Space Forum / Shuttle / January 2005

I read that article, and the impression I get is that so
many things would have had to go just perfect in order to
just get Atlantis there in time, and that time window was
so critical that Atlantis would have had to take lithium
hydroxide canisters to Columbia just so her astronauts
could survive the additional two days needed to effect a
crew transfer. If Atlantis had to do a launch delay for
almost any reason, and I can't recall very many launches
that went off the first time, Columbia's astronauts would
have been disabled enough to prevent a rescue. I don't
consider a whole slew of optimistic assumptions to be a
resonable chance of success.

Just to be clear, if it were my decision to make to send
Atlantis on a rescue mission I would have done so without
hesitation, regardless of the chances of success. I just
wouldn't be treating it like it was a sure thing.

JazzMan

It would be illuminative if you could describe how the crew of
Columbia could have avoided re-entry, yet stayed alive...

Be very specific.

Or, an alternative.

Andre



--
" I'm a man... But, I can change... If I have to... I guess. "
                                   The Man Prayer, Red Green.

Craig, I know you don't think you're doing the 20/20 hindsight thing,
but you *are*.

During the flight there were indeed a couple of lower-echelon
NASA/contractor personnel who had big questions about the foam impact.
And they did in fact try fruitlessly to get orbital pix of the orbiter.

But you need to remember clearly several things: first, AFAIK nobody had
*any* concerns about a RCC impact, everybody was focusing on the
underside of the wing. Including the people asking for pictures. They
were thinking about damage to the tiles near the wheel wells.

Along those lines, Boeing ran the best test data they had available
(CRATER) and concluded that there was no risk. In hindsight that
analysis was flawed in several ways (it focused on tile damage and the
program was not scaled for the size of debris that actually struck the
orbiter), but *there was no way to know that during the flight*.

And as far as actually getting the pix, someone here did a very detailed
study of what reconsats were in range of Columbia during the mission. He
concluded that there were only a handful of opportunities to get
reasonably detailed images of the orbiter, and IIRC the bext chances
were towards the end of the mission when there would not have been
enough consumables to survive until Atlantis launched anyway. And the
upper-bound resolution of those hypothetical images (based on factors
like the distance between teh reconsat and the orbiter, their orbital
inclinations, sun angle, etc.) make it highly *un*likely that the actual
damage to the RCC panels would have been visible in the photos.

IOW, even if NASA managers *had* requested on-orbit pix, it's very
unlikely that they would have revealed any damage, and that would have
just *decreased* the sense of urgency, not increased it.

So JimO did what any responsible journalist would have done in his
shoes: he caught wind of a potential problem, he started working his
contacts, and he got hte best data available. That data led to the
conclusion that there was no major damage from the foam impact. That was
the best data available during the mission, so JimO made the only honest
conclusion available to him: there was no story.

As far as the rescue mission, n.b. that while *possible*, there were (as
others have pointed out) a long series of events that had to happen
without fail in order to rescue the crew. Any one of those steps would
be a failure point that would doom Columbia's crew. Or worse, doom
Columbia *and* the rescue crew as well. It is naive in the extreme to
assume that everything would have worked smoothly and as planned.

Again: there simply was no data *during the mission* to indicate that
there was serious damage to the orbiter. Most of the aftermath analysis
used by the CAIB and the media has relied heavily on data that either
was transmitted realtime during the descent (and thus was by definition
unavailable while Columbia was on orbit) showing the effects of the RCC
hole, or data that was recorded onboard but not transmitted realtime
(and thus unavailable during the mission), or by reverse-engineering
analyses done after the end result was obvious (a good example being the
RCC impact studies).

So it is utterly unrealistic to assume that there was anything anybody
could have done to save the crew. NASA (and journalists like JimO) took
their best look at the best available data, and drew a reasonable
conclusion.

That the best possible data was not sufficient to generate an accurate
conclusion is unfortunate but all too common in disasters.

Moral of the story: disasters always happen because of those tiny,
unforseen events that interact in tiny, unforseen ways. Nature has a way
of finding the Achilles heel of anything, and then ruthlessly exploiting
the weakness. It's not a matter of how often that happens (and thus how
often disasters happen), but a question of how *un*common disasters are.
 it takes a long sequence of one-in-a-million coincidences piling up to
create a disaster. That's why they are so rare. *But*, disasters happen
from time to time. That's the way the universe works, and there's
nothing that anybody can do to stop them from happening on occasion.

HTH,

Then there's Brad Guth, Stuffie, Bbo Hallre, LaToya, "scott" and the
Maxsons, who not only look out of their collective a.ses, but talk out of
them as well.