I've always found the relative impact velocity of the foam piece with respect to the shuttle quite surprising. There is some clarification of this in the CAIB report, chapter 3, page 60 (http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/CAIB_Vol1.html):
THE ORBITER “RAN INTO” THE FOAM
“How could a lightweight piece of foam travel so fast and hit
the wing at 545 miles per hour?”
Just prior to separating from the External Tank, the foam was
traveling with the Shuttle stack at about 1,568 mph (2,300
feet per second). Visual evidence shows that the foam de-
bris impacted the wing approximately 0.161 seconds after
separating from the External Tank. In that time, the velocity
of the foam debris slowed from 1,568 mph to about 1,022
mph (1,500 feet per second). Therefore, the Orbiter hit the
foam with a relative velocity of about 545 mph (800 feet per
second). In essence, the foam debris slowed down and the
Orbiter did not, so the Orbiter ran into the foam. The foam
slowed down rapidly because such low-density objects have
low ballistic coefficients, which means their speed rapidly
decreases when they lose their means of propulsion.
where p is the density of the fluid the object is moving in, v is the velocity of the object relative
to the fluid, C_d is the coefficient of drag and A the cross-sectional area. C_d is around 1 for most geometries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient).
In the CAID report, the dimensions of the foam is estimated to be 19x11.5x11.5 inches, which is roughly 0.5x0.3x0.15 meters. Assuming the foam fell with the smallest surface pointing down (a bad assumption), we can estimate A to be 0.045 m^2.
According to Wolfram Alpha, the density of air at 20km, the altitude at which the foam broke off, is 0.089 kg/m^3. The initial velocity of the foam was about 1568 mph which is around 700 m/s.
Plugging all of this in to the above equation gives:
F ~= 981 kg*m/s^2
The mass of the foam was estimated at 1.6 lbs, or around 0.7 kg, and using F=ma we can calculate the acceleration to be about 1400 m/s^2. The foam traveled for 0.16 seconds before striking the shuttle, and assuming that the above force was constant during that time (thus overestimating the change in velocity), that would result in a delta_v for the foam of 224 m/s, which is about 500 mph.
This is all assuming of course I didn't make some trivial mistake with the math, which I probably did.
It would be great if someone with more knowledge than me could chime in about drag near the speed of sound (or multiples of the speed of sound).
The CAIB set up a dramatic recreation of the incident in which it used a nitrogen gun to fire a piece of foam at ~500mph at a test panel. NASA was not happy with the idea of the experiment feeling it was a waste of time. There were audible gasps from the crowd of engineers when the foam punched a head-sized hole in the panel. Bingo.
I loved this article. Teared up a few times thinking about how things could have gone differently.
I had an opportunity to tour Kennedy Space Center in December. I think many people have this idea that the NASA of today is a shadow of itself and that it's stagnating. I had an opinion something like that.
To my surprise, NASA is in the middle of some very interesting work. They've completed a new gantry/launch tower for their next generation of rockets which will be close to or bigger than the Saturn V. Several of the launch pads have been completely retrofitted. There's a lot of cool activity going on that we'll start seeing on the big stage in the next couple of years.
It was heart breaking to see one of the shuttles hanging in the museum. They really are beautiful, utterly massive machines. You can only get a sense of loss looking at them, feeling that we're missing something big by having removed them from service.
But looking back, despite their majesty the shuttles took a lot of work to do relatively little. (Little in this context is still a huge amount.) It was time to retire them.
I'm cautiously optimistic about NASA's future. The idea of being more of a support role for commercial manned space may seem beneath them, but it's not. They will continue doing the types of projects that are impossible for companies, including manned missions.
> It was heart breaking to see one of the shuttles hanging in the museum. They really are beautiful, utterly massive machines. You can only get a sense of loss looking at them, feeling that we're missing something big by having removed them from service.
I think this is the main problem with the space shuttle. They look good in a museum. They look good in a postcard. They have a mix of cutting edge, unproven, easy to break technology. They are a dead trap and explode in 1/50 launches.
According to Wikipedia the Soyuz have 4 dead astronauts, in 1700 launches. (No deads since 1971, and they change the model, so the new model perhaps is safer or perhaps they are lucky.) But they are "cheating", because most of the missions are unmanned. When they explode, usually nobody dies. The death rate is also approximately 1/50, But they only put humans when it's necessary.
