It was Tuesday, Jan. 21, five days after the foam had broken loose during liftoff, and some 30 engineers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its aerospace contractors were having the first formal meeting to assess potential damage when it struck the wing. Virtually every participant -- those in the room and some linked by teleconference -- agreed that the space agency should immediately get images of the impact zone, perhaps by requesting them from American spy satellites or powerful telescopes on the ground. They elected one of their number, a soft-spoken NASA engineer, Rodney Rocha, to convey the idea to the shuttle mission managers. Rocha said he tried at least half a dozen times to get the space agency to make the requests. There were two similar attempts by other engineers. All were turned aside. Rocha said a manager told him that he refused to be a "Chicken Little." The Columbia's flight director, LeRoy Cain, wrote a curt e-mail message that concluded, "I consider it to be a dead issue." New interviews and newly revealed e-mail sent during the fatal mission show that the engineers' desire for outside help in getting a look at the shuttle's wing was more intense and widespread than the Aug. 26 final report of the board investigating the accident described. The new information makes it clear that the failure to follow up on the request for outside imagery -- the first step in discovering the damage and perhaps mounting a last-ditch rescue effort -- did not simply fall through bureaucratic cracks, but was actively, even hotly resisted by mission managers. More at http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/212073371 responses total.
What the hell is the point? It was already established that there were no possible options for repair or salvage. The mission managers had already accepted a scenario in which the ship could be fatally damaged and nothing could be done about it, and the engineers bought into it and allowed it to happen. THAT's where the problem is.
Saying "the Shuttle will break up on re-entry and the astronauts die either way, so why bother to check?" is not a position that will fly with much of the American public. NASA is a very public agency of our democratic government; no NASA official should need to be told that this idea is a no-go. Assuming that you'd want to keep the Shuttles flying after a disaster, getting the best data you could on the damage & its consequences would be obvious basic engineering. From what i've seen, that there were "no possible options for repair or salvage" (how about just rescue of the astronauts?) was established only in the minds of pointy-haired bosses at NASA, and only after they went looking for excuses to cover a decision that they'd already made. NASA engineers have saved or partly saved a great many missions gone wrong by sundry feats of technological make-do & heroism. "Saving the American Shuttle's crew" would have great world-wide appeal, with huge political pay-offs for heroes. What might the Russians have done for the national glory of pulling a Russian rocket full of emergency supplies up to America's crippled Shuttle two hours before the oxygen ran out? (Whole world glued to TV's seeing our final approach and listening to good news phone call from Kremlin to White House, Ivan. Make sure side with huge Russian flag is right-side-up on cameras!)
Hey, I didn't make the decision. NASA had already decided by the time Columbia was launched that if at launch something so compromised the heat shield that the shuttle would disintegrate on reentry, there was nothing they could do about it anyway, so why bother to find out. That was their attitude. "We can't do anything about it anyway, so we don't want to know."
Another example of how managerial incompetence can subvert attempts to eliminate inefficiency, no matter how much $$ is or isn't thrown at the problem.
I think they ought to put the shuttles immediately back into service, and draft all the managers and directors that made the don't-bother-to- find-out decision as crew.
Re #1:
>What the hell is the point? It was already established that there were
>no possible options for repair or salvage.
Yes, but nobody knew that until the post-crash analysis was done.
There are two points worth reiterating here:
1.) The damage caused by the impact was of unknown severity. If the
damage was such that a modified re-entry profile could have
saved the vehicle and crew, we should have taken that course.
2.) If the damage was sufficiently serious that a safe return was
impossible, at least we would have known what kind of damage
was caused by the foam impact. Right now we are still guessing,
because most of the evidence was destroyed by the re-entry.
As one who believes that Columbia should have been in a museum
instead of in orbit this past January, I think that taking steps
to see if it could have been saved would have been very worthwhile.
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If it was known that there was that much damage within 24
hours of launch, then the crew could have gone into long survival
mode, possibly extending consumables beyond the mission profile
timeline (plus the safety timeline for delay in landing) while
either supplies could be sent up (food, water, oxygen) or/and
rescue attempts be made.
