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NASA says Columbia Rescue was Possible
nuke-alwin writes "Apparently NASA is saying that a rescue mission may have been possible for the Columbia crew. I first saw this on TV, but Chicago Sun-Times is also reporting the story. The risks would have been great, and may have endangered more astronaut's lives."
Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda. Lets work on improving our space program instead of sulking over things we COULD have done better.
Well NASA at the time didn't think the problem was all that big of a deal to send up a rescue crew, so they didn't.
And before people start yammering about sending them to the ISS, someone give them a physics book, they couldn't have.
I hope that NASA learns something (when something falls off a vessle it usually isn't a good sign!!!) and to be a bit more catious in the future. BUT I think they should get right back up on the horse so to speak and keep going. To quote "Enterprise" (and one of their better episodes recently) "If we are ever going to explore deep space we are going to need to take a few risks" and thats the truth of the matter.
-- It's harder to fly into the sun than out of the galaxy, go figure --
I'm sure many will disagree, but the cost of the shuttle program is horrendous, and NASA's insistence on using it has led to some cataclysmically stupid decisions. One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."
The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.
Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.
It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.
It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that trinity dies ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.
Let's do it over. And do it right.
Yes, in theory it was possible... But at what risk? How do you no the rescue ship wouldn't have had the same problem on launch? And we will never know if they spy satellites could have seen the damage on the wing...
And what of the risk of sending a crew up on a mission with zero training for that specific mission? As I understand it, they practice space walks for months ahead of time... The suggest this space walk with no training at all. And rushing another space shuttle into orbit doesn't exactly sound safe.
Sure, there is a chance they could have saved them. We could also have lost twice as many people.
Really, this just sounds like a witch hunt, and someone laying the groundwork for lawsuits.
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
I want to hear what they are going to do next time. I sure as hell don't want to hear that they could have done it this time, but didn't.
What do you think that they're going to do next time a shuttle is up in space and has possible damage?
Just about everything that they could have done for Columbia, plus whatever new stuff they change on account of looking at what NASA could have done for Columbia.
I think I could handle the risking of the lives to attempt the rescue.
But sadly, and honestly, I would have disagreed with this approach due to the risk to the manned space program. Had both shuttles not returned (which was rather likely, I believe), I don't think we would have returned to space for at least a decade.
I guess that is a rather confusing/conflicting point of view.
In general, I'm still rather angry about things like the spy agencies not giving satellite time. This is where the root of the problem lies in our space program (by "our", I mean "man's", not the US's).
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
So, they are taking heat for the failure, and now we've got the idiots yelling "You COULD have saved them!!!!"...
This isn't like someone making a huge error, it's a small error. Nasa designs their parts to be probability-tolerent. IE, they build a part, test it 1000 times, figure out how many times it will fail then improve on it. They get their parts down to a 99% fault tolerency and then they put 8 or 9 of them on the shuttle to lessen the chance of them breaking.
It isn't like the crew didn't know about it and didn't take a look at the damage before re-entry and figure it was minor. Sometimes accidents just happen, miscalculators lead to deaths and we aren't perfect. But you're an idiot for saying that these people are a bunch of dumbnuts for not sending up a shuttle for every little incident.
The problem with Nasa is that they are low on funding and are run (as in, leaded by, not as in the people donig the work) by a bunch of idiots. This wouldn't have happened if they weren't going up in a 20 year old rickety tin can, and they probably do have the funding to build new shuttles they just waste so much that they don't have the recources to do so.
Buerocracy is a bitch.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Better would be not to rush a rescue, but rather rush finding a way to resupply Columbia so it could stay up long enough to wait for a non-rushed rescue.
With all the military launch capacity, plus various other country's space programs, it would probably not take too long to get something up that could deliver food/water/oxygen and whatever else is needed to keep things going.
People really need to get a grip. These people signed up for this shit. What's with this joy of deciding FOR people "It's dangerous for you, you can't do it" instead of giving them a choice.
Ask the other astronauts, "We're looking for someone to go up to try and rescue these guys." I doubt one of them would say no, regardless of the danger. They would hope that those other astronauts would do the same for them if the tables were reversed, eh? It's part of the job. Hell, it's part of the human spirit.
