let them in your organization." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster
• grecy 13y ago
  Wow, I devoured every word of that article with baited breath. One of the most amazing stories of fiction intertwined with actual events I've ever read. I wonder how much years will have to pass before it would be acceptable to make this fictional rescue mission into a movie..? The obvious issue would be everyone walking out of the theater saying "Jeezz, NASA should have obviously done that, idiots. They killed those astronauts because they didn't do that."
  • qwerta 13y ago
    Read Voyage and Titan from Stephen Baxter. He was an astronaut candidate and write two great books about NASA.
  • philwelch 13y ago
    Of course, the thousands of scenarios where something goes horribly wrong all make for terrible movies.
    • grecy 13y ago
      Yeah, but that wouldn't be the movie. Obviously it could focus on them and have many, many narrow misses, but we all know it would still have the Hollywood ending.
    • ytNumbers 13y ago
      Yeah. A movie like that might only get ten Academy Award nominations. http://gravitymovie.warnerbros.com/ http://gravitymovie.warnerbros.com/
      • philwelch 13y ago
        The girl made it home (despite being like the worst astronaut ever) so it still counts as a happy ending.
      • brc 13y ago
        The article for me pointed out just how unlikely the entire movie is. I already knew there were a lot of impossibilities in Gravity (changing orbital planes etc) - but reading just how much work it takes to keep two orbiters aligned, and how much work it is to get into and out of a spacesuit. In the movie she gets out of one space suit and then into another, and then out of it again. That right there is impossible from the reading.
• lini 13y ago
  If you are interested in the Columbia events, check out Wayne Hale's blog[1]. He was a flight director/space shuttle program manager and offers a very detailed recollection of the events from inside mission control. [1] https://waynehale.wordpress.com/ https://waynehale.wordpress.com/
• geuis 13y ago
  I loved this article. Teared up a few times thinking about how things could have gone differently. I had an opportunity to tour Kennedy Space Center in December. I think many people have this idea that the NASA of today is a shadow of itself and that it's stagnating. I had an opinion something like that. To my surprise, NASA is in the middle of some very interesting work. They've completed a new gantry/launch tower for their next generation of rockets which will be close to or bigger than the Saturn V. Several of the launch pads have been completely retrofitted. There's a lot of cool activity going on that we'll start seeing on the big stage in the next couple of years. It was heart breaking to see one of the shuttles hanging in the museum. They really are beautiful, utterly massive machines. You can only get a sense of loss looking at them, feeling that we're missing something big by having removed them from service. But looking back, despite their majesty the shuttles took a lot of work to do relatively little. (Little in this context is still a huge amount.) It was time to retire them. I'm cautiously optimistic about NASA's future. The idea of being more of a support role for commercial manned space may seem beneath them, but it's not. They will continue doing the types of projects that are impossible for companies, including manned missions.
  • gus_massa 13y ago
    > It was heart breaking to see one of the shuttles hanging in the museum. They really are beautiful, utterly massive machines. You can only get a sense of loss looking at them, feeling that we're missing something big by having removed them from service. I think this is the main problem with the space shuttle. They look good in a museum. They look good in a postcard. They have a mix of cutting edge, unproven, easy to break technology. They are a dead trap and explode in 1/50 launches. According to Wikipedia the Soyuz have 4 dead astronauts, in 1700 launches. (No deads since 1971, and they change the model, so the new model perhaps is safer or perhaps they are lucky.) But they are "cheating", because most of the missions are unmanned. When they explode, usually nobody dies. The death rate is also approximately 1/50, But they only put humans when it's necessary.
    • sentenza 13y ago
      When visiting the Technikmuseum Speyer recently, I had the opportunity to see an actual Buran, the Russian Space Shuttle, on display. Today, it is easy to forget that the Russians percieved the Space Shuttle as a weapons platform. The tactical advantage of "coming out of space" to deliver a payload made them build their Space Shuttle clone. Buran never had any civilian purpose. After all, they were quite happy with Soyuz for all research purposes.
