6 ms·

The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

69 points by raphaelj 12y ago

garrettgrimsley 12y ago
This seems like a pretty good look into what the race on Earth in "A Walk in the Sun" would have looked like.
aftbit 12y ago
This was the most depressing quote for me: >It is unlikely that launching a space vehicle will ever be as routine an undertaking as commercial air travel—certainly not in the lifetime of anybody who reads this.
- wyager 12y ago
  Of course, that could certainly be completely incorrect. It seems to me, from casual observation, that the rate of rocket launches is increasing very quickly. We seem to be getting better at it.
  - rgbrenner 12y ago
    > It seems to me, from casual observation, that the rate of rocket launches is increasing very quickly. We seem to be getting better at it. The numbers say otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html
    - pimlottc 12y ago
      > http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html There's no legend on that table; it took me a while to figure out that it's Launches and Failures.
  - morbius 12y ago
    Unmanned launches, yes. Manned spaceflight, and astronauts themselves, have to adhere to extremely strict standards to maintain safety. Those standards cost $$$, time, and require highly educated and resourceful people. The economies just don't scale. It costs a few thousand dollars to fly a transcontinental flight on a 777, and passengers don't have to be trained in all types of contingency situations like astronauts do. The cost for a single Shuttle launch used to be an eight-figure sum. Someday getting to space will be as simple as a transcontinental flight. Unfortunately, rockets aren't the way we're going to get there.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
atonse 12y ago
That seems like an absolute crazy mission, the kind you'd see in a hollywood movie. As long as we're imagining, was there maybe an option C, an EVA from the Columbia crew to just replace some of those tiles? Was that even possible?
- grecy 12y ago
  I assume they didn't have replacement tiles on board, but assuming they did, I wonder if that would have been possible. It also occurs to me they could have sent an unmanned cargo carrier to dock with them with the required tiles and tools - maybe a Soyuz... but then, they could have all just gotten into the Soyuz. There is no mention of the Soyuz in the article. I wonder if they considered that option.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    They are not, and as I recall it was one of the criticisms a friend of mine levelled at the report as well. That by sending up a Soyuz, and using both that module and the backup, they could return 6 people to earth. Then a second and Soyuz mission and the Atlantis mission to replace the backup and return excess crew. Leaving Columbia on orbit awaiting some form of repair or scuttling. Mostly though it re-emphasized how "not routine" going up into space is. Orbital windows not withstanding, you cannot just "decide" to catch the next one and bring up hardware to fly. Something I hope we can get to with Falcon 9 re-use.
    - cthalupa 12y ago
      Soyuz is mentioned in the CAIB report. +++++++++++ 5.2 Other Vehicles (Soyuz, Ariane 4) There has been some discussion regarding the possibility of sending supplies to Columbia using an expendable launch vehicle – to lengthen the amount of time available to execute a rescue mission. Because of Columbia's 39-degree orbital inclination, an expendable launch from a launch site with a latitude greater than 39 degrees would not be able to reach Columbia. This rules out a Soyuz/Progress launch. There was an Ariane 4 in French Guiana that successfully launched an Intelsat satellite on February 15. The challenge with developing a supply kit, building an appropriate housing and separation system, and reprogramming the Ariane seems very difficult in three weeks, although this option is still in work. —Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Appendix D.13 ++++++++++ (Yanked from the Ars comment section)
jtchang 12y ago
Why will launching a space vehicle never be as routine as commercial air travel? I think it should be one of the goals of mankind. There is no fundamental law of physics that says we can't make it routine. The author states that they don't think it will be feasible in our lifetime. However the amount of technological advancement that has been made over the past century is astounding. There is no reason to think this would be unfeasible.
- eropple 12y ago
  Economics and the progression of aerospace technology have more to do with it than "fundamental laws of physics". Strapping stuff to a gigantic tower of boom just doesn't scale that well and unless you believe that the aforementioned strapping-to-a-tower-of-boom can be iteratively improved to reduce its cost by multiple decimal places, making space vehicles "routine" requires something other than iterative advancement. You can at least somewhat plan iterative advancement, but finding new global maxima is really, really hard and unpredictable. (I would not be surprised if getting to space eventually becomes unremarkable, though I would be surprised if it happened in my lifetime. I would be stunned if launching a vehicle from dirt to space ever became as routine as air travel is today, however, because it doesn't make very much sense.)
- pi-err 12y ago
  It took >300 years for transatlantic marine routes to reach acceptable levels of safety - and it really had to wait for modern navigation system + coal propulsion + metal. I wonder if going to space will become routine before supraconduction and MHD drives are widespread. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_1 for air travel.
- brudgers 12y ago
  No, it will never be as routine as commercial air travel. Yes, there are fundamental laws of physics that say we cannot make it routine. [1] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
  - 12y ago
WalterBright 12y ago
> Further, even if successful reentry were possible, the shuttle could not be landed entirely from the ground—there was no way for Mission Control to have extended the shuttle's landing gear or the air probes necessary to judge velocity once in the atmosphere. Those functions (as well as starting the shuttle's auxiliary power unit) could only be invoked by physically throwing switches in the cockpit during approach and landing. It is a mystery to me why it was designed this way. I'd design it so that if the crew were disabled, it could be brought back by mission control.
- kabouseng 12y ago
  And add more cost and complexity to an already costly and complex piece of equipment. Fact is, when the crew are disabled, 99.99% [1] of the time, so is the entire shuttle, i.e. catastrophically "disabled". http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/?Page=4 http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/?Page=4
- emp_zealoth 12y ago
