Ten Years After Columbia
It had been a successful mission, and the crew prepared to slowly start the long controlled fall home after completing the retroburn from the Orbital Maneuvering System. But unbeknown to them, the first hint of trouble appeared a few minutes after Entry Interface, defined as 400,000 feet altitude.
The vehicle was still moving at about Mach 24 — twenty-four times the speed of sound. The yaw moment had changed almost imperceptibly, with a gentle tug to the left — there was a slight asymmetry in the aircraft’s aerodynamics, but no one on the ground or in the cabin noticed it at the time.
Twelve seconds later, a temperature sensor indicated that a hydraulic brake line in the left wing was warmer than it should have been, and was slightly out of specification in that regard. As the vehicle was gradually slowing down, perceived gravity slowly growing to an indiscernible hundredth of a gee, fiery hot plasma was infiltrating through the hole in the leading edge, insinuating itself into the interior of the wing and starting to damage it, but none realized it yet.
A minute or so later, as they approached the California coast from three hundred miles out, an off-nominal rolling moment appeared, more evidence of subtle changes to the vehicle’s outer shape. A few seconds later, Mission Control received a signal that several sensors were starting to indicate problems, but no one on board or in the control room was yet aware.
Half a minute later, still going Mach 23 after crossing the coast line, observers on the ground in California saw an eight-pound piece of the left wing separate from the vehicle, creating a luminescent trail in the plasma, though they didn’t know at the time what they were seeing. No one in Houston or in the cabin was aware of this. About the same time, the side-slip angle exceeded any previous entry experience, as the vehicle was no longer moving in a pure forward motion. A little over half a minute later, the left elevon started to trim to compensate for the off-nominal forces, but no one noticed at the time.
A few seconds later, as the craft crossed the border into Nevada, someone in Mission Control finally noted the temperature-sensor anomalies from a couple minutes earlier.
A few more seconds after that, as the crew was doing a pressure check on their suits in preparation for landing, the brightest piece of debris was shed, but the sensors indicated nothing, and no one on board saw it.
The crew started to really sense the deceleration — about a third of a gravity — a minute or so later, as the dynamic pressure increased to forty pounds per square foot. This was a value that allowed the aero surfaces to take over from the small rockets that had been controlling the vehicle’s attitude. Thirty seconds later, they commenced the first roll reversal to bleed off excess energy, from right-wing low to left-wing low, starting the standard series of S-turns as they approached their eventual landing site. For the veterans on board, the entry seemed to be going normally.
But a picture taken from an infrared camera in New Mexico showed some bulges in the flow field on the left wing that couldn’t be explained by the vehicle attitude. No one saw it until later. The trim on the elevon was now departing sharply from a standard entry, as it fought to maintain the nominal attitude in the face of increasing asymmetric aerodynamic loads.
One question I have always had: If the problem had been discovered early during during re-entry, would there have been enough fuel on board to abort? In other words, once they were committed, was there anything they could have done?
No, once you do the de-orbit burn you’re committed. You don’t have enough fuel at the point to re-establish orbit.
– there was a sonic boom over Northern California.
I read the report from NASA that came out after the accident, and all indications were that the crew didn’t die from the decompression/lack of oxygen, but died from being tossed around in their seats (the report used the rather euphemistic term “flail injuries”). Apparently, the seat belts were never designed with high G loads in mind and they failed to hold the crewmembers in their seats.
Quite an interesting (and sobering) read.
The crew was apparently not told of the problem officially. I’m still not sure why NASA didn’t send one of them outside to look, except that NASA claimed they weren’t trained to EVA. I find that excuse hard to believe. Put a guy in a suit, tie a rope to his leg and send him out to look. Easy peasy.
As for fixing it, yeah, probably not possible. But then again, they wrote off Apollo 13 initially too; it wasn’t until the mission director started kicking butts that the smart guys in the room started coming up with solutions. Never know what motivated smart people in the shuttle might have been able to do. Duct tape and some chewing gum can work wonders.
Duct tape and chewing gum could never withstand the heat of re-entry.
Once the wing shielding was penetrated, the Shuttle was doomed. There’s nothing else the Shuttle carried at the time that had a good chance of success. Since the accident, the review commission looked at that. But even with the passage of much time, they couldn’t come up with anything that would definitely work.
What NASA could have done–and SHOULD have done–is rushed like hell to launch another Shuttle to rescue the Columbia crew. With strict rationing of supplies, the Columbia crew could have stayed in orbit for a month while awaiting rescue. Space Shuttle Atlantis could have been launched in time, if they had tried hard enough.
But NASA didn’t think that a rescue was necessary, so they didn’t try.
SpaceX would have tried. We need to get NASA out of the business of managing human spaceflight and limit them to what they are good at: running robotic missions, and being a customer for private systems.
Bingo.
All I’ve got to say about it is that there is a house in Berryville Virginia with my knuckle prints in the trim from when I heard about it.
Murder by mismanagement, damn NASA.
I saw the headline of the article and started counting backwards to try and rationalize how the 1986 Columbia Shuttle was only ten years ago…
Must be age or something, “The Shuttle Disaster” to me is always Columbia…
God bless the brave souls who routinely do things no other civilization could even imagine.
Challenger…
I think of Challenger when I think of “The Lost Shuttle”
My apologies to both crews for getting their names mixed up.
Ice on the launch pad strikes again.
“If we now fear to open up the high frontier because of what happened to them, they will have died in vain.”
Rightly and courageously said, Rand. Some may resent this statement, but it is simply true.
Ragnar #3:
I am reading Comm Check, the book about the Columbia loss, and I very recently had a discussion about potential rescue efforts with two friends of mine who had worked on the Shuttle program. By the way, I myself have been in the space launch business since 1978.
The suits that they had on board were not space suits but pressure suits. They had no separate oxygen supplies or cooling capability and so the crew basically could hardly even move out of their seats with the suits on. It is not clear that with such suits they could even survive a full cabin depressurization.