I toured Kennedy back in 2011 while STS-134 was sitting on the pad. I didn't quite have the impression that NASA of today was a shadow its former self, but I sure walked away from the tour thinking it was.
Learning that the giant VAB sitting there was constructed for one purpose: Building a Saturn V. Learning that the crawler that moved the craft around were built for one purpose: Moving a Saturn V. Then moving on to the most interesting part of the tour, not the shuttle sitting out there on the pad, but a giant warehouse with a Saturn V on its side inside.
Everything seemed to be in a slight state of decay -- not entirely neglected, but definitely from another age. The age of the Saturn V. The biggest impression I got from the whole experience was both awe inspiring, and sad: Apollo was NASA's zenith, and the future doesn't look quite as bright as those days in the 60's.
I'm hopeful that I'm wrong, but every part of the experience reinforced in me the belief that NASA's glory days had come and gone.
When the Space Shuttle program was decommissioned in 2011, the U.S. lost human spaceflight capability. We are at a point in U.S. history that is similar to the human spaceflight gap that existed between the Apollo program and the Space Shuttle program.
There is an American flag that flew on-board STS-1. It was left on display in the ISS by the crew of STS-135. It is awaiting return to the U.S. by the next American crew that is launched from the U.S.
I do my best to embrace the concept of being a citizen of the world rather than of a specific country, but I can't help feeling a little patriotic. Like many of you, I grew up watching the Space Shuttle launches; all of those memories of both the successful launches and the tragic losses. That zeitgeist you grew up with, seeing those launches: it indelibly marked young people like us, with the knowledge and firm belief that, anything is possible through science and technology, perhaps even more so because it was during that time that we were teaching ourselves to program on our Commodore 64, Atari 800, etc.
Perhaps this feeling is heightened for me now, because in the U.S., I think there has been an under-current feeling for some time now, that could be paraphrased as, "Where are we heading, as a nation?"
I still believe in those child-hood dreams, and my eyes get a little misty, thinking of when we will launch into space and bring that flag home.
SpaceX has done low earth orbit, geosynchronous transfer orbit, and is working on reusable self-landing first stages and human spaceflight. Out of them and NASA, I expect SpaceX to get there first.
When the Space Shuttle program was decommissioned in 2011, the U.S. lost human spaceflight capability.
The real problem is that there are so many people who either don't care or think space exploration is a bad thing.
If you look at some polls you get half of all people polled not knowing that Armstrong landed on the moon and a fairly clear majority opposing the idea of spending public money on going to Mars.
So now there is the situation that NASA lost the ability to get people into space and only the nerds complained. It is going to be very difficult politically to get that capability back.
Interesting to remember the Columbia tragedy while recalling Richard Feynman's report summarizing the culture problems at NASA he found following the Challenger disaster. It's clear that NASA ultimately learned very little (or forgot it after 15 years).
No matter the state of the shuttle program, it's also a shame that NASA didn't maintain a non-reusable rocket system that could have allowed for expensive but relatively low-risk emergency flights for this sort of thing. If the shuttle's all you've got then it's going to be difficult to address unexpected problems with another shuttle just like it.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. If we sent a successful rescue mission, we would instead be reading an article entitled. "Columbia Rescue: NASA's finest hour or giant waste of taxpayer's dollars?" with a bunch of supporting evidence on why the rescue was unnecessary.
Doubtful. Appolo 13 showed that the public really likes bringing the astronauts alive. And even the most fervent republicans will have hard time presenting saving the lives as waste.
It's really difficult to imagine the proposed approach panning out as intended - the infrastructure for STS wasn't set up for really quick turn arounds. STS's conceptual design was pitched that way (shuttles going up several times a week), but that didn't pan out in design. And the Challenger accident can be blamed in part on a management culture that took too long to accept their engineers telling them that.
As terrible as the Columbia accident was, I think this approach (with so many checks skipped to get Atlantis up as quick as possible) would have ended in the loss of both crews & orbiters. And I think if the Columbia crew knew the full extent of the situation, and also knew of this sort of rescue in the works, they probably would have pressed mission control to just let them try the re-entry themselves.
As terrible as the Columbia accident was, I think this approach (with so many checks skipped to get Atlantis up as quick as possible) would have ended in the loss of both crews & orbiters.
