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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.
"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.
Say it how it is, the main difference to Apollo 13 was that the shuttle design was simply by no means as solid as the one of the Apollo rockets.
V. Braun, no matter what you might think about him, made sure there's a backup plan available. Always. Well, I guess you get that way when you spend your first test years ducking for cover from explosion debris. I think I remember an interview where he remarked that he did play out everything that could even possibly go wrong every time he designed something and that we haven't seen about 90% of what the Apollo capsules COULD actually do in an emergency because we (thankfully) never needed them.
Apollo 13 is a good example of a mission that could easily have gone south if it happened to a less solid platform.
The shuttle was over-engineered. There were simply too many little things that could go wrong to be a safe launch platform. Solid boosters (another thing v. Braun despised) and a pretty much unshielded heat shield (where other parts may bang against) were the two things that eventually cost lives.
Personally, I think we should consider ourselves damn lucky it was just 2.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.