For that mission Columbia was not set up to dock with the Space Station, had no airlock, and therefore there was no way to get in or out of the vehicle except on the ground.
Now, they had extended consumable supplies on board, and if the problem had been recognized on L+1 they could have gone into survival mode and NASA could have done the full Apollo 13 routine. But as Wayne Hale said, they never even got that chance because they denied it to themselves.
What Comm Check reveals is that the attitude in NASA among some key personnel was the now-familiar government bureaucrat phrase “What difference does it make now?” When pressed to acquire more data (via USAF and NRO assets) on the results of the so-called foam strike (note: it was not foam) more than one NASA official replied that since they could not repair any damage that it was pointless to find out how bad it was. They continued this attitude even after their own computer model simulations showed they most likely had a very serious problem. Maybe they could not have saved the Columbia crew but it would a magnificent thing to try.
One of my friends related how he was supposed to be on the recovery team for Columbia at the SLF; he had been picked for the job. The evening after the launch he got an e-mail from a NASA guy showing the strike on the wing.
He went back to his boss and said he could not be there for the Columbia landing; they would have to get someone else on the team. His boss asked why.
My friend replied as he walked out the door, “Because she’s not coming back.” He was right.
For that mission Columbia was not set up to dock with the Space Station, had no airlock, and therefore there was no way to get in or out of the vehicle except on the ground.
I asked about whether Columbia had an airlock and space suits on Rand’s board last week and was informed that they did. Part of Shuttle mission planning was the possibility that the cargo bay doors wouldn’t close and latch properly. In that event, an astronaut would’ve had to don the space suit and go into the cargo bay to close and latch the doors. Columbia was carrying a spacehab module in the cargo bay but apparently there was still an airlock.
My friend was on the team that configured Columbia for the launch and he said there was no airlock and no EVA space suits.
Now, I would assume they would have an airlock between the Spacehab module and the crew compartment, but that does not get you outside.
I think that if a rescue mission could have been launched they could have sent up a Shuttle to replenish the Columbia consumables and perhaps figured out a way to use the Spacehab module as an airlock to enable them to escape to another spacecraft.
” so-called foam strike (note: it was not foam)”
Does anyone have a laymens mass-density approximation for how “big/heavy” that chunk of debris was?
I swear I’ve had some pretty sizeable crap fly OVER my car on the highway because of the aerodynamic flow of air going around/over me….Boxes and whatnot I swore were coming through the windshield, but sailed up and over.
When they say “a piece of foam” I cant figure a piece of Styrofoam or urethane foam I’m familiar with, doing that kind of damage to a wing that’s DESIGNED to direct airflow over it…
A piece of Ice or snow I’d get.
But “foam”?
Gotta be something alot denser than what I’m picturing
It actually was a type of polyurethane foam (BX-250) that was roughly similar to the insulating foam inside of refrigerators. The mass of the piece that struck Columbia was less than a kilogram, despite being about the same size as a briefcase. At least, if the foam was freshly applied.
As the blowing method for BX-250 used CFC-11, starting in 1997, NASA began to switch to a new foam (BX-256) for most of the craft, but not in that part of the external tank. In 2001, BX-250 was banned, although NASA received a partial exemption. They could still use BX-250, but only from “stockpiled, recycled or recovered” sources.
So there is a pretty solid chance that the actual density was quite a bit higher than a freshly applied foam coat from humidity and moisture absorption over the years, possible compression from earlier usage, as well as the cryo-pumped water-ice that Been There@9 mentions. The age of the reused BX-250 foam would also likely make it harder and more brittle, although I don’t know to what extent.
I really don’t understand what you claim to know anything about. Recovered blowing agent would just be blowing agent. All foams on the tank were single use, nothing was recovered.
Not the mass so much as mass at speed. At 2.5 lbs moving at N x 1000 mph, it’s a lot of energy that needs to be dissipated.
Physics.
Take foam encased in ice and it would be incredibly strong. Combine a tensile strength material and a good compression material you will get a wonder material. Our whole world is built with steel re-bar in concrete for example. If you add hay to water and freeze it you get an incredibly strong ice cube that will not crack.
The last crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia talk about their dreams of being astronauts and the spectacle of flying above the Earth in this retrospective. Credit: SPACE.com / NASA
http://www.space.com/14429-remembering-columbia-words.html
Been There – Almost;
I had retired from NASA shortly before Feb 2003, so I was not involved with the STS-107 Columbia mission. However I had been heavily involved with some of the earlier shuttle missions, and as a NASA microgravity scientist, I had placed my own experiment aboard several earlier missions, so my only problem now is trying to remember the technical details.
Shuttle Columbia had been used to service the Hubble Space Telescope on STS-109 in March 2002, so it did indeed have an airlock and several fully functional space suits at that time, but I don’t know if there were enough fully functional suits aboard STS-107 for all crew members. (note – many shuttle missions were flown out of mission number sequence)
Yes, Mission Control should have been aware that something was bad wrong shortly after launch, but no one on Columbia had any idea that a large piece of the leading-edge of Columbia’s left wing had been torn off during launch when a 1.7-pound chunk of foam insulation (probably much heavier with cryo-pumped water-ice) had separated from the External Tank & impacted the wing about 80-seconds after liftoff. The crew could not see the large gaping hole in the wing’s leading edge since both wings are too far aft to be visible from the Shuttle cockpit side windows, & the hole was located too far forward on the wing to be visible from the aft-facing windows on Columbia’s flight-deck. These aft windows look out into the payload bay, & cannot see outside the bay at all until the bay doors are opened after the Shuttle reaches orbit. Then once the bay doors are opened, the forward areas of both wings are blocked from view by the payload-bay doors themselves.
I am convinced that if NASA management had quickly recognized the severity of the problem, they should have been able to launch a rescue shuttle to rendezvous with Columbia and transfer the crew. Columbia had embarked on a 17-day science mission with the Spacehab Module inside the payload bay, so there was plenty of air, food, water, and power to probably double this time in orbit if the crew had gone immediately into emergency power-down mode.