  I thought it was done to legitimise crew requirement - just so one could say "No, the shuttle cannot fly without humans on board" Nasa was threatened by expendable launchers from military and there were fears it would put human space launches on hold
- VLM 12y ago
  The shuttle was marketed to all people as capable of all things, leading to some peculiar .mil requirements, and the fairly reasonable cold war fear was the .ru would "borrow" a shuttle of ours and take a look at the spooky payload. Now this would really piss the DoD off if there were american military personnel on board, but if the taxi between a space station and the ground happened to have no humans but did have some spooky NSA satellite on board they could wiggle in some kind of salvage claim. Maybe the .ru couldn't get away with it politically, but maybe Libya in the bad old days or something... Also I don't know if even the most optimistic "everything for everyone" marketing went this far outside Larry Niven sci fi books, but I could totally imagine if we sold F16 to Pakistan maybe they'd buy a shuttle if it was economic and then India would try to steal it from the ground. Or use a re-entering shuttle as a weapon, 9/11 WTC style. Its not far fetched. The Iranians stole one of our spooky drones a couple years ago by broadcasting very strong GPS signals and the drone designers not using the authenticated stream making this hack possible. If you sell something as "do everything for everyone" then you're going to end up with weird "legacy" requirements.
WalterBright 12y ago
> Contrary to popular belief, the heat a spacecraft faces on reentry isn't generated by simple friction but rather by ram pressure—the fast-moving shuttle compresses the air in front of it, forming a massive shock zone in which air molecules ionize and break apart. Finally! It always annoys me when people, even those who should know better, call it friction.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  It is almost perfect adiabatic process. Or the ionization helps to heat even further?
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    When gas is compressed, it heats up. Moving rapidly through the air compresses the air in front, so it heats up. It's as simple as that. The ionization has nothing to do with it, though that probably reduces the heat slightly as it takes energy to ionize a gas.
    - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
      Ionization actually reduces the effective temperature massively - from O(v^2) to O(v) at high (read: re-entry-like) velocities.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  Is friction a % of the heating, or is it negligible?
fsloth 12y ago
"Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage." The foam strikes were not uncommon but they were not designed events. Rather, the organization went the slippery slope of considering unplanned debris "normal" since they had not caused any disasters before. This leads me to think that the communications and security culture had not improved that much from the Challenger days then...
- venomsnake 12y ago
  Worth the read http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger... It was that way in the 80s. If it does not work as planned, but it has not broke yet - it is safe.
  - vlasev 12y ago
    That's a very Kerbal way of dealing with things shudders
- VLM 12y ago
  And to extend your correct remarks and combine them with the article "Russian roulette" section, at that time NASA had no idea if the insulation failure was the usual statistical thing, or if there was a procedure/material failure in that ramp and all ramps going forward, or there is some weird interaction such that the fumes from a slightly different tile glue ruins all current and future insulation. What I'm getting at is part of what took months after the accident was ruling out a new, previously unknown problem, that might have doomed every single launch going forward rather than merely the russian roulette scenario. The article has a pretty bad case of 20/20 hindsight WRT this topic. Immediately after the accident NASA knew the risk of a ramp failure was about 6/100 and a resulting vehicle loss was about 1/100 but those are LOWER bounds, the upper failure bound due to a manufacturing change or supplier error might very well be 100% on both counts and it took months to rule that out. If the problem had been a minor catalyst change in the foam chemistry such that every ramp fails under launch conditions, every time going forward, then launching Atlantis would result in two dead crew not one.
dexen 12y ago
On a lighter note, a 1983 TV movie [1] follows events on an high-speed passenger airplane accidentally launching into LEO and being rescued by two space shuttle missions. Concepts shown included transfering passengers and crew through space by improvised means [2] and using a shuttle as sort of heat shield in front of the plane; one character realizes a shuttle could drop into the atmosphere ahead of Starflight, with Starflight riding the plough-wave; the wingtips would burn a little. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight:_The_Plane_That_Couldn't_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight:_The_Plane_That_Cou... [2] among them, a coffin.
gambiting 12y ago
On a completely philosophical note - assuming it was actually fully finished, do you think the Buran Space Shuttle, which could fly fully autonomously, could be sent to rescue the astronauts without endangering more human lives? From what I understand it was ready to fly(it did complete a successful orbit launch and landing, fully automatically) but the whole project was mothballed because the Soviet Union collapsed. What if it wasn't? Would it be a viable alternative? And on a similar note - was there never any interest in automating the US Space Shuttles?
- VLM 12y ago
  "do you think the Buran Space Shuttle, which could fly fully autonomously, could be sent to rescue the astronauts" No, not enough fuel. Unless you ship that dude out of the USSR it doesn't have enough fuel, when launched from the USSR, to get to orbit with an inclination below maybe 45 or so degrees (nobody is absolutely sure and you can play a lot of geography games etc). It would have been super borderline at absolute best. Also "orbit" is fuzzy, so "could launch as low as 45 degrees" is technically true if you're cool with only achieving a temporary very low orbit, maybe 40-50 miles lower than columbia was. Of course you could try an insane rescue attempt like re-entering columbia while buran is re-entering and then you got 5 minutes to transfer... Umm this is sounding too hollywood movie to be considered. Given an infinite tank of fuel or an infinitely low payload you can launch from any latitude into any inclination, but you always get best payload for least fuel if your orbit is over your latitude aka your inclination equals your latitude. This is why the ISS is in such a weird super-high inclination orbit, to make the Russians happy during the cold war.
blaze33 12y ago
Previous discussion in feb. 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7305224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7305224

