Slashdot Mirror
The Rescue Plan That Could Have Saved Space Shuttle Columbia
An anonymous reader writes "In February, 2003, space shuttle Columbia was lost upon atmospheric re-entry. Afterward, NASA commissioned an exhaustive investigation to figure out what happened, and how it could be prevented in the future. However, they also figured out exactly what would have been required for a repair and rescue mission using Atlantis. Lee Hutchinson at Ars Technica went through the report and wrote a lengthy article explaining what such a mission would look like. In short: risky and terribly complex — but possible. 'In order to push Atlantis through processing in time, a number of standard checks would have to be abandoned. The expedited OPF processing would get Atlantis into the Vehicle Assembly Building in just six days, and the 24/7 prep work would then shave an additional day off the amount of time it takes to get Atlantis mated to its external tank and boosters. After only four days in the Vehicle Assembly Building, one of the two Crawler-Transporters would haul Atlantis out to Launch Complex 39, where it would stage on either Pad A or Pad B on Flight Day 15—January 30. ... Once on the pad, the final push to launch would begin. There would be no practice countdown for the astronauts chosen to fly the mission, nor would there be extra fuel leak tests. Prior to this launch, the shortest time a shuttle had spent on the launch pad was 14 days; the pad crews closing out Atlantis would have only 11 days to get it ready to fly.'"
However, this presupposes that you knew about the problem before trying to land.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Because you were cutting corners?
What then?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I wonder what other options they investigated... for instance, would it have been feasible to do a spacewalk and relocate foam to critical areas? I know this stuff is way more complicated than any simplistic suggestions from the internet, but NASA pulled hell and high water to bring Apollo 13 home safely. Imminent emergencies have a way bringing out the greatness in an otherwise bureaucratic organization.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
...of only a few days, then this would be quite useful. You could get Denzel Washington in onthe project somehow.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
"Could" is a pretty strong word. As Lee goes into some depth on exactly how much of a record breaking effort it would have taken just to get Atlantis off the ground in time to save Columbia, and how many corners would have to be not only cut but removed with a chainsaw, it would be more accurate to say that the plan proposed by the CAIB shows that even if the Launch Director had pointed to Columbia as it was launching and said "Hey, there are some missing tiles there. We need to get Atlantis ready right now", they still wouldn't have been able to do it.
The thing to take away from this is not that NASA could have saved Columbia but didn't, but that they changed the plan for every other shuttle launch so that they would always have a second launch vehicle on standby. It's about learning from mistakes, not making them worse.
...if you encapsulate the word "reusable" in quotes. and this is a good illustration of that fact.
At $2bn per flight and a stack of signatures a mile high for each one, they required significant dissasembly and inspection in-between flights. The shuttle was never designed as a production vehicle - it was a test article hastily pressed into production. To keep a "hot standby" for rescue missions would thus be quite costly.
The future is ultimately with 100% reusable "gas and go" vehicles with automotive-like reliability, and not with the latest "SLS" - Senate Launch System. These vehicles require more R&D upfront but the payoff is staggering.
The report deals with a tragedy 11 years ago (Feb 2003), and how it could've been handled 11 years ago. Fast forward to February 2014. Let's use today's tech. We've got SpaceX and other commercial entities capable of launching supplies into orbit and rendezvouing with with ISS or a shuttle.
If any similar missions are undertaken in future, pay SpaceX/whomever, to have a launch vehicle with emergency supplies on standby. In a worst case, send up enough oxygen/water/rations/etc to allow the orbiting shuttle crew to survive longer on the orbiting shuttle. This would buy enough extra time to do a proper and safe inspection+launch of the rescue shuttle. In a best case, they might be able to carry out the necessary repairs and safely land the orbiting shuttle.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
One of the most basic rules of rescue operations is that you don't put rescuers into that kind of risky situation. That just created more victims.
A repair mission was pretty much impossible. A rescue mission might have been, but as others will be sure to point out this would have been risky and didn't stand a very good chance of success. But it was ONLY possible had they known for sure the damage was terminal and had started the rescue mission right after the launch. Given they didn't really know the extent of the damage, trying a reentry was pretty much the only option. I don't begrudge the mission controllers for going though with it.
Astronauts know the risks they take all too well. They fully accept the risk that they may not come home, and that death may not be quick. Many of the modes of death they face are quick. But some are slow lingering affairs. I cannot imagine dying of Hypoxia in a cold soundless metal cylinder, knowing what was coming, but having no options.
But heroes are like that. For the sake of the mission they take risks we would never imagine. Astronauts are rare, not because they number only a few, but because of what they choose to do in spite of the risks.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This kind of thing really makes me angry, because the Columbia crew *did not have to die*
I absolutely hate the triumph of spreadsheet analysis over human intuition and experience.
NOTE: I'm not saying quantitative analysis, project management, risk analysis, etc isn't important...trolls...for fucks sake...I'm acknowledging that all of it is valuable and should be done.
That being said, humans need to be dealt back into the NASA decision process.
Two reasons:
1. Humans can comprehend complexity that we cannot program a machine to compute or put into numbers on a spreadsheet.
2. Redundant decision systems provide cover for incompetence & mismanagement. If the system is so complex no top decision has a human to be held accountable...well what's the difference then between an overly complex system and total anarchy?
NASA isn't the only organization suffering from 'paralysis by analysis' but it is such a special case b/c it is a government agency, very PR sensitive, & involves human lives & billions of dollars.
It's one of the most advanced orgs in existence...doing the most complex tasks humans are attempting...its logical then that NASA would have the 'worst' of these problems but it's due to their scale not any incompetence on your NASA workforce.