The shuttle launch crews at the Cape routinely performed miracles in getting each mission off the ground, and I am convinced that they could have launched a rescue shuttle within 30 days – if they had begun preparations immediately. A rescue shuttle could have launched with its payload bay empty, and with only a minimal crew on board.
Columbia had launched into a different orbital inclination than that used by Space Station, so it did not have enough OMS fuel to rendezvous with Space Station; and it did not have an ISS docking mechanism. But the rescue shuttle could have easily launched into the same orbit used by Columbia, and pulled up alongside. With both payload bay doors open, the crew from Comumbia could have floated out of Columbia and into the payload bay of rescue shuttle (probably using a tether line), and gone inside through its airlock. More space suits could have been brought over to Columbia if needed. Then Columbia would have been abandoned, and Mission Control would have remotely sent it into a suicide dive into the Pacific – same as the Russians had done with their Mir Station on 23 March 2001.
Therefore I believe NASA Management is totally wrong when they said nothing could ever have been done to save the crew.
“… NASA Management is totally wrong when they said nothing could ever have been done to save the crew.”
I completely agree. When I heard NASA officials making statements that nothing could have been done if they knew …. NASA jumped the shark.
There was nothing they could do that would have had a very high probability of success. At best, they might have been able to save the vehicle, but they would have had to risk more astronauts.
Rand & Root, I repeat that I believe an emergency shuttle mission to rescue the crew was not only possible, it stood a very high probability of success. Yes, there could have been another wing impact on a rescue launch, but nothing like this deadly foam impact had happened in the previous 112 shuttle launches, so the odds of it happening again were very small. Also it never happened again during the 22 subsequent shuttle launches after Columbia was lost.
The astronaut corps at Houston was a highly motivated and dedicated group, and they would have jumped at the chance to perform this rescue, so there would have been no lack of volunteers. I think they could easily have planned a rescue mission on the fly. It really would not have been that difficult; just rendezvous with Columbia and set up an EVA to rescue shuttle.
Just look at how future crews overcame serious problems during ISS construction, and how 3 astronauts went EVA to grab that large satellite and haul it into the payload bay; for that little adventure, they had to re-write their procedures as they did them. I worked a console inside the Payload Operations Control Center for 5 shuttle missions, so I know what the re-plan and timeline engineers can do.
However there was absolutely no way to save the vehicle once it was in orbit, since the wing leading edge material could not have been fixed. But I believe if NASA Management had given quick permission for a rescue mission, the crew could have been saved. If the astronauts on the ground had been aware of what the managers knew shortly after launch, they would have demanded a rescue mission be performed. However NASA managers are a completely different breed of folk than astronauts. Astronauts are fighter pilots, engineers, and scientists, all of whom (or at least most of whom) are capable of making split second decisions, whereas NASA managers – like all managers – are politicians. I knew enough in both groups to say that emphatically.
I do not believe any of the managers knew just how bad the damage was, but like all managers, they did not want to wave a red flag and start a panic, when they all thought if they just ignored the issue it would go away. However about a week into the mission, I think some of the managers did know there was a serious problem, but by then it was definitely too late to mount any sort of rescue, so they just all kept quiet and hoped for the best.
Been There
Thanks for your informative opinions. I’m always amazed at how wide the expertise level is among PJM commenters, and how willing they are to take the time responding in detail to make their case. This Dumb Grunt and Grease Monkey sure appreciates it
Manager personalities aside, do you think the “cost” of maintaining a potential rescue flight would be (was ever) a realistic idea? It would seem to almost to double the operational tempo, in terms of available men and equipment, to have a “standby shuttle”.
What is your opinion on whether we realistically had (will ever have) the “political” clout to fund the program with an additional X-amount of resources, not for “profitable” launches but for POTENTIAL launches, by keeping a Spare Shuttle available at, what, 40% , 60%, 80% readiness level, to use in an emergency?
Its not the same thing, but when my dad was sailing Liberty Ships in WW2, if you went over the side in a convoy, they let your drown. All of the “woulda, coulda, probably, I’ll bet, and most likely” were already decided upon in advance, and the answer was “no”. We don’t break convoy, even IF it’s a sure thing we’d be able to save the guy.
I wouldn’t be pleased if it was MY dad doggie paddling in the cold North Atlantic (I wouldn’t be here if that was the case!) but in an organization that large, I cant fault them too much for being “less flexible” than I’d prefer.
Thanks!
Excellent post, and very true regarding the eternal battle between the engineers and the politicians (It was the same with Challenger, as you know).
The rumor I heard was that it was the TPS [Thermal Protection System] group at KSC who originally made the urgent request for a spy-satellite pass. News reports never identified who made the request, but TPS would have been the ones who reviewed the slow-motion launch photos. Anyway, whomever made the request was overruled by the …what was her name?…Oh, yes: “First Female Flight Director” Linda Ham.
More at http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2004-02-01/news/0402010042_1_linda-ham-shuttle-columbia-accident
Been There and Bad Apple,
Unless they plan(ed) on a Shuttle Crew Rescue from Orbit more or less in advance with each mission and had resources waiting, I think its a bit of a stretch to expect one to be pulled off on the fly.
Particularly, since any new launch would face the exact same crap-shoot of a foam strike (and every other risk) that “doomed” the first vehicle, no?
We lose Military Pilots all the time, in ones and two’s. We expect it, and we accept it. Flying anything is dangerous stuff. Planes malfunction and crash, we learn what we can, and move on.
But I think its the “spectacle” of such a prominent machine, the singular craft of its type in the air at that moment, having an “unsalvageable” malfunction (that may take days to kill the crew) that creates an emotional “why cant we DO something!” response. A response that is perhaps, just perhaps, a bit beyond the reasonable limits of that type of Flying Program.