69 points by raphaelj 12y ago

This seems like a pretty good look into what the race on Earth in "A Walk in the Sun" would have looked like.

This was the most depressing quote for me: >It is unlikely that launching a space vehicle will ever be as routine an undertaking as commercial air travel—certainly not in the lifetime of anybody who reads this.

wyager 12y ago
Of course, that could certainly be completely incorrect. It seems to me, from casual observation, that the rate of rocket launches is increasing very quickly. We seem to be getting better at it.
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  > It seems to me, from casual observation, that the rate of rocket launches is increasing very quickly. We seem to be getting better at it. The numbers say otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html
  - pimlottc 12y ago
    > http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html There's no legend on that table; it took me a while to figure out that it's Launches and Failures.
- morbius 12y ago
  Unmanned launches, yes. Manned spaceflight, and astronauts themselves, have to adhere to extremely strict standards to maintain safety. Those standards cost $$$, time, and require highly educated and resourceful people. The economies just don't scale. It costs a few thousand dollars to fly a transcontinental flight on a 777, and passengers don't have to be trained in all types of contingency situations like astronauts do. The cost for a single Shuttle launch used to be an eight-figure sum. Someday getting to space will be as simple as a transcontinental flight. Unfortunately, rockets aren't the way we're going to get there.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

atonse 12y ago

That seems like an absolute crazy mission, the kind you'd see in a hollywood movie. As long as we're imagining, was there maybe an option C, an EVA from the Columbia crew to just replace some of those tiles? Was that even possible?