If we had the 7 person space station emergcy return
vechile at the space station, instead of trash pile of
congressional funding, could it have been used.
I don't believe in the no-win scenario. About time NASA adopted that attitude. They had it in the 60's and we made it to the moon and back, including some incredibly close calls with changes and repairs done with materials at hand. Maybe they could have been saved, maybe they could not. The point is, they didn't want to know, asnd they didn't try.
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Even if the situation was hopeless (or, *especially* if), they should have made every attempt to assess/analyze the damage. If they were to tell the crew, "we don't think you're going to get down alive, but we want you to make every effort possible to help us figure out what happened so that we can get the next crew up and down safely," the astronauts would have agreed without question. I, cynically, see the fialure to investigate the damage as a foolish hope that the shuttle would make it back without the public (or Congress) ever getting wind of a problem in the space program.
It is really easy to look at how things could have been handled differently after a disaster. Certainly the decision making process should be examined for flaws but I dont think it is fair to say that management was incompetent in this case without much more information.
they prolly really need me and slynne to stand out in their front yard and yell stuart smally type slogans... "IT'S OK YOU GUYS, YOU STILL HAVE A BETTER SUCCESS RATE THAN THE FORD PINTO AND WE LIKE YOU!"
Well they *do* have a better success rate than the Ford Pinto ;)
If you were on the phone to a store, talking, solving a
problem, then suddenly heard a scream, maybe a gunshot, then
nothing, what would you do? Would you go into action your own,
or would you tell your manager? If you manager took no action,
Now, what would you do?
It was those manangers who did not listen to their
team. Those experts that should have concerns. Maybe they
even pre-intimidated them into not demanding loud enough.
This wasnt something as clear as that. This would be more like I am on the phone with a store and the person on the other line tells me someone creepy just walked in. Ok, does that mean anything? If that person is later murdered and it is discovered that they told me that someone creepy walked in just before something bad happened, I am sure there would be people saying, "That's outragous! How could she have done NOTHING." As they say, hindsight is 20/20 Here is a situation where foam hits the shuttle and an engineer things that there *might* be a possibility that could cause problems. Management ignores the warning most likely due to cost pressures. It is completely possible that the engineer never fully communicated the probability that the foam could have caused a problem. It is entirely possible that the management made a decision because they believed there was only a very very small chance that the foam caused a problem and it would cost them a lot of money to find out for sure.
It would cost a lot of money to radio the ship and have them send someone out in a vacc suit to look?
They should have a mini-robot to fly around the ship and inspect it. That doesn't seem like it would be much of a technical challenge, or very expensive.
I just think it is funny how whenever something bad happens, people start looking around for someone to blame. Then the people who get blamed start acting all defensive which prevents them from taking a good hard look at what happened. The fact of the matter is that every human makes mistakes and bad decisions. It sucks when a bad decision has dire consequences but it isnt like the NASA management was sitting around thinking "Those guys up there are in real danger but we never liked them anyway..." It is easy after the fact to tell if a decision was a good one or a bad one. It isnt so easy before the consequences of the decision is known. Frankly, some of the people in this item are such morons I seriously doubt they would be capable of making better choices than the NASA management.
In general, NASA is incredibly careful; I think very few shuttles have launched on time, ever, because they don't want to risk anything going wrong in the launch. In a culture where anybody can stop the launch at any time for any reason (slight hyperbole), the fact that so little investigation was done in this case seems uncharacteristicly negligent. I do not, for example, blame Bush for "not putting the pieces together" about 9/11, despite my strong leftie leanings. I'm much more willing to blame NASA for screwing up, despite being a fanatic supporter of the space program, because it's so unusual for them.
Yes, President Reagan has his state of the union speech tonight, congradulating the the Teacher In Space. We really really need to launch Challenger.
TOp management simply blew it off. As far as the foam is concened, A prior
flight had a "DENT" in one of the solid booster casings from a foam strike.