I’ll bet there are numerous “nothing we can do, if…” scenarios in the Space Program they simply shrug their shoulders at. Balancing probability, cost and potential for success of dangerous “rescue missions” , vs a “W.T.F. this is inherently dangerous” practical engineering attitude.
Imagine the expectation that every Commercial Airliner should have its own parachutes…ones that will deploy and float it, whole, gently to back to earth in the event of any engine/electrical/control surface malfunctions that would otherwise doom it to a crash if they continued trying to “fly it” to a safe landing.
Or the families of victims lost in a stricken airliner, that flew in circles for an agonizing hour or more before crashing, asking why “rescue planes” werent within reach of theirs, ready to loop-sling and carry it to safety, when we KNOW X number of planes are going to crash because of that very type of malfunction/incident, every decade.
If you know it’s going to happen “sometimes”, why don’t you ALREADY have a rescue plan in place?
“because shit happens” is cold comfort, but often there is no other realistic answer.
“why don’t you ALREADY have a rescue plan in place?” Exactly. Years before the loss of Columbia, I suggested to the Chief OV-102 Test Conductor that our group should come up with an “emergency launch plan” for just such a contingency. The idea I proposed was to figure out which of the normal processing steps could be eliminated should the need arise to launch a shuttle ASAP. Nobody was interested at the time. Too bad.
John,
Were getting all out of sequence, but see my above reply to” Been There” if you can.
(the 2:11 PM one)
Same question(s):
Would we ever have had the Political/Financial will to have a plausible back-up Shuttle for a rescue mission?
Would a “yes” automatically have meant a drastically increase the operational tempo , meaning, we’d have to “produce” one 100% ready launch vehicle AND have a “partially ready” one standing by for each flight?
Sounds to me like it was a forgone conclusion…they didn’t discuss it because they already knew the politics finance and engineering would push the overall scope of the “Shuttle Program” beyond what the country could (would) swallow.
Interested in your thoughts
Sometimes we lose aircrew and passengers in the dozens. Ever heard of the Osprey?
“Therefore I believe NASA Management is totally wrong when they said nothing could ever have been done to save the crew.”
I agree, but the worst part is that they used that as an excuse for not even finding out how bad it was. It appears that no true EVA space suits were on board and that the only airlock was taken up by the Spacehab Module.
But before Apollo 13 if you had asked NASA if an Apollo could fly back from the Moon without a functional Service module what do you think they would have told you?
I really do not think NASA management thought the crew was doomed and that they were just putting on a brave front. The mission management team at Houston did not even meet during the 3 days of the holiday weekend after the launch!
RWE, The large airlock hatch at the rear of the Mid-deck connects to the tunnel leading to the Spacehab module, however there is another airlock hatch built into the tunnel itself which allows for an EVA while Spacehab is attached. This second airlock hatch points up 90 degrees from the tunnel. Columbia did not yet have its space station docking module attached, so this second airlock hatch opened into empty space.
I cannot guarantee that the tunnel airlock hatch was operational for this mission, but I believe flight rules would have required it to be operational for use in an emergency EVA. BTW, there was no “arm” aboard STS-107, since there were no experiments mounted outside for it to grapple. Therefore no camera could have been put on an arm to examine the wings and belly for damage, as the crews did for all flights subsequent to Columbia.
I believe there had to be at least 2 or 3 fully functional space suits aboard every mission so that a pair of astronauts could go EVA and hand-crank the payload bay doors closed, if they failed to close and latch when commanded.
That would be a good book to write: “Columbia: the rescue that could have been.” Get all the facts and figure out how it could have been done. Maybe I’ll do that.
Remember the movie “Marooned”? I have a copy, and I even have a copy of the ORGINAL novel it was based on, where the last Mercury mission is stranded and the first Gemini has to be launched to rescue the astronaut. I should have gotten Martin Caiden to autograph that; I saw him a couple of times.
“Ironman One, Ironman One, this is Capcom on UHF, do you read?”
Maybe we could not have done it, but I can guarantee you that we at the Cape would have busted our arses trying.
In assessing whether the vehicle is fit for lift-off or fit for reentry before initiating either maneuver, there is always some fraction of certainty that is missing, and left to chance, or faith, depending on your own assessment of the limitations of human cognition. This is risky business, and always will be. Aviation is more than 100 years old, and we still have aviation tragedies. Rocketry is the most advanced form of domestication of fire, but it is not the absolute domestication of fire.
So the critical question is how much is left to chance, and how can this fraction be diminished? After noticing the “foam” strike on the left wing, one could conceivably have undertaken a wing inspection effort, either by telescope, or in-site inspection by EVA. Only this out-of-standard-procedure could have triggered the improvisation of a rescue mission using another somewhat under-prepared shuttle, itself a dangerous enterprise. What would have been saved is the spirit of chivalry, even if the whole thing had turned into a double disaster instead of a single one.
Chivalry. Exactly. How many stories have we read of the team that goes into harm’s way to rescue someone while getting their own killed in the process? The movie Saving Private Ryan is a good example. Send 8 guys to get 1, 2 survive. Fictional? Yes. But abundant examples exist in real life as well. Firefighters run back into the burning building all the time, for example. And if anyone remembers Somalia in 1993, 2 Army Rangers went it to defend the downed chopper and its pilot, knowing that their chances were less than minimal they would survive. Humanity demands it, and the fact is that we left the Columbia crew hanging out to die. Didn’t even tell them their bird was wounded, just let die on re-entry. And no one went to jail for it, or got fired, or tarred and feathered. Sad.
Perhaps the crew did know, at least the shuttle commander and pilot.
It could be the entire mission crew knew right up to the ISS crew.
Given a choice, a vote or an order, chose re-entry as the best path or the least painless and the public spectacle of them dying in orbit slowly while in contact with the ground crews as well as family up till the minute they succumb on video was averted.