grecy 12y ago
I assume they didn't have replacement tiles on board, but assuming they did, I wonder if that would have been possible. It also occurs to me they could have sent an unmanned cargo carrier to dock with them with the required tiles and tools - maybe a Soyuz... but then, they could have all just gotten into the Soyuz. There is no mention of the Soyuz in the article. I wonder if they considered that option.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  They are not, and as I recall it was one of the criticisms a friend of mine levelled at the report as well. That by sending up a Soyuz, and using both that module and the backup, they could return 6 people to earth. Then a second and Soyuz mission and the Atlantis mission to replace the backup and return excess crew. Leaving Columbia on orbit awaiting some form of repair or scuttling. Mostly though it re-emphasized how "not routine" going up into space is. Orbital windows not withstanding, you cannot just "decide" to catch the next one and bring up hardware to fly. Something I hope we can get to with Falcon 9 re-use.
  - cthalupa 12y ago
    Soyuz is mentioned in the CAIB report. +++++++++++ 5.2 Other Vehicles (Soyuz, Ariane 4) There has been some discussion regarding the possibility of sending supplies to Columbia using an expendable launch vehicle – to lengthen the amount of time available to execute a rescue mission. Because of Columbia's 39-degree orbital inclination, an expendable launch from a launch site with a latitude greater than 39 degrees would not be able to reach Columbia. This rules out a Soyuz/Progress launch. There was an Ariane 4 in French Guiana that successfully launched an Intelsat satellite on February 15. The challenge with developing a supply kit, building an appropriate housing and separation system, and reprogramming the Ariane seems very difficult in three weeks, although this option is still in work. —Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Appendix D.13 ++++++++++ (Yanked from the Ars comment section)

jtchang 12y ago

Why will launching a space vehicle never be as routine as commercial air travel? I think it should be one of the goals of mankind. There is no fundamental law of physics that says we can't make it routine. The author states that they don't think it will be feasible in our lifetime. However the amount of technological advancement that has been made over the past century is astounding. There is no reason to think this would be unfeasible.

eropple 12y ago
Economics and the progression of aerospace technology have more to do with it than "fundamental laws of physics". Strapping stuff to a gigantic tower of boom just doesn't scale that well and unless you believe that the aforementioned strapping-to-a-tower-of-boom can be iteratively improved to reduce its cost by multiple decimal places, making space vehicles "routine" requires something other than iterative advancement. You can at least somewhat plan iterative advancement, but finding new global maxima is really, really hard and unpredictable. (I would not be surprised if getting to space eventually becomes unremarkable, though I would be surprised if it happened in my lifetime. I would be stunned if launching a vehicle from dirt to space ever became as routine as air travel is today, however, because it doesn't make very much sense.)
pi-err 12y ago
It took >300 years for transatlantic marine routes to reach acceptable levels of safety - and it really had to wait for modern navigation system + coal propulsion + metal. I wonder if going to space will become routine before supraconduction and MHD drives are widespread. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_1 for air travel.
brudgers 12y ago
No, it will never be as routine as commercial air travel. Yes, there are fundamental laws of physics that say we cannot make it routine. [1] [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
- 12y ago

WalterBright 12y ago

> Further, even if successful reentry were possible, the shuttle could not be landed entirely from the ground—there was no way for Mission Control to have extended the shuttle's landing gear or the air probes necessary to judge velocity once in the atmosphere. Those functions (as well as starting the shuttle's auxiliary power unit) could only be invoked by physically throwing switches in the cockpit during approach and landing. It is a mystery to me why it was designed this way. I'd design it so that if the crew were disabled, it could be brought back by mission control.

kabouseng 12y ago
And add more cost and complexity to an already costly and complex piece of equipment. Fact is, when the crew are disabled, 99.99% [1] of the time, so is the entire shuttle, i.e. catastrophically "disabled". http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/?Page=4 http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/?Page=4
emp_zealoth 12y ago
I thought it was done to legitimise crew requirement - just so one could say "No, the shuttle cannot fly without humans on board" Nasa was threatened by expendable launchers from military and there were fears it would put human space launches on hold
VLM 12y ago
The shuttle was marketed to all people as capable of all things, leading to some peculiar .mil requirements, and the fairly reasonable cold war fear was the .ru would "borrow" a shuttle of ours and take a look at the spooky payload. Now this would really piss the DoD off if there were american military personnel on board, but if the taxi between a space station and the ground happened to have no humans but did have some spooky NSA satellite on board they could wiggle in some kind of salvage claim. Maybe the .ru couldn't get away with it politically, but maybe Libya in the bad old days or something... Also I don't know if even the most optimistic "everything for everyone" marketing went this far outside Larry Niven sci fi books, but I could totally imagine if we sold F16 to Pakistan maybe they'd buy a shuttle if it was economic and then India would try to steal it from the ground. Or use a re-entering shuttle as a weapon, 9/11 WTC style. Its not far fetched. The Iranians stole one of our spooky drones a couple years ago by broadcasting very strong GPS signals and the drone designers not using the authenticated stream making this hack possible. If you sell something as "do everything for everyone" then you're going to end up with weird "legacy" requirements.