It's not just the space program that they like to enforce "safety" upon, but that's been the clearest indicator recently. All the "oh no it's dangerous can't do it" anal-retentives of the world need to loosen up. Little of the research that has gotten us this far could be classified as "safe". So stop making decisions for others based on their safety.
There are stupid risks, and then there are just risks. Leave it up to the people whose lives are on the line to decide. Except, of course, if the risk is clearly a very stupid one, you might not want to waste an orbiter on it. That's fair. But to go up to save astronauts from certain death? Yeah, that's worth an orbiter.
Regardless, other posts are correct -- this is all 20/20 hindsight now. Time to move on. I just wish the lesson learned from this wasn't "Space travel is dangerous, we'd better be much more careful to the point of making everything we're trying to do only marginally useful at best", while all the people who are willing to take risks utterly blow them out of the water.
Random and weird software I've written.
I never bought that a rescue mission wasn't possible. If they knew that Columbia would burn up, they would've found a solution. 1,000,000 engineers across the country, including all 10,000+ Aerospace engineers in this country would have been working on solutions. We would've figured it out, and it would have been much more clever than the limited scenario they have reightfully been exploring.
Basically, all the engineers did their jobs, but they were making assumptions about how others would do their jobs, and what the options were.
One team analyzed the foam impact. They didn't think it would be serious, but there was some uncertainty. In general, rocket engineers, especially those working for NASA and the Air Force, are paid to make conservative analyses and decisions. So, if they were operating in a vacuum, the engineers would likely have requested better test data on foam impact of different parts, and better assessment of the damage.
Now, these engineers believed that getting better foam impact test data was unlikely. So they didn't ask for it. They had already made the 1st assessment that it was OK (based on un-wetted foam hitting tiles), even though they probably knew this wasn't a conservative analysis. So they asked for photos, to improve their assessment. Someone at NASA decided photos were not necessary since the intial analysis made it look like Columbia was OK. Plus, these managers assumed that the photographs would not be helpful, but that was based on 1) capabilities of a few years ago, and 2) probably what was unclassified; could an NRO spy satellite have taken pictures? Plus, the NASA manager has it in his head that a rescue is impossible anyways, so why push the issue?
I also wonder whether the foam-impact engineers knew about the piece that detached? Probably not. I'm sure someone had all the info, but it probably sounded like, "The foam impact analysis said there was no problem. Therefore this object is probably just ice."
And the point CAIB keeps hitting on, NASA got comfortable with risks b/c they turned out to be OK. But when you aim for 99.9% reliability, it should preclude using flight history to clear anomalies until the anomaly has occured 1000 times. NASA should've always been looking at objects neat STS.
All in all, it's a tough nut to crack. It took a lot to bring down Columbia, a sequence of events that took over 2 weeks to play out. Like Apollo 1, the biggest failure was probably a lack of imagination, and not realizing what our capabilities really are. The Shuttle is a true engineering marvel, on par with the great construction projects, and light-years ahead of any Stealth bomber (which cost almost as much as a shuttle!), aircraft carrier, dumb booster or any race car. The shuttle is a global asset, and the improvements we make to it will reep rewards for decades to come.
Do you really think there's someone at a high enough level at NASA (or anywhere, for that matter) who would have had the brass cajones (that's "brass balls" for you gringos) to take accountability for approving such a rescue mission? If a rescue were successful, he'd have to answer to the bean counters and outrage over having risked *two* crews. And if it weren't....
...Bethanie....
The right stuff and can-do attitude of the early days has been replaced by bureaucrats. Which, as you seen, can cost people their lives. As you can see here, shuttle rescues used to be part of the nasa planning process.
Of courser there is this question as well
"What's to stop you from having the same damage to Atlantis? You're basically throwing the dice," Thagard said.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
How much would such a rescue have cost anyway? Would it have made sense to pay it? Just think how many lives could have been saved with the millions of $$$ if they had been used to supply emergency aid after the Iraq or Afghanistan invasions, or to pay for famine victims in Africa instead.
Of course, they aren't glamorous, and aren't "heroes" with their faces splashed all over the world-wide media, but neverless saving a thousand or so of them might have been more worthy than what's being proposed here. What's more, we still have an opporunity to do something on this one...