IANARS (Rocket Scientist) but I can't help but think the same thing. The ability to get Atlantis safely into orbit in 11 days beggars belief, as much as I wish it could have been done.
A catastrophic failure of a rescue mission would have killed the Shuttle program then and there. Aside from the loss of now eleven astronauts and two orbiters, the following post-Columbia activities either could not have taken place or would have been limited to what the Russians could do:
21 ISS resupply/delivery missions, 5 ISS crew transfers, a Hubble telescope servicing mission and major delivery and assembly of ISS components (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_assembly_sequence#Assembly_... to get a feel for how incomplete the station was in 2003)
Additionally, there would have been an impact on SpaceX as the shuttle had delivered their DragonEye sensor test package as well as communications gear to the station.
> As terrible as the Columbia accident was, I think this approach (with so many checks skipped to get Atlantis up as quick as possible) would have ended in the loss of both crews & orbiters.
Agreed. The article touches on the fact that the Columbia disaster has its roots in decisions that were made far in advance of its final launch. Not that this excuses what happened, but I almost wonder if the reason the photographs of the damage were never taken ("miscommunication") was that the people involved knew there was no possibility of rescue, so better to not know and hope for the best.
When I was at JSC, a young engineer once referred to Challenger as an accident over lunch. An older engineer looked at him, and said very slowly "Never, ever, call it an accident. Marshall (Space Flight Center) murdered them."
As for Columbia, even if you could turn around, that approach just doesn't make sense to me either. Station keeping for that long, without the RMS? It's crazy. I would have thought they'd just take up 5 extra suits, make one approach, get them over, take CM1 & CM2, and come back later for 3 (I think 3 could get in the airlock in a pinch) and then a third pass for the last 2. Obviously missing something there if that wasn't possible.
Wow, I devoured every word of that article with baited breath. One of the most amazing stories of fiction intertwined with actual events I've ever read.
I wonder how much years will have to pass before it would be acceptable to make this fictional rescue mission into a movie..?
The obvious issue would be everyone walking out of the theater saying "Jeezz, NASA should have obviously done that, idiots. They killed those astronauts because they didn't do that."
The movie Marooned (1969) depicted a Soviet spacecraft rendezvousing with a stricken American spacecraft to deliver oxygen via an EVA. However, it was unable to dock.
This movie was circulating right around the time of the Apollo 13 mission. The movie was shown to Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, who approached the Soviets about a common docking system. The result was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the APAS androgynous docking system.
Reminds me of what Neil Armstrong said, when asked what he would do if an engine on Eagle broke and there was no chance they could return from the Moon: "I would try to fix it."
One thing not covered in this article (and maybe the CAIB report? I don't know) is whether the Russians could have done something useful in the rescue. Could enough fuel and scrubber tanks have been boosted to Columbia on a Soyuz or Progress to get it up to the ISS?
> One thing not covered in this article (and maybe the CAIB report? I don't know) is whether the Russians could have done something useful in the rescue. Could enough fuel and scrubber tanks have been boosted to Columbia on a Soyuz or Progress to get it up to the ISS?
No.
On STS-107, Columbia was launched into a 39° orbit. The ISS is at an inclination of 51°. It is very expensive to make an in-orbit change-of-plane.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that you would need 50,000 kg of fuel to change the orbit of an empty Shuttle from 39° to 51°. The Progress M has a cargo capacity of 2600 kg -- and the Russians launch one every two months. 20 Progresses all at once wouldn't have been very practical.
If you were going to attempt a rendezvous with Columbia from Baikonur, it would be better to send Soyuzes and bring them down two-at-a-time. The Russians do have the Soyuz on an assembly line, but I don't think they have four of them just sitting around.
I wonder if a smaller rocket could have been repurposed to simply send extra supplies to the shuttle (or a repair kit) while they waited for rescue? Maybe a soyez?
Even if it couldn't dock with the shuttle, I wonder if it could match orbit and then do a space walk to retrieve the supplies?
Rockets launched from the Soyuz launch site in Kazakhstan cannot reach orbits with an inclination of 39 degrees so there's no way that they could have reached the orbiter from there.
