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Space Shuttle Columbia Breaks Up Over Texas
An anonymous reader writes "NASA lost communication with space shuttle Columbia shortly before its scheduled landing on Saturday. It was unclear whether there were any other problems." Various news programs have been showing debris falling from the sky, and NASA has declared an emergency.Update: 02/01 15:29 GMT by H : Confirmation has come - the shuttle has broken up over Texas while coming in for landing Florida.
Here's the yet not-updated NASA site for mission STS-107.
The U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia, flying STS 107 apparently dissentegrated over north Texas during re-entry according to CNN, CBS, and NBC TV reports. Columbia launched on January 16 for that orbiter's 28th journey. Communication was lost at 8:00 Central Time (14:00 GMT), 16 minutes prior to the scheduled landing, at an altitude of 200,000 feet (61km) and velocity of 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km/h). NASA advises people to report and avoid debris in the area because it may inlude toxic propellants.
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
I have my photos on my website:
www.pdrap.org, link from the front page.
The actual photo page is here
I didn't actually see the space shuttle until it had exploded, so all my photos are of the shuttle as it burns and breaks up. The instant that the shuttle exploded was dramatic. One second I'm looking for it, the next, it was a bright burning ball of fire.
Very sad. Columbia was my favorite shuttle.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
well, the guy on CBS (some NASA spokesman) said that while they have the door they can exit out of, he couldn't imagine a situation where that would be feasable. So probably not, no. :-(
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BBC news live (needs Real/Helix player)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/live/now2.ram
Story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/2716369.stm
NASA TV Live (Real/Helix Player)
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Impossible.
The emergency exit business is the hatch on the side, astronauts hook to a pole and slide out. Only if they have time. Parachute down.
They made no indication that they knew anything was wrong before contact was lost.
There was a report on FOX that a tile or some piece had come off on launch and hit a wing, was not supposed to be a problem. Not sure if that was this missions launch or not.
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1. No Surface to Air missile can reach above 100k feet.
2. There is almost no fuel on the space shuttle during reentry.
3. Most likely cause of destruction was damage to heat shield.
4. Survival is possible... space shuttle was relatively slow, already mostly throught the atmosphere the crew may have been able to bail out, and they do have parachutes.
5. This does not bode well for manned space exploration
Under normal circumstances, the shuttle is checked and astronauts don't leave for a good 15 to 30 minutes after the shuttle has landed.
See my journal, I write things there
Well, it couldn't be a SAM due to the altitude of the Shuttle on breakup.
At 200,000 feet, there'd be no way to survive.
This is sad, sad day. Here's CNNs profile of the crew of the Columbia.
Here's a timestamped update of the final minutes of the mission on the Spaceflight Now site.
On launch day, a piece of insulating foam on the external fuel tank came off during liftoff and was believed to have struck the left wing of the shuttle. Leroy Cain, the lead flight director in Mission Control, had assured reporters Friday that engineers had concluded that any damage to the wing was considered minor and posed no safety hazard.
Source: cnn.com
One of the eye-witnesses in Texas stated that it appeared the contrail had a spiral characteristic that might mean the craft was tumbling during or before re-entry. This may imply that it was not a catastrophic explosion, rather some other event that went wrong.
Part of the insulation on one of the boosters apparently came off on takoff (gaining orbit) and struck a wing. The wing was checked during flight and said to not be damaged.
Yes.
What are the chances NASA will send up STS 108 on schedule?
Zero. I wouldn't be surprised if the shuttles never fly again.
Will they use the soyuz emergency capsule to return earthside?
Unlikely. Remember, the Soyuz is not just an emergency capsule, it's a full-blown launcher system. Most supply and crew change missions to the ISS are flown with Soyuzes, so technically the shuttle is not an irreplaceable part of the ISS program.
However, Russia's financially strapped space program has been hard pressed to produce even the current number of spacecraft (the "escape capsule" Soyuz is swapped for a new one every 6 months), so whether they alone can keep going is doubtful.
-j.
I had always assumed that the front compartment would be highly reinforced and could remain intact longer than the rest of it. It seems that is not the case.
:-( Rest in peace, shuttle astronauts, this is an extremely sad day.
It is, however it won't help them. Even if the front compartment survived the explosion, it will still drop all the way down.
That's what happened to Challenger btw. At least some were alive for the 20 or minutes or so it took to hit the water. While there were no recordings, evidence was found, such as the emergency air supply being turned on for the pilot -- that can only be done behind the seat by another person, so it was obvious people were moving around.