• blisterpeanuts 13y ago
  Very good article, clears up a lot of questions, doubts, and misconceptions. It seems to me that the problems with the Shuttle program always came down to money. The Nixon Administration denied Nasa the necessary budget to build the larger reusable vehicle they originally envisioned, while simultaneously scrapping the Saturn manned program. As a space nut since basically I was 5 or 6 years old, when America was in its heyday of Gemini and Apollo programs (I was 10 when Apollo 11 astronauts kicked up lunar dust), space exploration was a given to me and all of my friends. It was assumed that we would just keep on building and growing our space program until we got to something that resembled Clarke/Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps we wouldn't make it by 2001, but some time not too far beyond then. Maybe 2011. Maybe 2015. It therefore makes me sad that we've been in this hiatus since about 1974, really 40 years of treading water rather than building much on the accomplishments of the past. Why not a permanent station on the moon? Why not a nuclear propulsion system that could get to Mars in 6 weeks? What have we done instead with our money, that is so much more worthwhile? Why was Nasa denied the $4 billion it needed to continue the Constellation program, while literally hundreds of billions were allocated for bank bailouts, automotive bailouts, etc.? Where are our priorities? I know these are controversial questions and there are probably some good answers out there, but I go back to the lost dreams, the sacrifices made by the Columbia and Challenger astronauts and others, and I wonder if we haven't traded big dreams for little ones and lost sight along the way of what we're all about.
  • Sharlin 13y ago
    Money, and in the end, politics. The Shuttle, as implemented, was not really what NASA wanted, but they needed to make design compromises to support certain use cases the Air Force told they need, including launching spy satellites to polar orbits and potentially capturing enemy satellites and bringing them down in one piece. The compromises were made but the Air Force had changed their mind in the meantime and those use cases were never actualized.
    • blisterpeanuts 13y ago
      True. But, really, in the end, money. The Air Force could have contracted its own shuttle that was optimized for its needs, given enough budget.
• arnold_palmur 13y ago
  This is the best article I've read in a long time - wonderful read on such an incredible and yet tragic topic.
• bfe 13y ago
  Reminds me of what Neil Armstrong said, when asked what he would do if an engine on Eagle broke and there was no chance they could return from the Moon: "I would try to fix it."
• wtrsld 13y ago
  This super sad. Amazing that foam is what caused it.
• Arjuna 13y ago
  When the Space Shuttle program was decommissioned in 2011, the U.S. lost human spaceflight capability. We are at a point in U.S. history that is similar to the human spaceflight gap that existed between the Apollo program and the Space Shuttle program. There is an American flag that flew on-board STS-1. It was left on display in the ISS by the crew of STS-135. It is awaiting return to the U.S. by the next American crew that is launched from the U.S. I do my best to embrace the concept of being a citizen of the world rather than of a specific country, but I can't help feeling a little patriotic. Like many of you, I grew up watching the Space Shuttle launches; all of those memories of both the successful launches and the tragic losses. That zeitgeist you grew up with, seeing those launches: it indelibly marked young people like us, with the knowledge and firm belief that, anything is possible through science and technology, perhaps even more so because it was during that time that we were teaching ourselves to program on our Commodore 64, Atari 800, etc. Perhaps this feeling is heightened for me now, because in the U.S., I think there has been an under-current feeling for some time now, that could be paraphrased as, "Where are we heading, as a nation?" I still believe in those child-hood dreams, and my eyes get a little misty, thinking of when we will launch into space and bring that flag home.
  • JulianMorrison 13y ago
    SpaceX has done low earth orbit, geosynchronous transfer orbit, and is working on reusable self-landing first stages and human spaceflight. Out of them and NASA, I expect SpaceX to get there first.
  • lotsofmangos 13y ago
    When the Space Shuttle program was decommissioned in 2011, the U.S. lost human spaceflight capability. The real problem is that there are so many people who either don't care or think space exploration is a bad thing. If you look at some polls you get half of all people polled not knowing that Armstrong landed on the moon and a fairly clear majority opposing the idea of spending public money on going to Mars. http://www.gallup.com/poll/3712/landing-man-moon-publics-view.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/3712/landing-man-moon-publics-vie... So now there is the situation that NASA lost the ability to get people into space and only the nerds complained. It is going to be very difficult politically to get that capability back.
• iamwithnail 13y ago
  Genuinely one of the most interesting things I've read in a long time.
• ThomPete 13y ago
  Edward Tufte had his own information design take on this. http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
• deleted 13y ago
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• stormbrew 13y ago
  One thing not covered in this article (and maybe the CAIB report? I don't know) is whether the Russians could have done something useful in the rescue. Could enough fuel and scrubber tanks have been boosted to Columbia on a Soyuz or Progress to get it up to the ISS?