An Ariane launch from French Guiana could have worked and there was a rocket there that launched a satellite shortly afterwards but that would have required fabricating a supply vehicle with automatic guidance and navigation capable of docking to the orbiter by itself. (Ignoring for the moment that the orbiter didn't even have an external airlock with docking collar installed.)
Very good article, clears up a lot of questions, doubts, and misconceptions.
It seems to me that the problems with the Shuttle program always came down to money. The Nixon Administration denied Nasa the necessary budget to build the larger reusable vehicle they originally envisioned, while simultaneously scrapping the Saturn manned program.
As a space nut since basically I was 5 or 6 years old, when America was in its heyday of Gemini and Apollo programs (I was 10 when Apollo 11 astronauts kicked up lunar dust), space exploration was a given to me and all of my friends.
It was assumed that we would just keep on building and growing our space program until we got to something that resembled Clarke/Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps we wouldn't make it by 2001, but some time not too far beyond then. Maybe 2011. Maybe 2015.
It therefore makes me sad that we've been in this hiatus since about 1974, really 40 years of treading water rather than building much on the accomplishments of the past. Why not a permanent station on the moon? Why not a nuclear propulsion system that could get to Mars in 6 weeks? What have we done instead with our money, that is so much more worthwhile? Why was Nasa denied the $4 billion it needed to continue the Constellation program, while literally hundreds of billions were allocated for bank bailouts, automotive bailouts, etc.? Where are our priorities?
I know these are controversial questions and there are probably some good answers out there, but I go back to the lost dreams, the sacrifices made by the Columbia and Challenger astronauts and others, and I wonder if we haven't traded big dreams for little ones and lost sight along the way of what we're all about.
Reading that it looks like the EVA would be a big problem due to getting into the suits.
Would someone who is smarter than me comment on the feasibility (In extremis) of just jumping across the 6 meter gap unsuited 1 by 1 with the suited rescuers helping? I have read that a human can survive about 30 seconds of vacuum without permanent damage. What if they huffed pure oxygen for a while before making the attempt so their blood was super-oxygenated before breathing out and making the leap?
Would the depressurization / repressurization take too long? Would it take too long for the space-suited rescuers to man-handle them into the airlock? (Would they even be able to align airlocks for a straight jump?)
It makes me wonder what would have happened if NASA has a set of minimal protection "short-duration" suits with almost nothing more than pressurization and a small oxygen supply for quick excursions (Like, for example, transferring quickly between two craft as if your live depended on it :p )
For those interested in a technically detailed fictional account of a rescue mission to Mars, read The Martian by Andy Weir. It raises some of the same feelings as this article.
Russia launched about a dozen Proton rockets a year at the time of Columbia disaster, two Soyuz spacecrafts and two-three Progress spacecrafts.
Proton used to launch several Soyuz without Orbital Section, called Zond, in 1960s, with booster DM to fly around the Moon. DM adds about 3 km/s of deltaV. Orbital plane change for 7 degrees - between Baikonur's 46 and Columbia's 39 - takes sin(7)*8 km/s = 1 km/s. So technically it could be considered to launch (several) Progress ship(s) with necessary cargos to Columbia while three unmanned Soyuzes would be prepared and sent to the rescue. Soyuz approaches Columbia, gets caught by manipulator, astronauts use spacesuits from Soyuz - which have to be extracted from Soyuz first.
ISS, meanwhile, had to be kept without ships, which means landing the crew, hopefully temporarily.
All that could be considered. But I don't think anybody high in chain of command considered all of that necessary.
I don't think Columbia had a docking collar, did they even have spacesuits on board? If not, they wouldn't have been able to get to the Soyuz to extract anything. You'd have to send up at least one person one the Soyuz to pass the spacesuits into the shuttle airlock.
Also, I'm not sure Columbia had a manipulator arm installed at the time. It's heavy and they don't fly with it when they're not going to use it.
If you are interested in the Columbia events, check out Wayne Hale's blog[1]. He was a flight director/space shuttle program manager and offers a very detailed recollection of the events from inside mission control.
What surprises me is that this contingency was not already in place prior to the Columbia accident. Was it budget constraints or did they really think it was that unlikely that a shuttle would be rendered unable to return from orbit and need the crew rescuing?
Seems like they could have rushed the development of RCO to allow a shot at bringing the empty Columbia back, too. In parallel with all the other preparation efforts, fast-tracking something like that where an already-100%-written-off craft might get saved seems worthwhile.