Would have, could have, should have .... come on ... going out into space means that from time to time things may go wrong. It's exploration of space, what do you expect? That it is easy? That everyone will always return home safely? Mankind has hardly taken any step 'out there' and if every accident results in such a media hype and discussions about funding and stuff, you may ask yourself where the exploring attitude of your ancestors has gone. Do the best you can possibly do to avoid accidents, you want your people to return to tell the story, but if something goes all wrong, accept that this is the price you sometimes have to pay and learn from it. It's about exploration, not about 'handling the media'. Are the media really able to understand what exploration is about in the first place?
You forget that the space shuttle is not equipped for such an in-orbit resupply. Sure you can bring up more food, water, oxygen canisters, CO2 scrubbers and what-not, but how about propellant for the maneuvering thrusters? What happens when the fuel cells are bled dry? I doubt those could be easily recharged in orbit, at least without poisoning the crew...
I keep seeing posts and news reports blaming NASA for not sending out a rescue. Read the articles people, get informed! If NASA had known the problem really was as bad as it turned out you can bet they would have put every person they could find on getting that crew home alive. Remember Apollo 13? It would have been the same scenario.
... AND we could have had two damaged shuttles in the air at one time because at the time we didn't have a clue as to what went wrong with the first one.
Though, the risk taker in me says we should've tried it if we had time to make a rescue attempt.
I'm also on board with the group that says, lets make improvements and move forward. I wish they had made the decision to take long range pictures, even if they couldn't have saved the Columbia. That information could've provided the needed piece to save future shuttle crews. Though it would've torn up the American public to know we had a shuttle that was lost before the fact.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
I think a key step is being overlooked here. Before a rescue mission is considered and planned, you have to have something to rescue. Remember, nobody at the time knew for a fact that there was a problem.
From what I understood, even if the foam issue had been investigated, no damage would have been seen. Missing tiles could not have been seen by a telescope or any other long-range imaging mechanism.
The *only* way they could have determined there was a problem was with a space walk and that wasn't possible because they didn't have the equipment.
We're now talking about sending an entire shuttle up just to *check* to see if some foam hit the wing, not to rescue a shuttle with a known problem.
Is there really any doubt that yes, *something* could have been done if the outcome we now are aware of was known? Of course NASA would have tried to prevent it. But the fact remains that there was no known problem. We shouldn't be worried about whether a rescue mission could have been created, we should be worried about how could the actual damage have been more accurately assessed!
An overwhelming majority of US astronauts are ex-military types. To talk about risks...these guys would gladly bear the likelyhood of their own death if it meant the possibility of saving another. I know guys who risked their lives in combat to recover corpses - dead bodies - simply because the hunk of unrecognizable flesh they were dragging back was a fellow solider/marine/airman. If a rescue mission had been organized, and volunteers asked for, you would have had no shortage of schmoes ready to hang it out on the line.
There should be pre-positioned Escape-n-Rescue devices, put all over the earth's orbit at several altitude. This would allow anyone (rocket men, shuttle crew, cosmonaught, Space Station, etc.) to use them during emergency. The U.N. should pay for this, since it would have to be international in order to avoid risk of more shuttle crews exploding like Discovery and Challenger.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Wouldn't NASA wait to determine the cause of the problem before launching a second crew into space? What if Atlantis gets up there and discovers "Hey, same thing happened to us...can you send ANOTHER rescue ship?". It took several weeks just to start narrowing down the cause from all the theories, and even now that they have plenty of info NASA still isn't sending shuttles up into space.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
IMHO, NASA management went through the exact same stages of denial that they went through with the Challenger orings--with regard to both the foam issues and in the investigation of the foam impact in the days following the launch.
NASA management knew the orings were charing before Challenger, and they knew falling foam was causing damage to the surface integrity before Columbia.
The killing off of NASA's failure analysis group in California is also a problem. NASA saved lots of money killing that shop, but in return they got a horribly botched analysis from the inexperienced replacement group in Texas--an analysis that was exactly what management wanted to hear--"There is no problem".
Accepting that analysis, management then decided no photos were necessary. How convenient. The risk appears low, so stop gathering data. That's some piss poor management. Hear no evil, speak no evil. If you close your eyes, it will all just go away.
The engineers still have the spirit. In the emails they predicted everything almost exactly as it unfolded. If not for the bumbling management, I have no doubt they could have transformed this from a tragedy to a epic story of rescue.