  • tanzam75 13y ago
    > One thing not covered in this article (and maybe the CAIB report? I don't know) is whether the Russians could have done something useful in the rescue. Could enough fuel and scrubber tanks have been boosted to Columbia on a Soyuz or Progress to get it up to the ISS? No. On STS-107, Columbia was launched into a 39° orbit. The ISS is at an inclination of 51°. It is very expensive to make an in-orbit change-of-plane. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that you would need 50,000 kg of fuel to change the orbit of an empty Shuttle from 39° to 51°. The Progress M has a cargo capacity of 2600 kg -- and the Russians launch one every two months. 20 Progresses all at once wouldn't have been very practical. If you were going to attempt a rendezvous with Columbia from Baikonur, it would be better to send Soyuzes and bring them down two-at-a-time. The Russians do have the Soyuz on an assembly line, but I don't think they have four of them just sitting around.
    • stormbrew 13y ago
      This is a bit confusing. Since Columbia the contingency plan for all of the shuttles (except one, which was to the Hubble) was apparently to have them go to the ISS and wait there for rescue from the standby shuttle (or later the next mission once the ISS was fully complete). Was Columbia at an unusual inclination for a shuttle mission? [edit] Answered my own question, this does seem to be the case. At least for the missions after STS-107.
      • tanzam75 13y ago
        > Was Columbia at an unusual inclination for a shuttle mission? Here's the breakdown of orbital inclinations for Shuttle missions: 28.3-28.8 53 34.3 1 38.0-40.3 11 49.4 1 51.3-51.6 47 56.9-57.0 20 61.9 1 Not orbited 1 As you can see, 89% of Shuttle launches went to: around 28.5° to deploy satellites around 51.6° to reach Mir or ISS around 57.0° for earth observation
• vl 13y ago
  So, after watching Gravity. Would they have enough fuel to change orbit to dock to ISS? If not, would there be enough fuel in Soyuz to undoc, change orbit to Shuttle's and then either re-dock or re-entry? In terms of safety, it appears that shuttle program became somewhat barbaric by reasonable standards of 21st century. If primary vehicle lost re-entry capability, there should be back up plan for re-suppling it until back up vehicle is ready to take people back. I.e. if failure of Soyuz detected before departing from ISS, they can always sit it out and wait for next one while being resullplied by automatic Progresses.
  • scott_s 13y ago
    No. From page 2: An oft-asked question is whether or not Columbia could have docked with the ISS, which would have had consumables to spare. There are numerous reasons why this would not have been possible, but the overriding one comes down to simple physics: Columbia would have had to execute what is known in orbital mechanics terminology as a "plane change" maneuver—applying thrust perpendicular to its orbital track in order to shift to match the ISS' inclination. Plane change maneuvers require tremendous amounts of energy—in some cases, even more energy than was required to launch the spacecraft in the first place. Appendix D.13 dismisses the possibility of an ISS rendezvous with just two sentences: "Columbia's 39 degree orbital inclination could not have been altered to the ISS 51.6 degree inclination without approximately 12,600 ft/sec of translational capability. Columbia had 448 ft/sec of propellant available." For the record, it wasn't possible in Gravity, either.
    • vl 13y ago
      Well, physics education definitely spoils Gravity somewhat. They tried to do bunch of stuff in realistic manner and crossed into "uncanny valley" of movie realism. During the movie I was "why medical doctor is servicing Hubble?", "no, you are not going to see it coming", "no, don't remove helmet when there is fire in the cabin!" And, more importantly, "all three of them on the same orbit sequentially if they can go from one to another?". Basically movie implies that. Of course the question is how they got Hubble on the same orbit, since they where servicing it, by theoretically it could have been repositioned during previous missions.
• DavidSJ 13y ago
  As one of my coworkers remarked, if you saw this photo without context you might think we had made it to the future: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Space_shuttles_Atlantis_STS-125_and_Endeavour_STS-400_on_launch_pads.jpg http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Space_...
  • grecy 13y ago
    It's a funny time when you can go to a museum to see the future - space shuttles and faster-than-sound commercial planes.
• WalterBright 13y ago
  I've often wondered if there was some repair the Columbia crew could have done. Anything that the hole could have been stuffed with? What about pulling a tile off of a less critical section, shaping it, and putting it in the hole?
  • marshray 13y ago
    I remember reading in National Geographic as a kid some of the contingencies for the Shuttle. There was a tile repair kit which involved some sort of caulk gun looking thing. There was also a spherical inflatable rescue pod for transferring astronauts in space without a spacesuit.
