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Shuttle Missions Will Be Monitored From Space
los furtive writes "According to this news article NASA has made an agreement with the U.S. military so that all future shuttle missions will be monitored by National Imagery and Mapping Agency satellites."
2006: "We couldn't have fixed the Space Shuttle Tranquility (sponsored by Nike) even if cameras on the satellite had shown that there was indeed iron-clad evidence of tile damage."
Now that's progress.
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Any number of things could have been done. Even with Columbia, knowing there was a disaster in the offing, I'd expect some creativity under pressure, if only sending up Soyuz to take them off.
And in future, I expect that NASA will have a contingency plan or two availible, with fuel and supplies to implement it.
John Roth
Remember that before Apollo 13, the same might have been said about the chances of the crew's survival if a service module had an explosion, but they worked on the problem, and got the crew home alive. I'd imagine that a shuttle 'could' stay in orbit for quite a while on it's supplies if it really had to. Probably wouldn't be comfortable, but it's better to know.
Well, if they had some sort of monitoring like this during the disasterous re-entry, they might be able to tell specifically what caused the accident. Instead, they now are working on conjecture and rumor.
So, when is this new shuttle going to be rolled out? I've heard bits and pieces about it for a while now, along with some who say it's a few years off. Anyone have any info? Talk amongst yourselves...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
This practice will help avert future shuttle disasters. It may not as you indicate help the potentially future damaged shuttle that they take a picture of by satelite.
Remember all the activity that has been underway to determine the root cause of the Columbia disaster? A picture wouldn't have necessarily saved the Columbia, but it could provide the needed information to have prevented future catastrophe's. The benefit is long term and possibly immediate if something is found to be fixable in flight
But more importantly who will be the first to put advertising on the bottom of the shuttle for the picture?
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
There is a limit to what creativity can do. In this case, the shuttle's orbit was not inclined enough to be reachable by Russian rockets--unless they launched from elsewhere that Baikonur, but their pad in Kourou won't be in service for years.
One possibility would have been to launch Atlantis a couple of weeks early, but they would have to have known about the seriousness of the damage early in the mission (so that Columbia's crew could conserve power and have resources left to stretch). But this was luck (what if no shuttle was waiting?), and it would still imply to skimp a few safety procedures; gamble, one shuttle and seven crew lost, or two shuttles and nine crew?
They're speaking of scrapping all shuttle missions not going to the ISS--not that there were many--except the final Hubble servicing. In other words, don't build a safer vehicle, don't take risks, reduce our capabilities...
I think some of you may be missing the obvious: the point isn't to prevent future space disasters, that will be done in other ways. The point is to know a lot more about them when they do happen by having as much information as possible.