There are continuing, endemic, structural, non-trivial management failures at NASA. The US government continues to ignore them at their peril.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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The Titanic had bigger casulties because they didn't have enough of them.
C3P0 and R2D2 used them in the first released Star Wars to escape the Imperial Froces.
I'm talking about ESCAPE PODS.
Lifeboats.
Why doesn't the shuttle have them? I realize "size" is an issue. But when a piece of FOAM can cause enough damage to the shuttle to bring it down, then there's gotta be an alternative. Or at least, future shuttles could be stockpiling them at the International Space Station.
(Personally, I don't think it was foam. There are faster and denser pieces of debris flying around in space all of the time. If Halley's comet is bulky enough to be swing around every 70 years, there must be smaller versions as well. I'm just surprised there aren't more cameras sprinkled throughout the ship for post-mortems or for scanning the underside of the ship. I was just at Target last night, and saw small CCD cameras for personal computers that cost a whopping $38 each.)
Basic orbital mechanics: 1. Soyuz can't reach the orbit Columbia was in. 2. Columbia didn't have enough fuel to make it to the ISS. The only possible rescue solution was Atlantis.
Thats just brilliant!
You are making the assumption that NASA knew the shuttle was going to suffer a catastrophic failure on re-entry. Other than some speculation by some NASA engineers, I havent seen any definitive proof that NASA was negligent.
Space travel is dangerous and accidents happen. I am not saying that should exclude people from taking responsibility, but it also means that we cant suggest letting people take baseball bats to men and women who lost their friends in an accident because we assume they played fast and loose with facts.
thousands may have survived the sinking of the Titanic if only the outcome had been different.....
Really now. Let's all play the "what if" game. What if they'd sent another shuttle? What if they'd looked at spy sat. images? What if a race of friendly aliens repaired the shuttle the erased the memories of those aboard? What if we could have sent Bruce Willis up there with a team of loveable hacks? You know what? None of that happened, and Columbia is still sitting in pieces. Deal with it. Establish what went wrong, do your best to ensure it doesn't happen again, and move on with the space program.
I'm just glad we've got experts in the media that can press home the fact that they're smarter than those in charge. "Hey, let's make NASA acknolwedge the fact that there was a super slim chance of possibly rescuing those poor, departed ratings....er...heros"
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Someone said 'Whats done is done'.
I agree with that sentiment. We are in the 'Find problem, fix it and move on' stage and backtracking does nothing.
However since the subject was brought up, I have the thought of how could they have known?
Okay we have said that technicaly it was feasible to rescue.
Let's say we get into a time machine and go back to Janurary and try to convince NASA that something is very, very wrong and they need to start prepping Atlantis.
Even if you could show those officials your time machine and convince them you are who you say you are they are still not going to do it without absolute proof that Columbia is in a bad, bad way.
Did we have a system available to us in Janurary to assess the damage properly?
Having an astronaut do an EVA with one of those jet packs they got is a serious step. It is very possible it would end up with the astronaut doing that 'dying' thing that they all try to avoid.
So you can't simply throw that out. Once again you have to have serious suspicions that you can back up before you go that step. I would say that is the last step before prepping Atlantis.
I remember this as a huge debate directly after the crash. I remember being thoroughly unsold on if we could have figured it out.
You're assuming there was damage that could actually be seen prior to re-entry. Perhaps there was something visible, but no one knows for sure. That seems to me pretty thin to be used as the basis for condemning someone to a life of derision.
The rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield.
I understand that they are NOT set up for 2 missions at a time. MC (I've heard) can only handle ONE flight at a time.
I would hope that they have a redundant mission control facility at some geograpically-different location (in case the active one is rendered unusable), which could serve a second shuttle if necessary.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
True but to not even try was irresponsible and according to reports an attemp to do so was asked for and then called off. I do not understand the logic of THAT at all. They gave the excuse that "we tried to use those assests before and failed to get good results" Sorry that line is bogus. During the Joh Glenn mission they tried and didn't get good results but during the first mission of Columbia they got good photos and her last mission's orbit was simular to this one if I recall correctly so the same assets could have been used on this mission.
Who killed the attempt at photos and why? That is the question I have been asking for 3 months.
Also the board has now allready recommeded to NASA that ALL shuttles be photographed as SOP from now on. If it so lousy a method why bother to require it?
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