These are the can solid fuel boosters, that after being jettisoned, fall FROM
that height, and crash into the Atlantic to be recovered AND reused. HOW much
brain power does it take to extend the shown damage to the aluninum of the
solid boosters to the fragile tiles and carbon-carbon wing edge?
Tope management blew it. the only nice thing THIS time, is the
reassignment and forced retirement of 11 of the fifteen Managers involved in
the failure to even THINK about the issues they were paid to resolve.
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Re #17: Yeah, it would have cost a whole 'nuther Shuttle mission, because Columbia was not carrying any EVA suits.
Re #14: I think the Ford Pinto's accident rate was much less than 1 in 100. Re #24: Not to mention that there's nothing to hold onto in that area of the Shuttle. It was never meant to be accessable during EVA.
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So you see, in the Plesco family NASA has a better accident rate with the Shuttle than Ford has with the Pinto.
Re #24:
Am I the only one who thinks this is incredibly *stupid*?
Re #25: it is not necessary to hold onto anything - a tethered EVA can provide its own maneuverability. Perhaps even simpler than a roving miniature inspection vehicle is one that has less maneuverability, but which can inspect the shuttle while the shuttle is maneuvered. I think they should have designed the external tanks so that nothing could come off to strike the shuttle. They knew of this problem from earlier flights but only showed after the fact that foam could puncture the wing. Considering how much testing went into wing surface design, including using wind tunnels, this oversight is incomprehensible.
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Re #24:
According to the FAQ, (google search "space shuttle columbia faq"), the
crew had two (2) EVA-capable vacc suits, in addition to their 7 (one per crew
member) flight suits. Also, the airlock tunnel has a hatch to dorsal, enabling
use of the lock for EVA whether or not there is something in the cargo bay.
There were no MMUs, but there was, apparently, some tether line, as there was
a contingency plan to use 60 ft of it or so to crawl out and close the bay
doors manually in case they should jam. How much additional line there was,
I'm not clear on. But given a sufficient length it should have been possible
to push off against one of the bay doors, to either port or starboard, and
end up by the ventral surface. Two people doing this could catch each other
and maintain position there. Getting back in would be as easy as reeling in
the tether.
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The point of this item is that the reason the crew did nothing was that people on the ground who saw something hit the hull and should have said something just sat there and kept their mouths shut; and had someone just sent a message "We saw a chunk of something hit the hull on take-off. We recommend you send someone out to have a look", they would have found the damage, maybe could have done *something* about it, or at least would know for certain what the damage was. At any rate it ought to be up to the captain to decide whether they can do something on their end, not administrators on the ground who decide to say nothing.
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I don't think it's surprising that there are things the people in the shuttle program don't look for, simply because they don't have time. If they gave into every such urge to look for problems, they'd *never* get anything done. People and organizations make decisions like this all the time. If you are driving along, and your car makes a noise it never made before, you *might* stop and look and try to figure out what the noise is, or you might drive on and hope it's not a problem. If you're driving through a bad neighborhood, are you more or less likely to stop & look? Space makes any bad neighborhood on earth look like paradise. It's quite possible even if somebody had been able to look at the outside, that they wouldn't have learned enough to decide what to do. If I remember right, significant damage was on the inside, where it would not have been visible - and there was almost certainly nothing on the shuttle that could have been used to fix it. Doing an EVA to look at the damage would have given the ground significant clues to the cause of the disaster afterwards, but I can well see them deciding beforehand that the risk of the EVA itself wasn't worth the small chance they might learn something of value, especially given the great chance it would be nothing they could fix. Of course, now, with hindsight, we can challenge all the assumptions, because obviously at least one of them was "wrong". In an organization that is (we hope) trained to consider all probabilities of failure, it's not surprising somebody thought things were wrong beforehand. This probably happens with some frequency - something goes wrong, some people panic over some possibility, they're overruled, and the shuttle lands and the possibility turns out to be either a false alarm, or not critical. In this case, though, they were right, and the interesting question is not why didn't we stop here in this case, but how can we improve the not why didn't we stop here in this case, but whether we have picked the right breakpoint for false negatives vs. false positives, and if there's anything we can do to decrease the risk of both.
