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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.
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.