Let's all hope that is NOT the case this time. That would be a simply horrible prolonged way to die
Their is a good description of what happens during the shuttles landing at:
... however I have flown a shuttle on X-plane for what its worth.
http://www.x-plane.com/orbiter.html
x-plane is an amazing flight simulator that uses an amazingly realistic flight model - great "physics" in video game software speak - and can simulate shuttle landings. The shuttle is a glider. I'm a glider pilot, but certainly not anything like a shuttle pilot
The shuttle changes its bank during the phase of the landing it was in to reduce speed. It's not banking to try change its course, it banks to increase drag and reduce speed. The shuttle just rotates over oneo its left or right side a bit.
The shuttle switches back and forth from banking right to banking left to stay on course while performing these drag increasing maneuvers.
FYI, these maneuvers are also done with the shuttle at a very steep angle of attack - as high as 70 degrees. This angle is also used to increase drag to slow the shuttle down.
The last confirmed communication happened shortly after the shuttle made its first switch from being banked right to being banked left.
It is very possible that the switch to being banked left introduced a change in force which led to a structural failure of the wings or control surfaces which are used during the landing. Given the high drag, high angle of attack, banked flight angle the orbiter would be in at the time, the shuttle would almost immediately start spinning end over end at 12,000 mph, disintegrating almost instantly.
Nasa also reported that one of the last data events they received from the shuttle was a "loss in tire pressure". It's alternatively possible that this could happen after an internal explosion in the shuttle, with part of the explosion debris puncturing the tire.
Below is a chronology from spaceflightnow.com - Notice the change in bank angle time.
1401 GMT (9:01 a.m. EST)
Columbia is out of communications with flight controllers in Houston. Now 15 minutes from landing time.
1359 GMT (8:59 a.m. EST)
At an altitude of 40 miles, shuttle Columbia has entered Texas.
1357 GMT (8:57 a.m. EST)
The shuttle is now 43 miles over New Mexico. Columbia is now reversing its bank to the left to further reduce speed.
OK:
1) As has been mentioned, there was no missle fired that could hit 200,000 feet. Iraq may have built a "supergun" with the capability to launch objects into space, but a) its firing would have been pretty obvious and b) the odds of it hitting its target are about zero, while the chance of its discovery was absolute. So no -- this wasn't a surface-to-air attack.
2) Neither was it some kind of EMP pulse. Ignoring the height, this is a ship that needs to be able to survive the extraordinarily hostile EMP environment of space -- that magnetic field that the sun's particles slam into, giving us those nice Auroras, don't exist where the shuttle goes. The ship was built to withstand EMP -- the odds of a remotely invoked meltdown in its electronics are effectively nil.
3) No, they couldn't have known it was going to fail. Random crap happens all the time, even small tiles of foam coming off. The ships are built to be four-times redundant; you don't want your ship falling apart if a simple tile comes off. I'd be surprised if this had anything to do with the insulation stripping off.
4) No, the space program is not going to be shut down. To be blunt, China ain't going anywhere but up, and with an entirely fresh, completely modern space program at that. This is a tragedy. This is horrifying. But there will be future missions.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go mourn now.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
CBS is reporting that the Russians sent up an unmanned supply vehicle this morning, and also that there is an escape craft of sorts sufficient to return the ISS crew to Earth without a shuttle flight.
Jan 27, 1967: Apollo 1 fire
Jan 28, 1986: Challenger explosion
Feb 1, 2003 Columbia breakup
--LP
but, with a crew on the Space Station, a long delay will not be possible this time.
Do you know anything about the ISS? The reason there's only three crew members? Because the Soyuz "lifeboat" attached to the ISS to be used in case of an emergency can only hold three people.
So no, there is no rush to get the shuttle back in service to retrieve the ISS crew, the crew can easily return on the Soyuz capsule. However, once the lifeboat is used, they won't leave the station manned without a replacement.
Considering the financial woes of the Russians, it's likely NASA will shut down the ISS until the shuttle program is back up and running.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
look at this still shot further along the trajectory..
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
There is a Soyuz space cupsule on the ISS that can be used to return the astronauts currently there (2 Americans, 1 Russian). This is, in fact, why the ISS has been limited to 3 astronauts; it is all they had the room for on the escape capsule.
I think this will actually help Russia's space program; unless we want to close up the ISS and come home, Nasa is going to throw some big bucks Russia's way... They now have the only vehicle that can get to and from the ISS, at least as long as the shuttle is grounded.
... there's simply no reason why we should continue using the ancient expensive dangerous shuttle technology, when there's been MUCH better stuff developed.