In an emergency like that, you just put all your engineers and technicians to work in whatever is critical to save the crew. If you have some spare personal, you put them in whatever is very important. Don't worry, you would not have enough people to cover the important task, you must hope that they doesn't mater.
Would they have enough fuel to change orbit to dock to ISS?
If not, would there be enough fuel in Soyuz to undoc, change orbit to Shuttle's and then either re-dock or re-entry?
In terms of safety, it appears that shuttle program became somewhat barbaric by reasonable standards of 21st century. If primary vehicle lost re-entry capability, there should be back up plan for re-suppling it until back up vehicle is ready to take people back. I.e. if failure of Soyuz detected before departing from ISS, they can always sit it out and wait for next one while being resullplied by automatic Progresses.
From page 2: An oft-asked question is whether or not Columbia could have docked with the ISS, which would have had consumables to spare. There are numerous reasons why this would not have been possible, but the overriding one comes down to simple physics: Columbia would have had to execute what is known in orbital mechanics terminology as a "plane change" maneuver—applying thrust perpendicular to its orbital track in order to shift to match the ISS' inclination. Plane change maneuvers require tremendous amounts of energy—in some cases, even more energy than was required to launch the spacecraft in the first place. Appendix D.13 dismisses the possibility of an ISS rendezvous with just two sentences:
"Columbia's 39 degree orbital inclination could not have been altered to the ISS 51.6 degree inclination without approximately 12,600 ft/sec of translational capability. Columbia had 448 ft/sec of propellant available."
For the record, it wasn't possible in Gravity, either.
[+] [-] natejenkins|12 years ago|reply
THE ORBITER “RAN INTO” THE FOAM “How could a lightweight piece of foam travel so fast and hit the wing at 545 miles per hour?” Just prior to separating from the External Tank, the foam was traveling with the Shuttle stack at about 1,568 mph (2,300 feet per second). Visual evidence shows that the foam de- bris impacted the wing approximately 0.161 seconds after separating from the External Tank. In that time, the velocity of the foam debris slowed from 1,568 mph to about 1,022 mph (1,500 feet per second). Therefore, the Orbiter hit the foam with a relative velocity of about 545 mph (800 feet per second). In essence, the foam debris slowed down and the Orbiter did not, so the Orbiter ran into the foam. The foam slowed down rapidly because such low-density objects have low ballistic coefficients, which means their speed rapidly decreases when they lose their means of propulsion.
[+] [-] natejenkins|12 years ago|reply
The force due to drag on an object is described by the following equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation):
F = (1/2)p(v^2)(C_d)A
where p is the density of the fluid the object is moving in, v is the velocity of the object relative to the fluid, C_d is the coefficient of drag and A the cross-sectional area. C_d is around 1 for most geometries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient).
In the CAID report, the dimensions of the foam is estimated to be 19x11.5x11.5 inches, which is roughly 0.5x0.3x0.15 meters. Assuming the foam fell with the smallest surface pointing down (a bad assumption), we can estimate A to be 0.045 m^2.
According to Wolfram Alpha, the density of air at 20km, the altitude at which the foam broke off, is 0.089 kg/m^3. The initial velocity of the foam was about 1568 mph which is around 700 m/s.
Plugging all of this in to the above equation gives:
F ~= 981 kg*m/s^2
The mass of the foam was estimated at 1.6 lbs, or around 0.7 kg, and using F=ma we can calculate the acceleration to be about 1400 m/s^2. The foam traveled for 0.16 seconds before striking the shuttle, and assuming that the above force was constant during that time (thus overestimating the change in velocity), that would result in a delta_v for the foam of 224 m/s, which is about 500 mph.
This is all assuming of course I didn't make some trivial mistake with the math, which I probably did.
It would be great if someone with more knowledge than me could chime in about drag near the speed of sound (or multiples of the speed of sound).
[+] [-] camperman|12 years ago|reply
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbia...
[+] [-] grecy|12 years ago|reply
I'm also extremely curious to know how much the Shuttle stack accelerated during those 0.161 seconds the foam wasn't attached to it...