EVA operations are thoroughly rehearsed before flight in neutral-buoyancy tanks. There's a good reason for this -- working in zero G, especially while in a restrictive pressure suit, is difficult and stressful and has all sorts of counter-intuitive aspects. Trying to access a part of the shuttle that no one had ever even thought about accessing while in orbit before would probably have been hazardous and unlikely to succeed. In hindsight it was probably worth the risk, but I can see how it might not have seemed that way at the time.
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What exactly is difficult and|or hazardous about EVA, other than the obvious? Granted, there are risks like holing the suit, running out of air, getting separated from the ship, and so forth. But are they so severe that they can't be managed by such things as proper care and inspection of the equipment, diligent use of safety lines, always topping off the air tanks before entering the lock, and just taking ones time and not panicking? It ought not to be physically stressful. Yes, the suit probably masses about as much as you do. But it's not like you have to actually lift and support that mass in full gravity. The only load on either muscles or tethers should be what the crewman decides to put on them. If someone for some reason pushes off against the ship with all his might, and if he were athletic enough to do a 1 meter high-jump in normal gravity - while wearing the vacc suit - he would be moving away from the ship at about 4.5 meters per second (10 MPH). This is just over 1/2000 of the delta-V that it took to get up there in the first place, and probably a small fraction of reasonable maneuvering reserves once in orbit. It should be easy enough to go after him. EVA operations should be routine. They're going to have to be sooner or later if we want to build things in orbit like space stations and large spacecraft. Every spacer should get a few hours of EVA in orbit as part of his training.
Yeah, you'd think that. Some of the very first EVA missions were almost disasters, though. The astronauts got overexerted, their helmets got steamed up and they couldn't see, etc. After that they started rehearsing every EVA in the water tank and building special equipment & tools. It's amazingly hard to do even simple tasks if you don't have gravity to work against.
Well, I think Drew has a good point, though. If something is hard, you can either 1) Plan it out meticulously before doing it every time, or 2) Work on making it easier until it is. Sounds like NASA has taken route 1 on EVAs. The problem with Route 1 is that you add a huge beaurocratic burden to doing what needs to be done, and you can't do anything that hasn't been thought about for a long time ahead of time. The problem with Route 2, of course, is that there may not be a solution. But if you find one, or a series of small ones, then you have something much more valuable than the procedure developed for Route 1.
Re #39: There's also the danger of damaging the spacecraft, which I suspect is part of the reason no one has tried to access the heat shield portion of the shuttle while on orbit so far.
I never realized the tile were that fragile. I mean, the damned thing gets a lot of stress going into orbit. If they were worried about a spacesuited hand or foot damaging the damned things, they sure as hell should have been worried about foam insulation at 5000mph+
I'm not sure if they're actually that fragile, though they *are* made of ceramic. I'm not saying it's likely there'd be damage, but it may have been a consideration. The fact that the orbiter goes through stress going into and out of orbit is really beside the point, because those stresses are spread out. Aircraft are often fragile when exposed to concentrated stresses or impacts, because they're made with distributed aerodynamic forces (and light weight) in mind.
The lack of MMUs is actually the critical factor in inspections. There are no handholds on the exterior of an orbiter, so anyone trying to look at the wing or underside would be waving around on the end of a tether like a bungee jumper. It would be very easy to do plenty of damage to the tiles just from bouncing off them or rubbing the tether on them. I will LART anyone who suggests suction cups.
If an astronaut bouncing around like a bungee jumper could do that much damage to the tiles, it would seem like a good argument in favor of being worried abouthigh speed projectiles. And, anyways, couldn't the astronaut just use suction cups to stick to the shuttle?