Thank you Dave Raggett
So abandon some standard checks and risk losing 2 crews along with the shuttles.
Yep!
There's no reason to immediately repair it, though you could, of course, and land it by computer, which it's fully capable of.
That assumes you have the repair technique well-designed by the time the rescue launches.
Better to have a later mission come back and fix it, then land by computer.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And now the U.S. has NO manned space capability... Except for thumbing a ride with the Russians! Times sure have changed.
Need a Ride?
Table-ized A.I.
You're putting words in my mouth and misrepresenting my point.
I took *great pains* to point out that *I value all quantifiable data greatly*...damn...
Also, you make it out like my side is saying, "Oh if you're trick knee twinges then 'go for it dude'!" or some kind of ridiculous crap.
That's absolutely not what I said at all....I said humans can comprehend complexity that they **cannot program a machine or quantify**
Big difference.
Thank you Dave Raggett
"The foam strike was not observed live. Only after the shuttle was orbiting Earth did NASA's launch imagery review reveal that the wing had been hit. Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage. Instead, NASA's Debris Assessment Team mathematically modeled the foam strike but could not reach any definitive conclusions about the state of the shuttle's wing. The mission continued"
..
.. said he tried at least half a dozen times to get the space agency to make the requests. There were two similar efforts by other engineers. All were turned aside. Mr. Rocha (pronounced ROE-cha) said a manager told him that he refused to be a "Chicken Little." The Columbia's flight director, LeRoy Cain, wrote a curt e-mail message that concluded, "I consider it to be a dead issue"`
NASA management choose to ignore reports of a foam strike, as they ignored previous problems with the O-Rings
'NASA engineer, Rodney Rocha
If the issue is the CO2 canisters, or even other supplies like liquid oxygen, what about launching supplies? Could the Russians have launched faster, perhaps with a vehicle already on the pad? Could we have used a unmanned rocket that would normally launch a satellite or similar to launch a payload of supplies?
From my read of the timeline even buying just a week or two might have changed the "launch a backup shuttle" plan from amazingly risky to just somewhat risky. I'm not trying to suggest getting supplies there would have been trivial, but if the right sort of rocket was ready to go it might have been a way to buy time.
I don't think that is possible. AFAIK the shuttles had custom installed thermal materials and carried no spares. The rationale was that installing that stuff in orbit was logistically just not reasonable.
However there was a proposal, post-disaster, and highly speculative. The idea was to carry something like a high temperature epoxy repair material, something that could be applied in liquid or paste form and would therefore be all-purpose when compared to random damage.
This was rejected based upon the reasoning that no such material had sufficient heat resistant properties. There was also concern that any patch would not be smooth and any sort of irregular surface would generate even more heat and pressure on the patch. All bad things and would cause the patch to fail upon re-entry. This is from memory and it was a long time ago now.
Story reminds me of the movie Marooned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... which I saw at the drive in 40+ years ago. Well done movie about an Apollo craft stranded in orbit that I haven't seen in a long time.
Also there was the Skylab rescue vehicle, an Apollo capsule modified for 5 crew members that was kept ready during the Skylab missions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
without approximately 12,600 ft/sec of translational capability. Columbia had 448 ft/sec of propellant available.
Who the fuck measures delta-v in foot/seconds?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Forgot option 5: Ask Russia and/or China for help ....
But we're too proud to do that. Soyuz suffers from the old problem of not being built in the right congressional district.
Wrong shuttle disaster...go home
It would have taken the Russians 2-3 days - primarily moving a launcher to a pad and fueling it. They already had compatible airlock adapters - and a space walk would have solved the problem if they hadn't.
My late ex-wife was an engineer at KSC for 17 years, and worked on Station and on Shuttle. She hadn't been working for NASA for several years when Columbia happened, and her analysis from outside was that it was *not* the insulation. She repeated, many times, that Shuttles had lost that much insulation before and come down fine.
She believed that the problem was more insidious, and partly due to management. What she, as a materials scientist, said was to point out first, that the Cape is on the Atlantic Ocean, and there's a constant salt water content in the air, which happily causes a *lot* of corrosion. (Those of you old folks here might remember what crrome bumpers on cars looked like that lived near the ocean.) In metals, it causes stress corrosion cracking - microcracks that need close inspection by experienced people to find... and which need replacement when observed. Further, the hydraulic lines inside the wings were in that environment, and this was a danger to those lines. If they were to rupture in the stress of a mach 25 maneuver, well, the Shuttle suddently has the controal and aerodynamcs of a mach 25 set of car keys.
She also said that those hydraulic lines were rarely checked, and that she was one of the few who *could* check them, partly because they needed looking at by experienced, knowledgeable people, and partly because she was five foot tall (on a good day) and 105lbs soaking wet... and the space that the hydraulic lines ran through were *very* small and tight, and most folks would have trouble getting their heads in. On top of which, management was getting lazy, letting experienced people (not just her) go, and not hiring replacements, nor demanding all the inspections that the rules demanded.
She figured that's what happened, and in an instant, the hot, flammible hydraulic fluid is all over inside the wings, and it was all over.
mark
So, if it's a normal launch you have to do a practice countdown and a bunch of safety checks, but if you're in a hurry you can just skip them? They are either necessary and important or they're not.
Wikipedia quotes creeds for several branches of the US military.
Only the Sailors Creed mentions fidelity to the Constitution.
Interesting.
NASA seems not to publish a creed. Probably for the best.
--
Credo - I believe I'll have another beer.
So there is an optimum week of the month for Canaveral launches, and another for Kazakstan.
And a launch every two weeks with four shuttles. Complexity and need greatly slowed that down. Maybe a future design will do this.