Check out the milnet page on VentureStar, which is apparently being funded by black-budget ops (speculation -- but something is happening, the Air Force doesn't warehouse dead NASA projects out of the goodness of its heart). Link here
Had to pull the page from the Google cache, as much of the X-33/VentureStar info has disappeared from the web. But there's still plenty of stuff from non-governmental sites.
One of the X-33 design goals was to reduce cost per pound of payload from $20,000 to $2000, but in my mind, the more efficient and reliable engines, lack of strap-on boosters, slower reentry, no ceramic "bricks" for heat protection make good enough reasons to move forward with such a replacement for the shuttle, even if it had zero cost advantage in lifting payload to orbit.
There's no good reason to continue using the obsolete and dangerous shuttle technology forever.
I don't mean to offend, but you obviously don't know what you are talking about.
The space shuttle is an amazing technology, but all the shuttles are going to fly until they can't.
Of course. Why would they stop using them if they were still good? The orbiters were designed to be able to launched at least 100 times. The Columbia, while over twenty years old, was still well within its operational lifetime. There are commercial jetliners twice as old as Columbia still in active service today.
Furthermore, it isn't like this was some beat-up automobile that someone was still trying to coax a few more miles out of. Each orbiter is subject to a complete inspection after every launch. Systems which can no longer do their job are upgraded or replaced. NASA's shuttle fleet is probably the best maintained equipment in human history.
"...why does it have to re-enter so fast..."
Because it is in orbit. An orbit is achieved by traveling fast enough that your rate of fall toward the center of gravity (Earth, in this case) is canceled out. I believe the orbiter travels at a relative ground speed of something like 17,000 miles per hour.
In order to decelerate from that great velocity, they use the atmospheric breaking. Just as the breaks in your car use friction to slow the car, the orbiter uses atmospheric friction to slow the orbiter.
It is an inherently dangerous situation (second only to launch in risk), but an unavoidable one.
How?
It's a reasonable question. There is a good reason every spacecraft ever flown by man has used an unpowered re-entry: Fuel. You would need a lot of fuel to control that kind of velocity. That means added weight, and weight is everything when it comes to launching a vehicle from a gravity well. Every pound of weight on the space shuttle costs approximately five thousand dollars to launch.
A powered landing would not only be impractically expensive, it would likely be technologically impossible. It makes no sense.
Again: How? Velocities of thousands of miles per hour. Altitudes of hundreds of thousands of miles. Temperatures of hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit. It isn't like they can just jump out. To survive, you would basically need to build another spacecraft. See above about weight.
The heat shield is one of the weaker points in the design of most spacecraft. Keep in mind that building a realistic heat shield pushes our materials technology to the edge. While you might think that building a single surface with no seams would be better, but that is not so. It would in fact be considerably harder and more expensive to build. It would also be much harder to maintain. The shuttle's tiles can be easily replaced when they inevitably degrade. Not so with a single surface.
On one hand, you're suggesting infeasible or impossible improvements. Now you suggest they subject it to unnecessary risk? Why?
The space shuttle is already one of the most heavily monitored devices ever built by man. Huge amounts of data are constantly transmitted, recorded, and analyized by computers and people, both onboard the spacecraft and on the ground. What do you suggest they do differently?
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I live in Nacogdoches, Texas, which is near where some of the debris fell. At around 8 this morning, I heard a low rumble, almost like an earthquake or something. Then the house starting shaking off and on for about 20-30 seconds. My first thought was to check the major appliances in the house (heat pump, hot water heater, etc.) simply because we don't get earthquakes in this neck of the woods. My wife also got up and said the house was shaking and it woke her up (and it is no small feat to wake her up early on a Saturday morning).
I ruled out any problems with the house and went online hoping maybe to find seismic information or news about an explosion or something. Within a few minutes, I saw the alert on CNN.com suggesting they'd lost contact with Columbia. I instantly knew that's what the rumbling was and I started to fear the worst.
It's not terribly uncommon to hear sonic booms when the shuttle goes over (we seem to be in the path when the shuttles land at Cape Canaveral) but it also isn't uncommon to have low flying B-52s and B-2s. Needless to say, this is a horrible tragedy. Personally though, it's one thing to see it on TV. It's quite another to have it take place in your back yard.
CBS is reporting multiple sources in NASA are looking at a possible left wing failure. This is the same wing which was possibly damaged by the foam falling off the fuel tank on launch. CBS was earlier reporting that last communication from the shuttle was relating to a inordinate tire pressure change also (not specific on which wing), could explain heating up of the left wing because of a heat shield failure, leading to heating up of the tire, increase tire pressure, catastrophic wing failure, shuttle gets out of alignment on re-entry, and it tears apart.