  • andyjohnson0 13y ago
    Post-Columbia there was some examination of repair options that could have been used if the crew had known about the damage. Some engineers considered it feasible to repair the hole in the wing using material scavenged from Columbia [1] but this was apparently considered very high-risk. The shuttle re-entered at Mach 25 and the leading-edges of the wings were made from titanium because of the extreme thermal and aerodynamic stresses they were subject to, so stuffing a tile (assuming it could be removed, which would have been unlikely) into the hole wouldn't have helped at all. Some repair techniques and tools were developed part of the process of returning the shuttle fleet to flight after the loss of Columbia. These included a caulk-gun to allow in-situ repairs to thermal tiles [2] and a device for plugging holes in leading surfaces such as the wings. These were tested in space but were never needed. [1] http://spaceflightnow.com/columbia/report/rescue.html http://spaceflightnow.com/columbia/report/rescue.html [2] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13521-shuttle-heat-shield-repair-test-a-success.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13521-shuttle-heat-shi...
    • WalterBright 13y ago
      An interesting article. I wonder what tools the crew had available for working metal. Even hand tools would suffice, given the 30 days to work on it. The idea of holding things in place with ice doesn't seem viable to me, ice would melt really fast. I'd go for screws, rivets, bending and hammering, etc., to get a mechanical connection. Basically, just pile on enough metal so that there'll be just enough left as the rest of it burned away.
• avmich 13y ago
  Russia launched about a dozen Proton rockets a year at the time of Columbia disaster, two Soyuz spacecrafts and two-three Progress spacecrafts. Proton used to launch several Soyuz without Orbital Section, called Zond, in 1960s, with booster DM to fly around the Moon. DM adds about 3 km/s of deltaV. Orbital plane change for 7 degrees - between Baikonur's 46 and Columbia's 39 - takes sin(7)*8 km/s = 1 km/s. So technically it could be considered to launch (several) Progress ship(s) with necessary cargos to Columbia while three unmanned Soyuzes would be prepared and sent to the rescue. Soyuz approaches Columbia, gets caught by manipulator, astronauts use spacesuits from Soyuz - which have to be extracted from Soyuz first. ISS, meanwhile, had to be kept without ships, which means landing the crew, hopefully temporarily. All that could be considered. But I don't think anybody high in chain of command considered all of that necessary.
  • Mvandenbergh 13y ago
    I don't think Columbia had a docking collar, did they even have spacesuits on board? If not, they wouldn't have been able to get to the Soyuz to extract anything. You'd have to send up at least one person one the Soyuz to pass the spacesuits into the shuttle airlock. Also, I'm not sure Columbia had a manipulator arm installed at the time. It's heavy and they don't fly with it when they're not going to use it.
    • avmich 13y ago
      Yes, there are problems. Soyuz could fly pretty close to Columbia, but to get to the bay could be tricky. It was not going to be a regular docking - but something for a saving mission. If Soyuz could be taken to the Columbia bay, an astronaut in the Columbia spacesuit could approach Soyuz and open the hatch. Spacesuits could be extracted from Soyuz without entering the spacecraft. Talk about ingenious ideas with rope, attached to the front hatch, etc. The Soyuz spacesuit then is delivered to inside Columbia, where somebody could wear it to get to Soyuz.
• rurounijones 13y ago
  Reading that it looks like the EVA would be a big problem due to getting into the suits. Would someone who is smarter than me comment on the feasibility (In extremis) of just jumping across the 6 meter gap unsuited 1 by 1 with the suited rescuers helping? I have read that a human can survive about 30 seconds of vacuum without permanent damage. What if they huffed pure oxygen for a while before making the attempt so their blood was super-oxygenated before breathing out and making the leap? Would the depressurization / repressurization take too long? Would it take too long for the space-suited rescuers to man-handle them into the airlock? (Would they even be able to align airlocks for a straight jump?) It makes me wonder what would have happened if NASA has a set of minimal protection "short-duration" suits with almost nothing more than pressurization and a small oxygen supply for quick excursions (Like, for example, transferring quickly between two craft as if your live depended on it :p )
  • disposablename 13y ago
    Here's a video of Jim LeBlanc's suit depressurizing during a test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO8L9tKR4CY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO8L9tKR4CY
  • philwelch 13y ago
    If you're going to rush a space shuttle into orbit and do a hundred things that have never been done before on a space mission, things like not wearing a space suit during EVA are fairly stupid risks to take.
    • rurounijones 13y ago
      If you read the original article one of the comments at the end was from an STS engineer expressing his opinion that it would be impossible (not enough propellent, never mind pilot fatigue) for the rescue shuttle to maintain station keeping for the required amount of time to do proper full suited EVAs. Hence my "In extremis" bit at the beginning before thinking about the feasibility of non-suited. I wasn't asking if it was a good idea (It obviously isn't if it can be avoided)