[+] [-] geuis|12 years ago|reply
I had an opportunity to tour Kennedy Space Center in December. I think many people have this idea that the NASA of today is a shadow of itself and that it's stagnating. I had an opinion something like that.
To my surprise, NASA is in the middle of some very interesting work. They've completed a new gantry/launch tower for their next generation of rockets which will be close to or bigger than the Saturn V. Several of the launch pads have been completely retrofitted. There's a lot of cool activity going on that we'll start seeing on the big stage in the next couple of years.
It was heart breaking to see one of the shuttles hanging in the museum. They really are beautiful, utterly massive machines. You can only get a sense of loss looking at them, feeling that we're missing something big by having removed them from service.
But looking back, despite their majesty the shuttles took a lot of work to do relatively little. (Little in this context is still a huge amount.) It was time to retire them.
I'm cautiously optimistic about NASA's future. The idea of being more of a support role for commercial manned space may seem beneath them, but it's not. They will continue doing the types of projects that are impossible for companies, including manned missions.
[+] [-] gus_massa|12 years ago|reply
I think this is the main problem with the space shuttle. They look good in a museum. They look good in a postcard. They have a mix of cutting edge, unproven, easy to break technology. They are a dead trap and explode in 1/50 launches.
According to Wikipedia the Soyuz have 4 dead astronauts, in 1700 launches. (No deads since 1971, and they change the model, so the new model perhaps is safer or perhaps they are lucky.) But they are "cheating", because most of the missions are unmanned. When they explode, usually nobody dies. The death rate is also approximately 1/50, But they only put humans when it's necessary.
[+] [-] chawco|12 years ago|reply
Learning that the giant VAB sitting there was constructed for one purpose: Building a Saturn V. Learning that the crawler that moved the craft around were built for one purpose: Moving a Saturn V. Then moving on to the most interesting part of the tour, not the shuttle sitting out there on the pad, but a giant warehouse with a Saturn V on its side inside.
Everything seemed to be in a slight state of decay -- not entirely neglected, but definitely from another age. The age of the Saturn V. The biggest impression I got from the whole experience was both awe inspiring, and sad: Apollo was NASA's zenith, and the future doesn't look quite as bright as those days in the 60's.
I'm hopeful that I'm wrong, but every part of the experience reinforced in me the belief that NASA's glory days had come and gone.
[+] [-] Arjuna|12 years ago|reply
There is an American flag that flew on-board STS-1. It was left on display in the ISS by the crew of STS-135. It is awaiting return to the U.S. by the next American crew that is launched from the U.S.
I do my best to embrace the concept of being a citizen of the world rather than of a specific country, but I can't help feeling a little patriotic. Like many of you, I grew up watching the Space Shuttle launches; all of those memories of both the successful launches and the tragic losses. That zeitgeist you grew up with, seeing those launches: it indelibly marked young people like us, with the knowledge and firm belief that, anything is possible through science and technology, perhaps even more so because it was during that time that we were teaching ourselves to program on our Commodore 64, Atari 800, etc.
Perhaps this feeling is heightened for me now, because in the U.S., I think there has been an under-current feeling for some time now, that could be paraphrased as, "Where are we heading, as a nation?"
I still believe in those child-hood dreams, and my eyes get a little misty, thinking of when we will launch into space and bring that flag home.
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotsofmangos|12 years ago|reply
The real problem is that there are so many people who either don't care or think space exploration is a bad thing.
If you look at some polls you get half of all people polled not knowing that Armstrong landed on the moon and a fairly clear majority opposing the idea of spending public money on going to Mars.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/3712/landing-man-moon-publics-vie...
So now there is the situation that NASA lost the ability to get people into space and only the nerds complained. It is going to be very difficult politically to get that capability back.
[+] [-] spiritplumber|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skywhopper|12 years ago|reply
No matter the state of the shuttle program, it's also a shame that NASA didn't maintain a non-reusable rocket system that could have allowed for expensive but relatively low-risk emergency flights for this sort of thing. If the shuttle's all you've got then it's going to be difficult to address unexpected problems with another shuttle just like it.
[+] [-] jedc|12 years ago|reply
Apollo 1 fire - 27 January 1967 Challenger disaster - 28 January 1986 (19 yrs later) Colombia disaster - 1 February 2003 (17 yrs later)
There's probably an interesting thought experiment around organizational behavior and deterioration of standards in the cycle time here...
