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Columbia's Final Minutes in Detail
grub writes "This article on Newsday has an excerpt from 'Comm Check... The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia,' by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood describing the last minutes of Columbia's final flight in detail."
This article is kind of an intense read... I think it's important to remember these fallen heros, who gave their lives for the purpose of furthering our understanding of science.
Hats off to those brave souls.
How can a hole being ripped in the wing, or any other part of the shuttle not be picked up by some sensor?
though, what could be done 81 seconds after beginning re-entry? anything besides acknowledge that you're going to die? if you level your course, instead of going down into the atmosphere will you just gradually burn up? I'm thinking, skim the outter atmosphere, since the air is thin it isn't having a drastic effect on the structure (compared with a few minutes later the change in atmosphere rips into the shuttle a lot more). skip out of the atmosphere and resume some sort of drift through space. try to control the drift so you're not hurtling into nothingness, although if your travelling at 1,568 mph maybe that is a little far fetched. then, assess the damage, and deal with it somehow (emergency rescue mission, repairs if at all possible?).
i am not a rocket scientist. but at what point of re-entry is it too late to do any sort of constructive abort?
I remember when the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed, and I really never imagined that another space shuttle would be destroyed in my lifetime.
I've heard complaints about feeding starving people instead of exploring space, and that does sound compelling in light of the fact that there is so much human suffering, but I believe (as do many) that space exploration represents a greater destiny for mankind.
Maybe that destiny could be put off a few decades while we solve all the world's problems, but I don't want that long.
It's like that t-shirt my one trekkie buddy used to wear, "The meek shall inherit the Earth... the rest of us shall go to the stars."
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
It is not entirely unfeasible. Engineered breakaway points for the crew capsule and hypersonic drag chutes for orientation in order to keep any insulating barriers between the crew and the encroaching atmosphere.
Humans have free fallen from as high as 19 miles with nothing more than a pressure suite and a hypersonic drag/parachute system.
Could it really have stopped it happening? Once the foam punched a hole in the craft, the Columbia was incapable of reentry. We were told back then (and I have heard nothing since which contradicts this) that the crew had no way of fixing that problem.
What I have always wondered is: if they had known, could they have hung out at the ISS and waited for NASA to send up a rescue craft? The Columbia will not have had enough food or oxygen for any extended period of time, but the ISS should have had. A rescue craft coming up a couple of weeks later could have replaced both and taken the crew home.
No idea if this was feasable.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
The openning quote really infuriates me.
It takes s special breed of bureaucratic self serving bozo to describe this accident in the most bizzarre terms possible then say something like "I don't know how anyone could have seen that coming" when the truth is people DID see it coming and tried their darndest to stop it happening and long before this NASA had been running foam inmapct studies due to earlier strikes.
Actually this sounds very similar to, and yet entirely different from the plasma I learned about in college 20 or so years ago.
:
... ) for a second - it isn't a liquid but if you touch it you get wet. It isn't a gas but its density approaches that of heavy gasses. It has properties of both a liquid and a gas - because it is sort of a half-step between the two.
As I recall, this is how matter arrives at the plasma state
1. Start with some matter.
2. Suck out all the other gasses surrounding that original matter.
3. Seal the container.
4. Heat it up beyond the boiling point, maintain a constant volume.
5. Some of the liquid will become a gas as it boils off. The partial pressure mixture of gas and liquid will equalize and as more heat enters the system more of it will boil out of the liquid phase as gas, and the density of the gas will increase.
6. The pressure inside the container increases.
7. Keep adding heat. Eventually the density of the superheated gas will be the same as the density of the frothy liquid and the state of the entire volume will be roughly the same - this is called Plasma.
I don't recall it having anything to do with electrically charged particles, or electrons being stripped away.
I suggest that you consider foam (mental vision : put ice cream in a tall glass, pour root beer over it - the foam is the fluffy stuff on top
Consider the conditions of the re-entrant space shuttle : hauling ass through upper atmosphere. Friction of the atmosphere on the wing leading edges causing both friction induced heat and pressure. The metal that comprises the shuttle providing the 'matter' in step #1 above, is super-heated and pushed under intense pressure through cracks in the superstructure. Depending on the pressure and temperature, it could have possibly been 'plasma' as I understand it, or it could have been really hot molten metal (which when sprayed on you, feels a lot like plasma, I envision.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
That is, equip the compartment with its own heatshield. And while you're at it, get rid of all the useless and dangerous surrounding stuff like wings etc. That is, build a conventional capsule like Soyuz or Apollo. Which is what they're planning to do, right?
When replying to the post above I mentioned they could have tried to use the "life-boat" Soyuz at docked to the ISS to take 3 people off right away. After I hit "submit", another thought crossed my mind, they could have stuffed the Soyuz with all the extra chemical oxigen exchanger cannisters and water and what not spare stuff they could get off ISS and send that along. In the best case you could have had 3 people off the shuttle reducing the rate of use consumables by 42% and a whole pile of new suplies on top of this in one go, thus allowing the remaining 4 to hang around for months on end in there! This would certainly be good enough to get Atlantis ready.
I'm acquainted with plasma, the ionized(electrically conductive) gas, and I've always wondered why they don't use magnetic fields to help steer the plasma away from the critical areas, ie. leading edge of the wings and nose. What would it take to generate such a field?
I can understand if there is a lot of power required, but couldn't some of it be taken from the supersonic plasma/airstream in some way, perhaps through MHD(MagnetoHydroDynamically)? In this way you would have a self balancing system, as the ship goes deeper into the atmosphere, where it's hotter, more power would be generated, and thus the field strength could increase?
I'm not a plasma physicist, but there would seem to be some merit in such an idea for re-entry craft such as the shuttle. Anybody of the appropriate technical persuasion have any comments about such an idea?
In memorium.