Again, this is only prelim reporting but would make sense in relation to visual reports of spiraling etc. Wing failure, goes into a spin, breaks up.
This morning when I heard the news, I was just getting started on the chapter "We're on fire!" of the book Flight, My life in mission control by Chris Kraft. This book provides a very interesting alternative viewpoint to the manned spaced program than the usual journalistic lack of information or astronauts famed biographies.
Here we get plenty of gritty details, in particular all the technical problems that they had during flights, and there were plenty. The well publicised Apolo 13 was only one of them, as virtually every mission was riddled with loss of control, loss of comunication, targetting error, or even worse, like rocket misfire on the pad with astronauts on top ! Just to show how close they were many times from major failure. Today was just one step over the limit.
A very recommended read for all you engineering types. And the others.
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Feynmann was very unhappy with the report on the Challenger disaster. As a member of the committee responsible for the report he refused to sign off on it unless he could include his views on shuttle safety as an appendix. As another /. reader pointed out previously, you can read Feynmann's appendix here:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/ docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt
Down near the end of the appendix Feynmann places the odds of catastrophic failure for a shuttle to be "on the order of 1%". This does NOT mean he said it was 1%: when a physicist says "on the order of" he means "the same order of magnitude" or (for the less mathematically rigorous) "about the same power of 10 as". He even went on to apologize for being unable to be more specific.
So, Feynmann's estimate was really that the chance of failure is CLOSER TO 1 IN 100 than to 1 in a thousand or 1 in 10.
Life is short: void the warranty.
Senators Challenge Shuttle Safety Spending
WASHINGTON -- Raising the specter of another shuttle tragedy, senators and others warned Thursday that NASA's growing budget woes are putting astronauts' lives at risk.
Pressure to deal with a projected $4.8 billion cost overrun on the International Space Station project and other factors have caused National Aeronautics and Space Administration managers to treat space shuttle safety upgrades as optional, officials said Thursday. Numerous pending safety improvements to the orbiter vehicles and their ground-support infrastructure have been targeted for cancellation or deferral.
"I fear that if we don't provide the space shuttle program with the resources it needs for safety upgrades, our country is going to pay a price we can't bear," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
[...]
"We're starving NASA's shuttle budget and thus greatly increasing the chance of a catastrophic loss," Nelson said.
The lone NASA official to testify, William Readdy, deputy associate administrator for the Office of Space Flight, did not dispute Nelson's assessment.
See: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/2121/used_news. htm
t nik.html
WORKING ON A TILE DAMAGE MYSTERY
By Greg Katnik
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/shuttle/team/ka
December 23, l997
STS-87 rolled to a stop; the mission was complete! That statement is true for the flight of the Columbia, however, a new mission began when the wheels of the Columbia came to a stop: the post flight inspections. My division is responsible for the overall analysis of these inspections and we insure that all changes made, due to these inspections, do not affect other areas that may jeopardize the flight-worthiness of the shuttle. This division does not focus on one specific area, but analyzes all information and ensures that all aspects are kept in balance.
Immediately after the Columbia rolled to a stop, the inspection crews began the process of the post flight inspection. As soon as the orbiter was approached, light spots in the tiles were observed indicating that there had been significant damage to the tiles. The tiles do a fantastic job of repelling heat, however they are very fragile and susceptible to impact damage. Damage numbering up to forty tiles is considered normal on each mission due to ice dropping off of the external tank (ET) and plume re-circulation causing this debris to impact with the tiles. But the extent of damage at the conclusion of this mission was not "normal". The pattern of hits did not follow aerodynamic expectations and the number, size and severity of hits were abnormal. Three hundred and eight hits were counted during the inspection, one-hundred and thirty two (132) were greater than one inch. Some of the hits measured fifteen (15) inches long with depths measuring up to one and one-half (1 1/2) inches. Considering that the depth of the tile is two (2) inches, a 75% penetration depth had been reached.Over one hundred (100) tiles have been removed from the Columbia because they were irreparable. The inspection revealed the damage, now the "detective process" began.
During the STS-87 mission, there was a change made on the external tank. Because of NASA's goal to use environmentally friendly products, a new method of "foaming" the external tank had been used for this mission and the STS-86 mission. It is suspected that large amounts of foam separated from the external tank and impacted the orbiter. This caused significant damage to the protective tiles of the orbiter. Foam cause damage to a ceramic tile?! That seems unlikly, however, when that foam is combined with a flight velocity between speeds of MACH two to MACH four, it becomes a projectile with incredible damage potential. The big question? At what phase of the flight did it happen and what changes need to be made to correct this for future missions? I will explain the entire process.