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eudox|12 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/atv.htm
[+] [-] ryanackley|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3am|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thearn4|12 years ago|reply
As terrible as the Columbia accident was, I think this approach (with so many checks skipped to get Atlantis up as quick as possible) would have ended in the loss of both crews & orbiters. And I think if the Columbia crew knew the full extent of the situation, and also knew of this sort of rescue in the works, they probably would have pressed mission control to just let them try the re-entry themselves.
[+] [-] MrZongle2|12 years ago|reply
IANARS (Rocket Scientist) but I can't help but think the same thing. The ability to get Atlantis safely into orbit in 11 days beggars belief, as much as I wish it could have been done.
A catastrophic failure of a rescue mission would have killed the Shuttle program then and there. Aside from the loss of now eleven astronauts and two orbiters, the following post-Columbia activities either could not have taken place or would have been limited to what the Russians could do: 21 ISS resupply/delivery missions, 5 ISS crew transfers, a Hubble telescope servicing mission and major delivery and assembly of ISS components (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_assembly_sequence#Assembly_... to get a feel for how incomplete the station was in 2003)
Additionally, there would have been an impact on SpaceX as the shuttle had delivered their DragonEye sensor test package as well as communications gear to the station.
[+] [-] krstck|12 years ago|reply
Agreed. The article touches on the fact that the Columbia disaster has its roots in decisions that were made far in advance of its final launch. Not that this excuses what happened, but I almost wonder if the reason the photographs of the damage were never taken ("miscommunication") was that the people involved knew there was no possibility of rescue, so better to not know and hope for the best.
[+] [-] hindsightbias|12 years ago|reply
When I was at JSC, a young engineer once referred to Challenger as an accident over lunch. An older engineer looked at him, and said very slowly "Never, ever, call it an accident. Marshall (Space Flight Center) murdered them."
As for Columbia, even if you could turn around, that approach just doesn't make sense to me either. Station keeping for that long, without the RMS? It's crazy. I would have thought they'd just take up 5 extra suits, make one approach, get them over, take CM1 & CM2, and come back later for 3 (I think 3 could get in the airlock in a pinch) and then a third pass for the last 2. Obviously missing something there if that wasn't possible.
[+] [-] grecy|12 years ago|reply
I wonder how much years will have to pass before it would be acceptable to make this fictional rescue mission into a movie..?
The obvious issue would be everyone walking out of the theater saying "Jeezz, NASA should have obviously done that, idiots. They killed those astronauts because they didn't do that."
[+] [-] tanzam75|12 years ago|reply
The movie Marooned (1969) depicted a Soviet spacecraft rendezvousing with a stricken American spacecraft to deliver oxygen via an EVA. However, it was unable to dock.
This movie was circulating right around the time of the Apollo 13 mission. The movie was shown to Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, who approached the Soviets about a common docking system. The result was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the APAS androgynous docking system.
See: http://archive.is/zgGEK
[+] [-] qwerta|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stormbrew|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanzam75|12 years ago|reply
No.
On STS-107, Columbia was launched into a 39° orbit. The ISS is at an inclination of 51°. It is very expensive to make an in-orbit change-of-plane.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that you would need 50,000 kg of fuel to change the orbit of an empty Shuttle from 39° to 51°. The Progress M has a cargo capacity of 2600 kg -- and the Russians launch one every two months. 20 Progresses all at once wouldn't have been very practical.
If you were going to attempt a rendezvous with Columbia from Baikonur, it would be better to send Soyuzes and bring them down two-at-a-time. The Russians do have the Soyuz on an assembly line, but I don't think they have four of them just sitting around.
[+] [-] mrfusion|12 years ago|reply
Even if it couldn't dock with the shuttle, I wonder if it could match orbit and then do a space walk to retrieve the supplies?
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilsetnieks|12 years ago|reply
I take it you have been watching Gravity?
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|12 years ago|reply
It seems to me that the problems with the Shuttle program always came down to money. The Nixon Administration denied Nasa the necessary budget to build the larger reusable vehicle they originally envisioned, while simultaneously scrapping the Saturn manned program.
As a space nut since basically I was 5 or 6 years old, when America was in its heyday of Gemini and Apollo programs (I was 10 when Apollo 11 astronauts kicked up lunar dust), space exploration was a given to me and all of my friends.
