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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."
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 --
What would Kirk do?
BytesTemplar.com
I think the point is that if a situation like this arises again, NASA can be better prepared to face it and potentially save lives.
-Sean
It said on the news last night that Atlantis was already being prepped for a future launch and it would have taken two weeks to finish up the launch procedures.
Two shuttles in orbit would have been amazing stuff.
The Washington Post gives more details on two plans. The first would involve a launch of Atlantis with a four man skeleton crew to an orbit within 20-30 meters of Columbia and a transfer of the stranded astronauts using spare spacesuits. The second would have two astronauts "don the two space suits aboard their craft and attempt to patch a hole in the left wing using odds and ends, including stainless steel parts, insulation, soft tiles ripped from the side of the shuttle, an ice pack and heat resistant tape."
Satellites are no longer launched by Shuttle.
Before Challenger they were, Hubble and KH-12 have similar chasis for Shuttle launches, but after the delay from Challenger NRO/NSA/DMA switched to Titan for KH and Lacrosse.
Commerical sat launches were outlawed by Congress after Challenger and while some recce birds were launched by Shuttle after Challenger, it was due to problems with Delta/Titan which have been fixed and so for the last decade they do the launching.
Everything now is launched by the Russians, Chinese, Delta, Ariane, Titan, Sealaunch now.
Nor does Shuttle capture and repair anything anymore but Hubble.
A) Soyuz Capsules have a maximum crew capacity of 3.
B) Soyuz Capsules have such a severe reentry and landing profile that each crewmember must have a specially designed seat liner to avoid serious injury on landing. ISS Crews take their seat liners up with them on the Shuttle incase they have to use the Soyuz docked there to escape.
C) Soyuz Capsules don't have an Airlock, they have a simple hatch. So they would have had to depressurize and repressurize the capsule multiple times for the crew transfer. No idea how many repressurizations a Soyuz capsule is rated for, nor if enough consumables are available onboard for multiple repressurizations.
D) Russia can barely build enough Soyuz capsules to fulfill their current committments. Firing off one (they would have needed 4 due to the 7 member crew and the requirement for at least 1 cosmonaut in each one) would have been technically and physically impossible under the time constraints they were operating under. Even if they DID Have 4 spare Soyuz capsules lying around, it's doubtful they would have had 4 launch vehicles available and able to be prepped and launched in rapid succession.
Inshort, completely impossible.
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.
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"
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.
Skylab was intended for exactly three missions, with no intention of resupply or re-use. The vehicle itself had severe problems -- one solar panel tore off at launch -- which limited its usefulness (the first mission ended up being largely wasted on rescuing the station). Mir was no picnic, either -- there was a major fire, and the collission with a resupply ship. The ISS has, so far, been comparatively problem-free.
Skylab's orbit was not that high -- roughly 270 miles -- in any case it was launched in 1973 and crashed to Earth only six years later, in 1979. The ISS's current altitude is 242 miles. I can't find any orbital data on Mir, but the space shuttle got there, too, and it didn't take more than a few years to crash back to Earth after maintenance ended.
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.
I don't know what you mean by "real orbit", but the shuttle deployed Hubble at an altitude of 368 miles and has visited it several times since. No current manned vehicle can go much higher than this; and none can reach geosynchronous orbit. Shuttle deployment is not a good idea for commercial satellites, but it makes sense for large, multi-billion-dollar one-shot spacecraft (like Hubble) because if something goes wrong there is an option to bring it back to Earth or do on-orbit repair.
The safety record sucks.
The claimed accident rate of one-in-400 is clearly off. The demonstrated accident rate of 2-in-113 is not atypical of comparable launch vehicles, such as Soyuz. It's even more impressive given that the shuttle system is intended to be reusable, while Soyuz is launched new each time.
It's a white elephant without a mission
Its mission has been and always will be to service the ISS.
It's very tempting to look at any complicated system that has problems, and say, "Bah, this is useless, let's start over". The reality is that experience gained using the shuttle and the ISS is crucial to the continued exploitation of space.
Space flight is a risky business and will continue to be so. There is no guarantee that a new system with untested hardware will be any safer.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Man that reminds me of a classmate in a high school math class:
/. I guess i did know it was coming...
teacher: "Now if you turn to page 165.."
student: "Ah man too bad it wasn't page 163, I turned right to it!!!"
Geez, and if I knew i was going to be dumped i could have dumped the girl first.. oh wait I read
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill