03-02-2003 18:45									#91
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quote: Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless It seems like very bad planning indeed if they coudn't send up any sort of rescue vehicle before supplies ran out. As for the damage to the wing: presumably if insulation fell off the tank and hit the wing, it would have hit the leading edge of the wing. How can there be "minor" damage to the leading edge of a wing coated with fragile tiles that has to withstand flight at 25 times the speed of sound? Looks like several dropped balls here. Even if the problem turns out to be something else entirely: NASA should definitely make sure that EVA equipment (incuding the Manned Maneuvering Unit) are carried as standard equipment on all flights, that ALL astronauts on manned spacecraft have a means of transferring to either the ISS or another spacecraft, and that a rescue vehicle of some sort is always available for launch. With only 3 shuttles left, that will be difficult to arrange.

hi ,

, its going to be intresting as what they are going to do , build a new shuttle like they did after the Challenger , or go for a new project , .....

in both cases the survival of the crew shall get way more emphasis (!)

have a nice day

	03-02-2003 19:05									#92
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Jack:
What you're suggesting would increase the cost of shuttle launches massively. For rescue you're talking about developing a new standby rocket (the shuttle would not be a good idea since it behaves badly if left standing around for long periods) capable of docking with the shuttle and transporting the occupants back to earth...all for a, what...1 in a hundred chance of failure if that?

The shuttle is not supposed to be a tourist vehicle...it is risky...anyone going on it knows it is risky...it is a glorified bomb.

Just done some more checking and Progress could not get to the shuttle anyway since the shuttle's orbit was too low and the (Soyuz?) can't hit that low an orbit for docking apparently.

	03-02-2003 19:40									#93
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It seems to me that they could simply plan all future missions so that the crew could move into the ISS in an emergency.

But it seems that NASA now has a real problem. If it is too dangerous to bring down a shuttle with missing or damaged tiles, and if the tiles are damaged or lost on about 25% of missions, it won't be too long before the entire shuttle fleet is abandoned in orbit.

I note a point made earlier in connection with the Buran. Apparently it had a dramatically higher payload than the shuttle because it did not have main engines - it relied totally on external engines to boost it into orbit.

This seems a lot more sensible approach to me. It was the pattern of all prior space vehicles. If anyone knows, why wasn't the shuttle designed this way from the beginning?

	03-02-2003 19:51									#94
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Tolls: Maybe a rescue vehicle based at the ISS?

Something like the proposed ISS "lifeboat", but with a booster capable of changing its orbit to rendezvous with a shuttle not headed for the ISS.

If we're serious about manned spaceflight, and already have a permanently manned station in space: that seems like the logical place to mount a space rescue from.

	03-02-2003 20:17									#95
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Ned: Engines are expensive. How were Buran's engines to be recovered?

But maybe "use once and throw away" engines are so much cheaper than ones designed for re-use that it's cost-effective to use them. I doubt if they're as safe though.

As for shuttles abandoned in orbit: the Russians managed to land Buran on autopilot. Maybe NASA should consider that. Inspect each shuttle in space with an EVA, and if there's a problem, transfer the astronauts to the ISS or another spacecraft and try to land it on autopilot. If it burns up, you've only lost a shuttle that would have been useless anyhow.

	03-02-2003 20:18									#96
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Have they got any more of the shuttles left that they used to blow up that asteroid. I saw them in the doccumentary Armageddon, I think 1 got home, it looked pretty tough, they should use those instead

	03-02-2003 20:23									#97
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quote: Originally posted by Mad Bomber What are you talking about, The Shuttle has been used for crew replacement since the inception of the ISS, and the station was designed around the use of the STS and Progress delivery systems.

The other shuttles were used for the ISS. Columbia was much heavier than the other three.

There seems to be some disagreement among the papers I've looked at. Yesterday it was imposssible, today it was just in the wrong orbit with no docking ring.

	03-02-2003 20:25									#98
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quote: Hollywood-style rescue mission ‘implausible, but not by much’ BY MARCIA DUNN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — If liftoff damage to Columbia’s thermal tiles caused the disaster, was the crew doomed from the very start? Or could NASA have saved all or some of the seven astronauts by trying some Hollywood-style heroics — a potentially suicidal spacewalk, perhaps, or a rescue mission by another shuttle? Some of the ideas suggested would have been highly impractical, dangerous and perhaps futile. The shuttle does not carry spare tiles, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration insists that the crew had nothing on board to use to repair or replace missing or broken ones. In any case, the space agency believed at the time that the tile damage was nothing to worry about and thus nothing worth risking a life over. Still, as James Oberg, a former shuttle flight controller and author who has been bombarded by Armageddon-type rescue ideas by e-mail, said Sunday, "They may be implausible, but not by much." He added, "There’s always the question of miracles." FOAM STRUCK LEFT WING NASA knew from the second day of Columbia’s 16-day research mission that a piece of the insulating foam on the external fuel tank peeled off just after liftoff, struck the left wing, and possibly ripped off some of the tiles that keep the ship from burning up when it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere. A frame-by-frame analysis of launch video and film clearly showed a clump of something streaking away from Columbia 80 seconds into the flight. Engineers spent days analyzing the situation and saw no reason for concern. Leroy Cain, the flight director in charge of Columbia’s Jan. 16 launch and Saturday’s descent from orbit, assured reporters as much Friday. Hours after the disaster, shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore acknowledged that NASA might have erred and that wing damage on launch day might have contributed to or even caused Columbia to disintegrate on re-entry. "It’s one of the areas we’re looking at first, early, to make sure that the investigative team is concentrating on that theory or that set of facts as we are starting to unfold," NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe said Sunday. Dittemore himself said, "My thoughts are on what we missed, what I missed, to allow this to happen." Some facts remain: NASA did not try to examine Columbia’s left wing with high-powered telescopes on the ground, 180 miles below, or with spy satellites. The last time NASA tried that, to check Discovery’s drag-chute compartment during John Glenn’s shuttle flight in 1998, the pictures proved of little use, Dittemore said. Besides, he said, "there was zero we could have done about it." Similarly, NASA did not ask the crew of the international space station to use its cameras to examine the wing when the two ships passed within a few hundred miles of each other several times over the past two weeks. NASA did not consider a spacewalk by the crew to inspect the left wing. The astronauts have neither training nor equipment to repair tile damage anywhere on the shuttle, least of all on a relatively inaccessible area like the underside of a wing, Dittemore said. Could NASA have sent another shuttle to rescue Columbia’s five men and two women? In theory, yes. Normally, it takes four months to prepare a shuttle for launch. But in a crisis, shuttle managers say, they perhaps could put together a launch in less than a week if all testing were thrown out the window and a shuttle were already on the pad. Columbia had enough fuel and supplies to remain in orbit until Wednesday, and the astronauts could have scrimped to stay up another few days beyond that. With shuttle Atlantis ready to be moved to its pad, it theoretically could have been rushed into service, and Columbia’s astronauts could have climbed aboard in a series of spacewalks. If Atlantis flew with the minimum crew of two, it could have accommodated seven more astronauts. Could Columbia’s astronauts have abandoned ship and climbed aboard the international space station? Because Columbia was in an entirely different orbit from the space station, it lacked enough fuel to fly to the orbiting outpost. Even if the shuttle could have limped there, it could not have docked. Columbia had no docking ring, since it was never meant to go there. So the shuttle astronauts would have had to float over in space suits to get there. NO TILE-REPAIR KIT Could Columbia’s astronauts have gone out on a spacewalk to inspect and perhaps repair their own ship? That assumes that the astronauts could have rigged up something, Apollo 13-style, to replace the missing tiles. But there was nothing on board, according to Dittemore and others. Back in the early shuttle days, NASA considered a tile-patching kit that was essentially a caulking gun, but the gunk undermined the performance of the tiles and never flew.

	03-02-2003 20:28									#99
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Andrew:
It was also not possible due to the lab inside...the extra weight of that would have made it impossible to get to the ISS on launch...having said that, since it was not launched to dock with the ISS there was no way they were going to be able to get there.

Jack:
(Apolyton ate my reply!)
We could use a ship on the ISS, but that would require all missions to be launched as if they were going to the ISS, otherwise you wouldn't be able to link up (fuel wise) for a rescue attempt. The Columbia mission (for example) would not have been possible.

	03-02-2003 20:33									#100
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quote: Originally posted by TheStinger Have they got any more of the shuttles left that they used to blow up that asteroid. I saw them in the doccumentary Armageddon, I think 1 got home, it looked pretty tough, they should use those instead

I really, really hope you're joking here!

	03-02-2003 20:36									#101
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Andrew:
That article covers most of it.

"...NASA did not ask the crew of the international space station to use its cameras to examine the wing when the two ships passed within a few hundred miles of each other several times over the past two weeks."

But the speed they were passing each other sort of precluded getting a decent look. Even then, does the ISS have cameras that could resolve the STS wing sufficiently to make out damage?

I'm not sure what the James Oberg quote is supposed to say?

	03-02-2003 21:33									#102
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quote: Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless Ned: Engines are expensive. How were Buran's engines to be recovered? But maybe "use once and throw away" engines are so much cheaper than ones designed for re-use that it's cost-effective to use them. I doubt if they're as safe though. As for shuttles abandoned in orbit: the Russians managed to land Buran on autopilot. Maybe NASA should consider that. Inspect each shuttle in space with an EVA, and if there's a problem, transfer the astronauts to the ISS or another spacecraft and try to land it on autopilot. If it burns up, you've only lost a shuttle that would have been useless anyhow.

The shuttle lands on auto-pilot, the pilot in re-entry keeps one eye on the flight controls (in case of failure of auto-pilot) and the other on the view.

	03-02-2003 23:08									#103
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Yes we still have 3 more shuttles we can use to land on an Asteroid and drill and plant bomb if such a need arises like in the documentary Armageddon.

	03-02-2003 23:57									#104
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I am still bothered by the fact that I woke up at 5:52, the very moment that the shuttle was directly overhead and began to break up. Could one of the crew reacted to whatever happened and I sensed his our her reaction? We will never know. But, this is more than strange.

	04-02-2003 01:15									#105
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CNN now saying they've isolated the problem:

Attachment: shuttleisfast.jpg
This has been downloaded 120 time(s).

	04-02-2003 01:18									#106
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quote: Originally posted by Dissident Yes we still have 3 more shuttles we can use to land on an Asteroid and drill and plant bomb if such a need arises like in the documentary Armageddon.

To Your Comments:


No disrespect intended to this tragedy, and my God have mercy on their souls.

	04-02-2003 02:58									#107
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quote: Originally posted by Azazel that puts things in a different perspective. You know this for a fact, andrew?

All of the shuttles are slightly different in design, and have unique configurations for each mission. STS-107 had a lot of onboard lab modules and other equipment specific to it's mission.

************

With the frenzy of speculation about the piece of ice or piece of foam insulation from the ET, one thing that hasn't been mentioned at all is the possibility that there was no significant damage from that event at all, and that Columbia was hit by something else at the time it started it's roll reversal and descent maneuver.

A micrometeorite encounter is a known risk, and so is the possibility of hitting space junk from thousands of dead objects in progressibely decaying orbits. We've had at least two known cases of satellites being killed by junk collisions, and have no ability to consistently track space junk smaller than 10cm in diameter.

The telescope footage taken by the Cal Tech astronomer showed that some object was already detached and moving with the Columbia, separate from the flash where another object (possibly an ablatement tile) detached. If the damage had been fatal from the outset (by the launch collision), I don't think it's real likely that Columbia would have successfully executed the roll reversal in the first place.

One way or another, the chances are pretty good that we'll find out.

	04-02-2003 03:05									#108
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quote: Originally posted by Tolls Even then, does the ISS have cameras that could resolve the STS wing sufficiently to make out damage?

Not unless the damage was so large as to likely be visible from the ground using ground based telescopes and adaptive optics. Privately owned amateur telescopes (standard commecial Meades and Celestrons) have been able to resolve lit components < 1 meter in size on both the shuttle and various space stations, and <20 cm resolutions have been obtained on Mir, Salyut and Skylab without adaptive optics, using larger scopes.

The ISS has nothing close to the ability to resolve individual tiles, most of which are black and very tightly jointed - there would have to be a big hole of missing tiles to be resolved - no alignment or cracking damage on a non-reflective black surface would be resolveable at all.

	04-02-2003 03:59									#109
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quote: With the frenzy of speculation about the piece of ice or piece of foam insulation from the ET, one thing that hasn't been mentioned at all is the possibility that there was no significant damage from that event at all, and that Columbia was hit by something else at the time it started it's roll reversal and descent maneuver. A micrometeorite encounter is a known risk, and so is the possibility of hitting space junk from thousands of dead objects in progressibely decaying orbits. We've had at least two known cases of satellites being killed by junk collisions, and have no ability to consistently track space junk smaller than 10cm in diameter. The telescope footage taken by the Cal Tech astronomer showed that some object was already detached and moving with the Columbia, separate from the flash where another object (possibly an ablatement tile) detached. If the damage had been fatal from the outset (by the launch collision), I don't think it's real likely that Columbia would have successfully executed the roll reversal in the first place.

two questions about space junk:
1) How are small part created? after all, a satellite, even when it malfunctions, is still staying intact?
2)why not just crash the sattelites into the atmosphere and burn them, when they go offline?

	04-02-2003 04:35									#110
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Small parts are created in a lot of ways - structural degredation from radiation, temperature differentials and micrometeorite collisions is the normal wear and tear way.

Another one is shear stress from the occasional satellite that doesn't deploy correctly or stabilize, so starts spinning uncontrollably and increasing stresses on things like joints for deploying solar panels.

Satellites can have stuff knocked loose or broken from the stress of launch, and that stuff gets deployed when the satellite does.

Also, large objects (Mir, Salyut, Skylab, and rocket booster stages) that reenter and burn up tend to break apart, and some small debris gets deflected upward (atmospheric bounce) back into orbit.

Accidents also contribute some - for example, problem with the solar panel arm not deploying on the original Skylab, and the French had a collision between a dead satellite and a military commsat, that broke pieces off of both.

There's several thousand pieces of junk > 10cm in size, tens of thousands in the 1-10 cm range, and likely millions in the < 1 cm range, down to microscopic particles.

Even though the junk would be a lot less massive than the ice or foam insulation from the ET, it could be moving at virtually any speed or angle, so the relative force of a collision with a piece of space junk or a micrometeorite would be higher.

Crashing satellites and burning them is done (now) with some satellites, depending on their orbital position, but is still not reliable - they could still have bounce problems with some pieces being separated and kicked back up, and you have a problem with trying to do something with an old satellite at the end of it's useful life. Do you take something in a relatively stable, out of the way orbit, and try to maneuver it into the atmosphere (passing through more crowded orbits, including those used in manned flight activities), not knowing if or how long it's maneuver systems (if any) will work? Sometimes it's been done successfully, other times it's done and hasn't worked. Sometimes, it's safer for several centuries to leave something where it is.

The earliest satellites had no really useful maneuvering systems, and/or uplinks can be impossible to achieve.

Yet another problem occurs with the percentage of satellites that just spontaneously die and don't respond.

Right now, the only thing that can be done is tracking those objects large enough to be tracked, and mapping the orbits that those pieces lie in or will soon be transitting through.

	04-02-2003 06:56									#111
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I was listening to an interview on the radio this morning, and they were saying (unofficially) that while there were no SOPs for checking the exterior of the shuttle, there were non-standard (aka risky) things that could have been done.

For example, an astronaut could suit up and go just outside the airlock, with a camera. The pilot would than carefully manuver the shuttle away from the free-floating spacewalker, and rotate the possible damaged section toward the space walker (who might well be rotating himself by this time). After enough pictures are gathered, the shuttle is manuvered back into position to pick up the astronaut.

I wouldn't want to be either the walker or the pilot.

	04-02-2003 07:09									#112
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quote: Originally posted by Willem I really, really hope you're joking here!

You don't get out much, do you?

	04-02-2003 08:04									#113
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quote: Originally posted by Ned I am still bothered by the fact that I woke up at 5:52, the very moment that the shuttle was directly overhead and began to break up. Could one of the crew reacted to whatever happened and I sensed his our her reaction? We will never know. But, this is more than strange.

Could it be...a coincidence?

	04-02-2003 08:17									#114
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quote: Originally posted by Azazel I thought you were all for tasteless jokes, Siro. Where is your sporting spirit?

Please notice that you replied to Solver and not me.

	04-02-2003 08:21									#115
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i think that 5.52 was too early for that. That would have been 7.52 CST which was a few minutes before it crashed. Failed sensors happens frequently and therefore there was no obvious problem yet.

	04-02-2003 08:31									#116
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On ABC's news site, there is an amateur home video of the last 20-30 seconds of Columbia's flight prior to its breaking up. The cameraman locates the shuttle in a clear blue sky, a tiny dot with no visible contrail. He initially focuses in tight on the shuttle. The shuttle can be seen flying at a yaw angle of about 30 degrees to the right, with the left side of the spacecraft facing into the wind. Both wings are clearly visible, and appear to be intact.

Just after the camera focuses in tightly, one begins to see fire trailing off the shuttle. The camera than zooms out so that the shuttle is again but a small dot. But the fire grows visibly. The contrail also grows. About 10 seconds after the fire begins, a large piece of the shuttle flies off in an explosion. One can definitely see a puff of smoke in the contrail as the piece of the shuttle flies off.

The fire now grows a lot worse. About 10 seconds later, other pieces began to break off and then the shuttle explodes into five or six pieces in a ball of flame.

What is peculiar about this is at NASA said that during its last moments the shuttle began compensating for drag on the left wing by steering to the right using its attitude rockets on the rear of the shuttle. The amateur camera video clearly shows that the shuttle is flying left side into the wind. Could it be possible that the shuttle itself compensated are overcompensated for drag by forcing the shuttle to fly sideways in the wind? Was the large piece it fell off the tail?

Is it possible that the steering maneuver itself was reacting to bad data coming from sensors that failed or about to fail on the left side of the shuttle? If this is the case, the NASA engineers were probably right in that the shuttle could have landed with the tile damage caused by the falling insulator debris. But what it couldn't survive was a sensor failure.

	04-02-2003 08:35									#117
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quote: Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia i think that 5.52 was too early for that. That would have been 7.52 CST which was a few minutes before it crashed. Failed sensors happens frequently and therefore there was no obvious problem yet.

I live in California. 5:52 Pacific time is 7:52 Central.

Of course my waking up and looking at the clock to find out what time it was - because it was still pitch black outside - could have been a coincidence. But the timing is so immensely odd as to be bizzare.

	04-02-2003 08:39									#118
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Yeah i know, I made the conversion. 5.52 PST would have been 7.52 CST

	04-02-2003 09:10									#119
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Ned, you're strange. Very strange.

	04-02-2003 11:09									#120
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quote: Originally posted by Boris Godunov Ned, you're strange. Very strange.

Boris, It happened, that's all I know.