It was assumed that we would just keep on building and growing our space program until we got to something that resembled Clarke/Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps we wouldn't make it by 2001, but some time not too far beyond then. Maybe 2011. Maybe 2015.
It therefore makes me sad that we've been in this hiatus since about 1974, really 40 years of treading water rather than building much on the accomplishments of the past. Why not a permanent station on the moon? Why not a nuclear propulsion system that could get to Mars in 6 weeks? What have we done instead with our money, that is so much more worthwhile? Why was Nasa denied the $4 billion it needed to continue the Constellation program, while literally hundreds of billions were allocated for bank bailouts, automotive bailouts, etc.? Where are our priorities?
I know these are controversial questions and there are probably some good answers out there, but I go back to the lost dreams, the sacrifices made by the Columbia and Challenger astronauts and others, and I wonder if we haven't traded big dreams for little ones and lost sight along the way of what we're all about.
[+] [-] rurounijones|12 years ago|reply
Would someone who is smarter than me comment on the feasibility (In extremis) of just jumping across the 6 meter gap unsuited 1 by 1 with the suited rescuers helping? I have read that a human can survive about 30 seconds of vacuum without permanent damage. What if they huffed pure oxygen for a while before making the attempt so their blood was super-oxygenated before breathing out and making the leap?
Would the depressurization / repressurization take too long? Would it take too long for the space-suited rescuers to man-handle them into the airlock? (Would they even be able to align airlocks for a straight jump?)
It makes me wonder what would have happened if NASA has a set of minimal protection "short-duration" suits with almost nothing more than pressurization and a small oxygen supply for quick excursions (Like, for example, transferring quickly between two craft as if your live depended on it :p )
[+] [-] sxcurry|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DavidSJ|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avmich|12 years ago|reply
Proton used to launch several Soyuz without Orbital Section, called Zond, in 1960s, with booster DM to fly around the Moon. DM adds about 3 km/s of deltaV. Orbital plane change for 7 degrees - between Baikonur's 46 and Columbia's 39 - takes sin(7)*8 km/s = 1 km/s. So technically it could be considered to launch (several) Progress ship(s) with necessary cargos to Columbia while three unmanned Soyuzes would be prepared and sent to the rescue. Soyuz approaches Columbia, gets caught by manipulator, astronauts use spacesuits from Soyuz - which have to be extracted from Soyuz first.
ISS, meanwhile, had to be kept without ships, which means landing the crew, hopefully temporarily.
All that could be considered. But I don't think anybody high in chain of command considered all of that necessary.
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|12 years ago|reply
Also, I'm not sure Columbia had a manipulator arm installed at the time. It's heavy and they don't fly with it when they're not going to use it.
[+] [-] lini|12 years ago|reply
[1] https://waynehale.wordpress.com/
[+] [-] snowwolf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arnold_palmur|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vl|12 years ago|reply
Would they have enough fuel to change orbit to dock to ISS?
If not, would there be enough fuel in Soyuz to undoc, change orbit to Shuttle's and then either re-dock or re-entry?
In terms of safety, it appears that shuttle program became somewhat barbaric by reasonable standards of 21st century. If primary vehicle lost re-entry capability, there should be back up plan for re-suppling it until back up vehicle is ready to take people back. I.e. if failure of Soyuz detected before departing from ISS, they can always sit it out and wait for next one while being resullplied by automatic Progresses.
[+] [-] scott_s|12 years ago|reply
From page 2: An oft-asked question is whether or not Columbia could have docked with the ISS, which would have had consumables to spare. There are numerous reasons why this would not have been possible, but the overriding one comes down to simple physics: Columbia would have had to execute what is known in orbital mechanics terminology as a "plane change" maneuver—applying thrust perpendicular to its orbital track in order to shift to match the ISS' inclination. Plane change maneuvers require tremendous amounts of energy—in some cases, even more energy than was required to launch the spacecraft in the first place. Appendix D.13 dismisses the possibility of an ISS rendezvous with just two sentences:
"Columbia's 39 degree orbital inclination could not have been altered to the ISS 51.6 degree inclination without approximately 12,600 ft/sec of translational capability. Columbia had 448 ft/sec of propellant available."
For the record, it wasn't possible in Gravity, either.