The ceramic tiles are indeed quite fragile -- I believe they are fragile enough that you can't walk across them on earth. There are actually several types of tiles, and some parts have been replaced by some sort of fiberglass mat which is stronger, which simplifies maintenance. One of the reasons there are lots of little tiles instead of big ones, is so that a failure of a single tile isn't necessarily fatal to the integrity of the whole thing. At least for the first few landings, they *were* losing tiles in flight, and they do regular inspections now to try to avoid this. Of course, if you lose enough tiles you expose the tender underframe to incendiary forces and get catastrophic failure.
(suction cups are useless without an atmosphere)
Re #42, #43: Yes, the tiles are THAT fragile. (The thermal blankets used on the payload bay doors are fabric, and probably tougher.) I have held a Shuttle low-temperature tile in my hand. It bore the scars of previous handlers' experiments with its toughness vs. that of their fingernails. As Jim Loudon said (paraphrased due to memory lapse), "It feels like you can score it with your fingernail. YES, YOU CAN." The tiles have a very difficult set of requirements; they have to cover almost the entire exterior surface of the vehicle, and they have to insulate the aluminum structure against re-entry heat while being light enough to let the whole thing fly. At the time the Shuttle was designed, the best they could do was sacrifice most of the mechanical strength they might otherwise have wanted. Since then thermal blankets have replaced tiles in some of the lowest-temperature regions, but the bulk of the exterior still relies on spun silica for its integrity during re-entry. (As a geek, I wonder about our modern materials such as high-Tc superconductors and ponder the possibilities of using magnetic barriers to hold the plasma flow at a safe distance from the skin. Unfortunately, I'll bet that nobody's even researching this seriously due to lack of funding.)
There is an important difference between a bungee jumper on the ground
and someone performing EVA on a tether in orbit. The Earthbound bungee
jumper will inevitably and in short order reach the end of the bungee cord,
stretch, and bounce back with the same speed that gravity accelerated him
to during the drop. A crewman on a tether need not bounce or even move
with any appreciable speed. He can just sit there, with the tether being
present merely as a safety measure. And if he does bounce, it can be with
a very small and gentle rebound.
There are other things that can be done when someone forgets to pack
an MMU. One of them is to have the person on EVA just sit there (probably
pointing a video camera at the ship) while the ship moves a short distance
away from him, then does one or more 360 degree rolls, then comes back.
This does require faith on the part of the guy outside that his crewmates
will come back for him; I admit there are people that I would be unwilling
to do this with. But presumably shuttle crewmembers trust each other well
enough for this.
Re #48:
If we get superconductors that can work at that high a temperature, it
may no longer be necessary to have heat shielding, as we might then be able
to build ships with hundreds of KPS of delta-V, and easily be able to spare
the 8 kps needed to slow down with thrusters instead of atmospheric drag.
In order for the shuttle to "move a short distance, roll, and come back" it has to fire maneuvering thrusters, scattered in random locations across the shuttle. I wouldn't care to be in an EVA suit hit by the jet of one of those things -- the jet itself *might* be harmless, but it's probably going to impart significant random delta V and angular momentum, and without an MMU (or SAFER), that's probably going to be fatal. This is a good example of the reason they reherse and plan these things out on the ground before trying them out in space. Without gravity and a convenient flat surface, *everything* is much harder.
But harder doesn't mean impossible, and it certainly doesn't mean "not worth doing".
I think that, in the case of putting an astronaut in space and maneuvering the shuttle around him, "harder" means "basically impossible". The space shuttle is not a graceful beast; trying to move it around like that would be a laughable proposition.
(There is work being done with plasma containment, but it seems to be aimed more at fusion power than heat shielding. Still, things seem to spin off of basic research. ;)
It might be feasible to have the shuttle and a camera satellite coincide, and have the shuttle do a slow roll wile being photographed. Being out of the atmosphere should help with getting a good image.
The shuttle is "graceful" enough orient and dock with the space station. No more maneuverability than that would be necessary for an inspection. The camera satellite can, as I've mentioned, be released from the shuttle itself.