WalterBright 12y ago

> Contrary to popular belief, the heat a spacecraft faces on reentry isn't generated by simple friction but rather by ram pressure—the fast-moving shuttle compresses the air in front of it, forming a massive shock zone in which air molecules ionize and break apart. Finally! It always annoys me when people, even those who should know better, call it friction.

venomsnake 12y ago
It is almost perfect adiabatic process. Or the ionization helps to heat even further?
- WalterBright 12y ago
  When gas is compressed, it heats up. Moving rapidly through the air compresses the air in front, so it heats up. It's as simple as that. The ionization has nothing to do with it, though that probably reduces the heat slightly as it takes energy to ionize a gas.
  - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
    Ionization actually reduces the effective temperature massively - from O(v^2) to O(v) at high (read: re-entry-like) velocities.
spiritplumber 12y ago
Is friction a % of the heating, or is it negligible?

fsloth 12y ago

"Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage." The foam strikes were not uncommon but they were not designed events. Rather, the organization went the slippery slope of considering unplanned debris "normal" since they had not caused any disasters before. This leads me to think that the communications and security culture had not improved that much from the Challenger days then...

venomsnake 12y ago
Worth the read http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger... It was that way in the 80s. If it does not work as planned, but it has not broke yet - it is safe.
- vlasev 12y ago
  That's a very Kerbal way of dealing with things shudders
VLM 12y ago
And to extend your correct remarks and combine them with the article "Russian roulette" section, at that time NASA had no idea if the insulation failure was the usual statistical thing, or if there was a procedure/material failure in that ramp and all ramps going forward, or there is some weird interaction such that the fumes from a slightly different tile glue ruins all current and future insulation. What I'm getting at is part of what took months after the accident was ruling out a new, previously unknown problem, that might have doomed every single launch going forward rather than merely the russian roulette scenario. The article has a pretty bad case of 20/20 hindsight WRT this topic. Immediately after the accident NASA knew the risk of a ramp failure was about 6/100 and a resulting vehicle loss was about 1/100 but those are LOWER bounds, the upper failure bound due to a manufacturing change or supplier error might very well be 100% on both counts and it took months to rule that out. If the problem had been a minor catalyst change in the foam chemistry such that every ramp fails under launch conditions, every time going forward, then launching Atlantis would result in two dead crew not one.

dexen 12y ago

On a lighter note, a 1983 TV movie [1] follows events on an high-speed passenger airplane accidentally launching into LEO and being rescued by two space shuttle missions. Concepts shown included transfering passengers and crew through space by improvised means [2] and using a shuttle as sort of heat shield in front of the plane; one character realizes a shuttle could drop into the atmosphere ahead of Starflight, with Starflight riding the plough-wave; the wingtips would burn a little. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight:_The_Plane_That_Couldn't_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight:_The_Plane_That_Cou... [2] among them, a coffin.

gambiting 12y ago

On a completely philosophical note - assuming it was actually fully finished, do you think the Buran Space Shuttle, which could fly fully autonomously, could be sent to rescue the astronauts without endangering more human lives? From what I understand it was ready to fly(it did complete a successful orbit launch and landing, fully automatically) but the whole project was mothballed because the Soviet Union collapsed. What if it wasn't? Would it be a viable alternative? And on a similar note - was there never any interest in automating the US Space Shuttles?

VLM 12y ago
"do you think the Buran Space Shuttle, which could fly fully autonomously, could be sent to rescue the astronauts" No, not enough fuel. Unless you ship that dude out of the USSR it doesn't have enough fuel, when launched from the USSR, to get to orbit with an inclination below maybe 45 or so degrees (nobody is absolutely sure and you can play a lot of geography games etc). It would have been super borderline at absolute best. Also "orbit" is fuzzy, so "could launch as low as 45 degrees" is technically true if you're cool with only achieving a temporary very low orbit, maybe 40-50 miles lower than columbia was. Of course you could try an insane rescue attempt like re-entering columbia while buran is re-entering and then you got 5 minutes to transfer... Umm this is sounding too hollywood movie to be considered. Given an infinite tank of fuel or an infinitely low payload you can launch from any latitude into any inclination, but you always get best payload for least fuel if your orbit is over your latitude aka your inclination equals your latitude. This is why the ISS is in such a weird super-high inclination orbit, to make the Russians happy during the cold war.

blaze33 12y ago

Previous discussion in feb. 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7305224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7305224