It,s a more noble thought but the crew being given the mercy of not knowing may have been felt as the easy way for the crew to die.
Even if that were true, and well-intentioned, it was still wrong.
Nobody has the right to make that decisions for another person.
Horse back riding (Equestrian) Is dangerous but we do it, so is space travel, Take the risks, and accept the losses safety first but getting there is more important than individual deaths, tragic they are each time. If we ever want to get off this ball of dirt and water and go space side, risks must be taken.
Currently there is an F-16 down in the Adriatic, pilot killed we do a safety check but the F-16 are still flying.
Another thing that’s sad is that none of these “retrospective” articles even mention the root cause of the foam falling off: The EPA regulations on CFCs. NASA changed both the solvent used to prep the tank for foaming, and the blowing agent itself. The rest is history. Don’t believe me? Look it up yourself on page 57512 of the Federal Register/Vol. 66, No. 221/Thursday, November 15, 2001/Rules and Regulations “ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, 40 CFR Part 82, [FRL–7101–1], RIN 2060–AH99, Protection of Stratospheric Ozone: Reconsideration of the 610
Nonessential Products Ban”
Sad thing is, the EPA offered NASA an exemption, and NASA didn’t take it.
Maybe because falling stuff was always a problem?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27
In this case the claim is material from an SRB nose cone, but look at the launcg date.
Additionally one gets the impression that ALL returning shuttles had tile damage and that the average replacement for damaged units was ~60 per trip. Certainly something was hitting the tiles.
You are correct that the ET always shed small pieces of ice during launch, but never suitcase-sized chunks of foam prior to the change in the solvent and blowing agent. After tanking, the “Ice Team” would report to the launch pad with infra-red imaging cameras and binoculars to make sure there were no large chunks of ice on the tank or the 17″ disconnects. They also did a final walk-around for FOD left on the Fixed Service Structure or MLP zero-level.
You know, I could never understand why a member of the crew never made a space walk to inspect the entire ship prior to re-entry.
Pre-flight rules should apply to space flight as well as conventional aircraft. It’s just common sense…
Since the EMUs were abandoned, there was no way for an astronaut to maneuver around the shuttle for an inspection. Nothing to hold onto…
Technological overreach. It was too much to expect huge, complicated machines like the shuttles to operate flawlessly, mission after mission, year after year. They were not tractor trailers or subway cars. Hell, they weren’t even submarines or aircraft carriers. They were big, fat X-15s – just as fast, just as experimental, just as dangerous. Space flight has NEVER been routine. Not sure it ever will be.
BS. We have been launching ballistic missiles fueled with cryogenic oxygen since the V2. The V2 was operational in 1944 or 69 years ago. 69 years after the Wright brothers millions of people were flying every year.
We know what works. Multistage missiles.
We know what does not work. Solid fueled, liquid fueled rocket powered glider hybrids.
Odd. They worked fine for a few decades. We only lost two missions. The design didn’t fail, some materials failed.
We only retired them because we got tired of paying for them.
In reply to Root 83′s comment at http://pjmedia.com/blog/ten-years-after-columbia/#comment-4419673
I was there when we were launching almost one per month, so we had a “spare” shuttle almost ready at any given time. The problem with re-directing a scheduled mission into a rescue mission would have been all the “junk in the trunk” – Many months (years, actually) of planning went into configuring the payload bay and crew module for a mission and you couldn’t just pull stuff out of there without messing up the weight and balance. Anyway, after the loss of Challenger, the geniuses at NASA decided the best thing to do was just slow down. So we did.
What really killed the concept of a “spare shuttle”, though, was AlGore’s deal with Chernomyrdin to put the ISS in the high-inclination “Russian Orbit”. That left the Shuttle with only a few 5-minute launch windows every few months. What good would it have done to have a shuttle on the launch pad if there was no way to get it into the same orbit as the one in distress?
Gore’s decision also drove us to use the super-light-weight Lithium ETs, which may also have been a contributing factor in the foam loss. (Disclaimer: I’m just speculating on that.)
Great conversation. I recall the inane TV commentators talking long after the Shuttle would have been down carrying on as if maybe it was still up there, somewhere.
Regarding the suits, can the O2 unmbilical on the pressure suit be severed and corked long enough for a guy to be carried into rescue pressure?
There’s almost always at least TWO solutions to every problem.
“I recall the inane TV commentators talking long after the Shuttle would have been down carrying on as if maybe it was still up there, somewhere.”
Oh boy, I remember that as well. I was watching on TV too and 1 minute after the scheduled landing time, I called my friends on the phone, telling them: “Turn on the TV! – We just lost the Space Shuttle!”
Note to The Root’83 @2:11pm.
All of the shuttle launches after Columbia were to the space station – except 1;
and that single mission was STS-125 to service the Hubble Space Telescope using the Shuttle Atlantis, on 11-24 May 2009.
That mission to Hubble had to be launched into the Hubble’s orbit, which was at a significant difference in inclination from ISS – which meant if Atlantis suffered a major problem on ascent that rendered it unable to survive re-entry heating, its crew could not take refuge on ISS.
I was long retired by the Hubble servicing mission, but if I remember right, during that 13-day mission, another shuttle was standing by either on its launch pad, or in the VAB ready to be rolled out to the pad on short notice. That was indeed a rescue shuttle, which would have performed the same rendezvous-rescue mission with STS-125 which I had described above. But NASA could only afford to do this the one time the shuttle did not launch directly to ISS which was in its high-inclination (Russian) orbit.
That rescue shuttle was a one-time scenario, and to answer your question, I do not think NASA would have been able to have a rescue mission standing by for each launch – due to the terrible cost. There was also another problem.
During the final decade of shuttle launches, NASA was usually short on repair parts due to funding cuts by politicians, so there were not enough spare parts on-hand to make up 3 complete shuttles (Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour). Thus whenever one shuttle was being prepped for launch, parts were “borrowed” from the other 2 shuttles whenever necessary to make up 1 complete shuttle. The launch techs at the Cape were kept busy swapping parts between shuttles, and when a required part was not available, it had to be especially purchased or even hand-made. By then the shuttle was old hardware and many of those companies that had supplied its original parts, plus spares, had long since gone out of business, or quit making such old designs.
My final point is that it is obvious that politicians will never provide enough funding for any national space program upon which the US might embark. In fact NASA no longer has the capability to do much of anything in-house, so it must contract out virtually everything, and use its remaining in-house people mostly as contract monitors. Fortunately, several commercial companies, especially SpaceX seem willing to invest whatever funds are necessary to send people and “stuff” into low earth orbit (LEO), and even into Geosync Orbit.
Politicians of both parties are never trustworthy when it comes to funding science, or especially space, so hopefully the promise of commercial profit will be sufficient. If we ever want to travel back to the moon, or explore deep space, we will have to depend on military necessity, or commercial profit. The next decade will show which.
I think an inherent problem with a government-run space program in a democratic society is that, as the government periodically changes hands, the new party will have different goals, priorities, and constituencies to please. Each party also tends to repudiate the plans of its predecessor, so it’s back to square one. We’ve seen a lot of these fits and starts over the past 30 years. This makes it difficult to make long-range plans and stick to them. Military weapons programs suffer from the same problem (see the F-22).
During most of the Apollo program, the same party was in control of Congress and the White House, so they were able to stay on course. The race to the Moon was also regarded as a vital battle in the Cold War, which gave it a sense of urgency. Because of that, there was widespread public support. But as soon as Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, much of the fickle public lost interest, and to this day that interest has never come back to the same degree that we saw in the 60s.
Commercial enterprises are better able to stay focused on their goals. As I’m fond of saying, “We need a private space industry, not a government space program.”
***
Been There, thanks for sharing your experiences on this thread. Several years ago I read about a rescue scenario that was similar to what you described in #9. That writer also said that their consumables could have been stretched to about a month if they had taken immediate action.
One of the things I like best about blogs is that no matter the topic, in between commenters batting opinions back and forth, someone is bound to chime in who has actual personal knowledge of the subject. That’s always welcome to a layman observer like me.
This morning I found this excellent article on THE REGISTER, complete with diagrams clearly showing the tunnel hatch and layout of Columbia’s payload bay as it was configured for the STS-107 mission. Wish I had seen this article yesterday when I was writing all this stuff. It would have saved me a lot of words.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/01/space_shuttle_columbia_disaster_10_years_on/
BTW, if you guys think the loss of Columbia made NASA managers look bad, you would not believe how NASA managers and politicians covered up what had happened to cause the loss of Challenger (51L = STS-33) on 28 Jan 1986. I was right in the middle of that debacle, but that is a story for another time.
That was a very informative article. Thanks. I was on console in the firing room at KSC for the Challenger launch. It was not a pleasant experience.
John, I wasn’t going to write any more on this thread, but here is a question I have never heard answered, and maybe you can help.
I observed the launch live on internal NASA TV and clearly saw the pieces of Challenger, including what must have been the crew module, impact the ocean offshore. So my question is: since it impacted just offshore, why then did it take NASA weeks to locate the wreckage of 51L underwater and recover what was left of the bodies? I suspect I already know that answer (and it isn’t pretty), but just wondering if you knew the truth. Several of my colleagues helped perform analysis on some of the items retrieved.
My major experiment was originally manifested to fly in the Middeck on 51L, but was bumped off when Crista was approved. As a PI, I had helped the techs install my experiment in the Middeck on earlier missions out on the pad a day before each launch, and would have gone aboard Challenger 51L to do it again. So I felt that a tiny piece of me went down with that crew.
I remember one historian who remarked:
“We went to the Moon–and then we stopped.
And the reason we stopped, is that we didn’t find any Klingons there.”
The public has lost interest in exploring the Solar System, now that it has become clear that there aren’t any life forms bigger than a microbe–and we don’t even know if those exist.
The public is accustomed to a diet of science fiction, including Star Wars and Star Trek, which depict a Galaxy filled with interesting life forms. It’s life that provides the drama, the conflict, the adventure, and (occasionally) even the romance: Klaatu, E.T., Chewbacca, Yoda, Sarek of Vulcan, etc. And that’s what is missing from space exploration today: Space appears lifeless.
Nobody wants to fund a manned mission to Mars to pick up more rocks. We’re past that point already.
And that’s not going to change unless and until we actually find some kind of extraterrestrial life. Even an insect would do.
Hmmmm. True.
And so maybe, just maybe, it isn’t ALL the fault of the politicians….
Been There asks: “why then did it take NASA weeks to locate the wreckage of 51L underwater and recover what was left of the bodies?”
I have no idea why the delay, being just a humble engineer in ’86. The lead engineer of our group did go out on the retrieval ship to retrieve the OPS and P/L tape recorders from the avionics bays in the crew module. His only comment afterwords was that everything was flattened. He wouldn’t say anything else about what he saw that day.
Now that you mention is, though, it did seem to take quite a while to go out there and find the remains. What’s your theory?
John,
I am not conspiracy nut, but I think this definitely is worth some thought. Of course after all this time, what happened is just ancient history, but stuff like this reinforces my original comment that all managers are just politicians; and of course the first law of politics is never take the blame for anything.
NASA appeared to have much difficulty in locating the sunken pieces of Challenger, even though live TV was broadcast of the falling debris – including the reinforced crew cabin – impacting the ocean just offshore from the Cape. By the time the heavily damaged cabin was finally located & brought to the surface over a month later, very little remained of the bodies, so no autopsy could be performed to reveal how they died.
NASA management vehemently maintained the crew died “instantly” in the explosion, rather than 4 to 5 minutes later when the cabin hit the ocean. This statement (of instant death) was promulgated to exonerate the NASA managers who had approved the Shuttle design even though the design provided no means for the crew to escape from the cabin during a launch emergency. Therefore “instant death” meant the NASA management was absolved from blame & legal liability for not having required a crew escape system.
Thus if the crew had died instantly, no escape system could have helped them during their fall to the ocean. However rumors floated around several NASA centers that HQ deliberately delayed recovery of crew remains until nothing remained to autopsy, so it could never be proven whether they died “instantly” or only after hitting the water. No transcripts were ever made public of sounds from within the cabin during its fall to the ocean, since NASA claimed all commo ended with the explosion; & of course if there had been voices heard from within the cabin during its fall, it would have meant the crew had not died instantly.
NASA never revealed if any cockpit voices were transmitted, or recorded on the cabin tape recorders, although rumors persist that at least one of the crew was talking to the ground all the way down.
Also, it was never revealed publically that shuttle astronauts commonly carried small battery-powered pocket tape recorders, which they spoke into during ascent & later while in orbit as personal logs to record their feelings & observations. At least 1 of these personal tape recorders was recovered, and examined by a NASA colleague, but the official report said its tape had been “degraded by immersion in sea water for so long that it revealed no usable information”. However my colleague told me quietly not to believe everything I read.
We know that the crew didn’t die instantly because the emergency O2 supplies on the seat backs of the CDR and PLT were turned on by the MS sitting behind them. Wikipedia says:
“three of the four recovered Personal Egress Air Packs (PEAPs) on the flight deck were found to have been activated. Investigators found their remaining unused air supply roughly consistent with the expected consumption during the 2 minute 45 second post-breakup trajectory.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that they survived (maybe unconscious, but alive) until they hit the water at 200Gs. As for the audio recordings, there was no electricity to run any of the on-board recorders or transmitters, but they might have had personal battery powered recording devices as you suggest. I have no knowledge of that one way or the other. If they did, I don’t believe that the salt water would have made it impossible to retrieve the audio. It’s not hard for me to believe that NASA actually recovered the audio but chose not to release it. I mean, really, would you want to hear that kind of thing? I wouldn’t. Even with my jaded opinion of NASA, I have trouble believing they purposely delayed the recovery, but it is an interesting question.
I definitely agree, I would not want to hear these recordings either – if they exist. However management denial of recordings is in line with the official NASA statement that the crew died “instantly” so no blame would be placed on those managers who approved the design of a crew cabin which had no means of escape.
I had also heard rumors that certain emergency systems had been activated after the ET ruptured (you mentioned the PEAPS), but somehow HQ managers still vehemently maintained the crew died “instantly” in the explosion. And apparently this statement was never questioned by the NASA legal office.
Remember the first few flights had ejection seats for the 2 pilots, but the seats were removed when mission and payload specialists began flying – since there was no way for these additional crewmen to escape. Of course the ridiculous so-called emergency escape system instituted after 51L was worthless, but it did fulfill the legal requirement for an “escape system”. Even the Russians who later flew on shuttle did not think it would work.
During the late 1990s, I “interfaced” with several of these Russian cosmonauts and they told me they were scared to death to fly on the shuttle since it had no escape system. They much preferred their ancient Soyuz system, since at least if it had a “major malfunction”, they had an excellent chance to survive.
Well, I appreciate this dialog, but I am going off-console now since I really don’t want to dredge up these sad old memories.
“Wikipedia says”? Please.
If you have a credible source, please cite it.
One more thing about the loss of Challenger. A contributing factor to the O-ring burn through was the change in the joint putty. In 1984, the asbestos-bearing Fuller O’Brien joint putty which had worked fairly well up until that time was changed to another type of asbestos-bearing putty manufactured by Randolph Products of Carlstadt, NJ. The Fuller-O’Brien putty was also used in the Titan 34-D booster rocket joint seals, similar in design to those of the Challenger. However, by 1985 it too had been replaced by a substitute putty. The result of this substitution, following a string of 50 successful Titan launches, was a devastating explosion of the next two Titan rockets, one launched in August of 1985 and the other in April of 1986.
I guess I’m a jinx because I was present for the two Titan explosions – one at Vandenberg and one at the Cape – as well as the Challenger. I retired, so y’all are safe now…
Will we ever return to the moon? I suspect that a lost art.
I suppose the question is who is ‘we’. Humanity? I think 90%. America? less than 25% (China at 50%+). Private industry? I’d say better than 50% also. Maybe higher.
Really interesting read from you guys affiliated with the program and thanks to the author for the acknowledgement. Sad, yes – but your acknowledgements important, your comments worthy of reflection.
I always thought perhaps the greatest tragedy, besides the loss of life of course, was the reaction of our nation shortly after. I recall vividly the Challenger explosion, where I was, what I was doing. It’s still a topic of national discussion and its anniversary always remembered. It affected me for weeks afterward. I remember too where I was when I heard about Columbia.
However, it seemed like Columbia never got equally national mourning and introspection as the Challenger accident and I never understood why. I suspect that it was combination of occurring shortly after 9/11 and human nature to become comfortably numb when tragedy repeated.
But I also wonder if it is something more insidious. That our nation changed from 1986 to 2003, and had grown more comfortable with death, more superficial and more isolated from sense of community.
reply to John:
Nope, you were not the jinx; the NASA Administrators during those years were the jinx. Remember “faster-cheaper-better”? We lost a number of unmanned missions due to that nonsense. Yes, I remember the two Titan explosions; wonder if any managers got slapped for that putty substitution? Hah! BTW, were you present during the Delta explosion during that same time period?
reply to Tex:
This country definitely changed between Challenger and Columbia. When Challenger was lost, it was only the 25th shuttle launch, and the shuttle program was still new and exciting. But Columbia was lost on the 113th shuttle launch, and the public was no longer interested. Can’t blame them since all the shuttle was capable of doing was flying endless circles in low earth orbit. That was great for a microgravity scientist like me, but terribly boring for viewers.
President Nixon was responsible for making sure that the shuttle could not do anything other than fly endless circles in low earth orbit, because he wanted to make sure the US could not go back to the moon. Nixon hated the Apollo moon program because it came from John Kennedy – whom Nixon hated with a passion because JFK had stolen the election from him in Chicago. Nixon ordered that the Apollo moon program be ended as soon as possible, and Apollo-17 was its last mission. Nixon is then quoted as saying “this moon nonsense is over, and I damn well intend to make sure it stays over”. With politicians like that, who needs enemies.
Yes, come to think of it I was still working at KSC in 1997 when the Delta II blew up. I watched the launch from the roof of the LCC and when it blew, ran downstairs and called my wife. I told her, “Watch that big orange cloud and if heads your way, get in the car and head for Orlando.” It drifted out to sea, thankfully.
You might have known my late neighbor who passed away last year: Chuck Hannon. He was a contractor to the space program from the fifties, and launched STS-1 in 1981 along with Andy Brown, his NASA counterpart.
Been There, this nation owes a lot to Richard Nixon.
However, he’s dead, so he’s beyond the reach of human justice now. We can’t give him what he deserves, except our everlasting contempt.
President Nixon was responsible for making sure that the shuttle could not do anything other than fly endless circles in low earth orbit, because he wanted to make sure the US could not go back to the moon. Nixon hated the Apollo moon program because it came from John Kennedy – whom Nixon hated with a passion because JFK had stolen the election from him in Chicago. Nixon ordered that the Apollo moon program be ended as soon as possible, and Apollo-17 was its last mission. Nixon is then quoted as saying “this moon nonsense is over, and I damn well intend to make sure it stays over”. With politicians like that, who needs enemies.
Do you have a credible citation for any of that? Because I think it’s mostly ahistorical nonsense.
Rand, you ask a legitimate question, and I wish I could give you a definitive answer, including citations. There probably are some books which discuss this, but I can’t point to them. During the 1970s I worked with several of the old Peenemünde Germans at MSFC, and the topic of Nixon’s desire to kill Apollo was frequently discussed. I was just a young lad at that time, and certainly do not presume to call any of those Peenemünde Germans colleagues, but I do consider them friends. That quote came from one of them, and I definitely remember seeing it in print – somewhere – many years later.
Nixon started his purge of the Peenemünde Germans at MSFC in March 1970, when Wernher von Braun was removed as Center Director and sent to NASA HQ, with the worthless title of “NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning”. Remember that was just a month before Apollo-13, and several of the Germans mentioned to me that they knew even then that Nixon was going to kill the moon program as soon as possible, now that the Soviets had lost JFK’s race.
But none of us knew in March 1970 that Nixon had decided to purge all the Germans now that they were no longer needed. Another quote I heard repeatedly from my friends was of Nixon saying “I intend to drive all those damn Nazis out of Huntsville”. Von Braun had to be removed from his powerful position as MSFC Center Director quickly because he had been quietly lobbying congress (with some success) to support a follow-on moon program; and this reportedly infuriated Nixon.
On 28 Dec 1972 NASA HQ announced the purge of Wernher von Braun’s old Peenemünde colleague, Dr. Eberhard Rees, as Director of MSFC, & that his replacement would be Dr. Rocco A. Petrone (an American). By then all of NASA was being drastically “downsized”, and all the rest of the old Germans would soon be gone, along with virtually all Civil Service and contractors who had worked on Apollo. All NASA centers would soon be in massive turmoil due to repeated RIFs. In fact virtually all Apollo documentation was ordered burned, rather than archieved, to make sure nothing remained on which a new moon program could be built.
Nixon’s OMB set design criteria for the shuttle, and based it solely upon USAF needs for wing and payload bay size, crossrange landing capability, and orbital altitudes and inclinations – which were all definitely LEO. Remember, the shuttle was supposed to launch the heaviest spy satellites into polar orbits from Vandenberg, in addition to the Cape.
I know my comments here are all “hearsay” and will not satisy your request for citations, but you can cite me, as one who was there throughout that entire time. I also remember some friends at HQ telling me years later that the first demand made of any new potential NASA administrator was that he never support a return to the moon.
After Agnew got laughed off the stage when he proposed lunar bases and Mars missions, it’s understandable that Nixon got very chary of proposing any ambitious beyond-LEO missions. but that has nothing to do with his feelings toward Kennedy. The fact that he let Agnew go out there with those proposals argues against the notion that he wanted to trap us in LEO. He was simply going with the political flow, as every single president has. I think that Nixon was an awful president, in many ways, but he was no more responsible for the mess that is space policy than is any other, other than the fact that he had no vision for it, and didn’t invest any political capital in selling it (and again, he is not unique in that regard).
Your friends in Huntsville were seeing things through their own personal prisms, which had nothing to do with political reality in Washington (and the country at large).
Worked for NASA contractors from 1977 through 2011 on Shuttle, ISS, Orion, and a few other programs. I remember a few years after Challenger talking with one of my colleagues and how we were first off surprised that so many people were surprised that Challenger happened, but we were also amazed that we were still in business and agreed that if ever we lost another shuttle, they would close the thing down. Guess we were wrong, because we kept flying them after Columbia. The management structure and various teams got very confusing with overlapping responsibilities. And yes, it really IS “rocket science” not Project Management. Too many managers who had no understanding of the physics of spaceflight rose to too many high positions in the programs based on criteria other than their knowledge of what makes things fly.
Looking back on out space program, I often wonder not ‘why did Apollo1, Apollo13, Challenger, and Colombia happen?’ – as well as all the other non manned failures, but ‘Why were there not more failures?’ It is some incredibly complex work. And face it the reason we light fire beneith us to launch is because we don’t have a better method.
And I probably should say this, but Rocket Science is pretty easy F=Ma, etc. Rocekt ENGINEERING is a real BITCH! and her punishment for failure is death! I realize we call them Scientist, but really it is Engineering.
To those who dream Ad Astra… thank you.