Re #49: The high-Tc superconductors I'm talking about are the ones which run at temperatures around 80 K, not 3000 K. The Shuttle carries liquid oxygen (BP around 83 K) for the fuel cells, so chilling a superconductor loop to that temperature shouldn't require any consumables that aren't already carried. The liquid hydrogen is another possibility, but I'm not sure how much heat it would sop up in the boiling process; the delta-H-fg is pretty small as the entropy increase is about the same as for other diatomic gases but the absolute temperature is much closer to zero. If we could find a way to hold the hot gases at a distance that seriously limits the heat transfer to the vehicle, something like the Shuttle could use titanium leading-edge skins instead of brittle carbon-carbon. The other virtue of a magnetic system is that you can test it before hitting the atmosphere and be sure it's working.
That can be done with transpiration cooling. This is done by using a porous surface and forcing a gas out through the surface, and uses comparatively very little gas compared to that which would be required to just cool the surface. The transpiratioin moves the hot boundary layer further from the surface. It has been used to protect gas turbine blades from heat. I would think, though, this would be mechanically complicated for the shuttle and of course would add extra weight for the piping and gas storage and control. The tile system was probably driven mainly by weight concerns.
I recall years ago they experimented with a system for reducing the drag of aircraft wings that involved injecting compressed air into the airstream through small holes along the wing surface. The system worked great, but the problem of keeping the holes clean turned out to make it totally impractical. A transpiration cooling system might have similar problems. Maybe our primary mistake was going to a reusable spacecraft to begin with. I've heard it said that each shuttle launch costs *more* than a Saturn V launch would, so it seems like a reusable spacecraft has been a poor tradeoff. You have a lot more heat shield options if you don't need to reuse the shield for another launch.
May if the vehicle was reusable but the heat shield was one-time?
I was thionking something similar. What were the heat shields of previous craft made of? Weren't they a spray on paint like material? Could something like this be applied after every use of the shuttle?
"Materials: Capsule hull is titanium coated in fiberglass insulation, covered with shingles of nickel-steel alloy. The rounded heat shield on the base is made of fiberglass and a strong plastic called phenolic resin" (http://www.casciencectr.org/Exhibits/AirAndSpace/HumansInSpace/Gemini11.ph p).
I think some very early Soviet designs even used oak.
Re #58: You've got it backwards. The boundary-layer control systems work by pulling the stagnant surface air in through the holes; blowing air out causes the airflow to separate. Re #57: Transpiration cooling requires a coolant; it's just another form of ablator. NASA went from ablative heat shields to refractories because the long, gradual descent of Shuttle would have required way too much weight of ablator. The heating rate of Shuttle is low, but the total heat load is high. The advantage of a magnetic shield is that it does not require expenditure of mass to renew the protective layer. Now I'm wondering how hard it would be to perform a test on a Shuttle external tank. You could put the superconducting coils inside the oxygen and hydrogen tanks and energize them with batteries after separation from the orbiter; you'd have your test results a few minutes later when the tank hit atmosphere over the Pacific.
Re 60: The big problem with trying to use the pre-Shuttle heat shield designs is weight. The old space capsules were much smaller than the Shuttle, asd so a heavier material was feasible. If they put that stuff on the whole Shuttle it'd never get into space.
But you could also save a lot of weight in other areas if you weren't planning on re-using the spacecraft.
'Unheard of' means not dreamed of yet,
'Impossible' means not yet done.
I saw an editorial the other day (by Jake Garn?) claiming that we needed to put the Shuttle back into service ASAP and that any alternatives were ten years off. Funny, I don't think it would take more than a few months for Scaled Composites to turn out a graphite-fiber version of the Apollo command module. We could be flying in two years, I bet. Given our advances with solid-state devices such as fiber-optic gyroscopes, it should be very easy to build a vehicle that could be flown to the station, left there for months to years, and flown back safely. It would just come down under a 'chute instead of with wings, and hit water instead of pavement. BFHD.
Of course, why design it ourselves when we can buy it off the shelf from the Russians? ;>
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http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/peanuts/archive/peanuts-20031027.html
He didn't write enough about whores.
You have several choices: