Shuttle Contact LOST-No Tracking Data During RE-Entry!

Nasa TV | 02/01/03 | GRRRR

[GRRRRR]

Shuttle has NOT been heard from or seen on tracking radar since 0800Hrs CDT. No contact at Merrit Island tracking station, no voice comm...DEVELOPING.

[sweetliberty]

"I heard it too and any jet would have been closer to the Earth than to the Space Shuttle"

When I heard the report of there being a plane in the air, I didn't get the impression that it was being related to the shuttle in any way, but rather that the plane may have been at risk from the explosion and breaking up of the shuttle. Obviously, a plane would not be flying at that altitude and speed.

That said, there are some folks who will break out the tinfoil over anything at all. If a few didn't show up, we would worry about them.

[Diddle E. Squat]

I guess you missed my post #2272.

No need to make an ass of yourself.

[lodwick]

LOL - thanks for a much needed laugh today.

I need to take another break so we don't starve tonight.bbl

[Northern Yankee]

Latest information coming out is that during the initial re-entry phase, NASA started picking up sensor readings that were giving bizarre data on the left wing.

Normally this isn't that unusual, but these sensors were scattered, and independent of each other.

As NASA called back to Columbia to find out what was happening, you got a "Roger" from the crew, and then static.

Couple that, with the insulation coming off during the launch, and hitting the left wing, and things are starting to add up. Maybe...

[joanie-f]

Mike,

You wrote a long essay. Not a word of it untrue. Every word of it deserving to be read by every American school child (not to mention his parents and teachers).

When I heard about the tragedy this morning, I had three reactions: immediate sorrow for those seven cream of the crop people whose lives were lost in this tragedy; sorrow for their families (both families by blood, and their NASA family); and a realistic bracing for what is to come.

What is to come is pretty much predictable, and unpalatable :

There will be the over-reporting by a ghoulish media, who want to leave no stone unturned and leave no question unasked in an effort to prolong a story which will keep them (as the omniscient interpreters) in the focus of the national consciousness.

In the leave no question unasked category, there will be three most offensive tactics undertaken:

(1) They will consult with hand-picked (by them, of course) ‘experts’ in order to tell us how we should best attempt to cope with this national tragedy. Leftist psycho babble will rule the day (week, month), and we will be treated as if we were unable to breathe in and out, or place one foot in front of the other, without their kind assistance.

(2) They will attempt to interview the families and friends of the deceased in order to prolong their (the interviewer’s) day in the sun. They will ask all manner of inane questions, certain to include, ‘How did it feel as you stood among the families at Cape Canaveral and began to suspect that something was wrong?’

(3) They (and their leftist accomplices in congress, and on campus) will begin to second-guess, and finger-point (at best) those who designed, built, and maintained the space shuttle. They may even be so arrogant as to dig into the history of the missions, and finger-point at past designers/builders/maintainers. And what will make this particular behavior especially obscene is the fact that most of them are probably intellectually incapable of comprehending the higher mathematics and science over which the people they will be accusing of incompetence have an expert grasp. Nor do they have any comprehension of the work ethic, dedication, honor and patriotism represented by the people they will be accusing of having a lack of such. People in glass houses shouldn’t sit in judgment of those who built them their houses.

When I worked as a fuel element designer at an atomic power lab in the early seventies, we were periodically besieged, on site, by hordes of useful, placard-carrying, idiots. I generally walked right by them into the lab. Once I stopped and talked with them, only to find that there was no talking with them. They knew nothing about that which they were protesting. All they knew was that it (the design of nuclear power plants) had to be discredited, and the plants had to be dismantled. Ignorance (especially ignorance which receives national attention, and national acceptance) is a very dangerous thing.

Now, thirty years later, the same kind of people will continue to attempt to destroy the space program. They will ghoulishly use every tragedy to their ideological, anti-American benefit.

I am not saying that there weren’t fatal errors made on this mission. Obviously there were. (A good FReeper friend e-mailed the following to me today, in part: Why [didn’t] someone step up and say these crafts will experience the same kind of fatigue as did the first jet liners during the early sixties when jet powered aircraft were a relatively new item? It's painfully obvious one or both of the bay doors or some other structure entry point failed on reentry due to fatigue.) He may well be right. I respect his opinion. It emanates from a mind that genuinely wants to know why – not one that wants to turn tragedy into fodder for globalist propaganda.

One needs only consider the fact that, in order to free itself from the earth’s atmosphere, the amount of power needed is mind-boggling (6.6 million pounds of thrust at lift-off alone). But, as was so eloquently pointed out by Jim Lovell today, the shuttle must deflect an equivalent amount of power upon re-entry. That, too, is mind-boggling. And the reality is that, just a minor error in one of millions of calculations or physical/mechanical elements, could account for today’s tragedy.

As has probably been said ad infinitum on this thread, the fact that there have been so few human tragedies in the shuttle program (or in the forty-year history of humans in space) is evidence of its incredible success. I know that the friends and families of those who died in Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia surely find little personal solace in that fact (and understandably so), but I can’t help but wonder how many of them would like to see the space program slowed, or dismantled, as a result of their personal loss. My guess would be none of them.

Get back on the horse!

And soon. Your words need to reverberate among the scientific community, and the American public in general. It’s the only sane reaction to this tragedy. To allow the ghouls and second-guessers to call the shots would be a fatal mistake.

Your yankee ingenuity has been responsible for the greatest scientific/industrial progress (in the shortest amount of time) that humankind has ever known. And it has been fueled by courage, vision, and determination unparalleled in the history of mankind. Yet we have allowed it to be smothered by the leftists/globalists on so many fronts. And, to the degree that we continue to capitulate to them, we will find ourselves held hostage to a class of people who hold humanity, and human liberty, in contempt.

God knows that I'm a wreck at times, but I cannot see the point in making political, what is scientific. You don’t embrace the lying, power-hungry (at the expense of human industry and dignity) bureaucratic mindset. Thank you for that. :)

[William McKinley]

100 flights.

The Columbia was around flight 21 or so for it. They were talking about this on the radio as I was driving home.

[GOP_1900AD]

I would imagine that a plume of ball bearings set into the reentry path by one or more extremely low orbit satellites, such that the shuttle passed through it just a few minutes after reentry burn, would have not only damaged / loosened tiles, but at that speed, penetrated various points to a substantial degree. At a Mach 2 plus collision speed, it would be like getting shot up pretty bad. Not only that but control surfaces would likely have gotten multiple dings and thruster nozzles gotten dinged up as well. Perhaps just enough to create an out-of-angle or oscillating reentry. This thing was not designed to skip off the stratosphere - it's not a space plane per se. As old and fatigued as it must have been, a couple of skips like that and it would have been enough to break it up. Unless some other root cause gets solidly determined first, a detailed review of all forensic evidence and telemetry during the time between the reentry burn and the crash, looking for evidence of anything even remotely resembling what I have described, appears to be in order. Closing thought, in 1998, the ChiCOMs all but promised that someday they would do something like this.

[FITZ]

I wonder if a meteor could have hit the space shuttle ---I saw a pretty large meteor sometime during the night.

[Zebra]

28

[mathluv]

So has ABC.

[sweetliberty]

Hi OCC. Nice to see you. I am sorry that it is under such unpleasant circumstances. Unfortunately, the DUmmies have deteriorated even farthur. I didn't think it was possible, but Lord, what pathetic specimens of humanity. I don't know whether to grieve for them or just throw up. They're not even funny any more, just nasty and bitter and unable to put aside politics even for a day. I have no respect for them at all.

[Terriergal]

well, actually, since the DU's think the media is in Bush's pocket and that we *will* see teeming masses of people cheering, my bet is that this is all we're gonna get.

[Terriergal]

I don't know whether to grieve for them

Why bother? They don't know how to grieve themselves. All they know is how to get angry and whine about life's unfairness and blame it on Republicans.

[Wormwood]

I wonder who will be the first to Wellstone *this* tragedy?

[eno_]

This is a vastly premature conclusion, but I'd bet anyone a beer the final answer is close to this:

The shuttle crew died from a lack of thinking outside the box.

When debris was seen striking the leading edge of a wing, the mission should have been modified to check for damage.

Because the shuttle itself had no capability to check for damage - no robot arm and no EVA capability outside the payload bay - the whole issue of looking for tile damage was deemed outside of consideration.

This is, in my opinion, the first fatal mistake. If the mission had been modified to visit the ISS, it is possible an external examination of the wing could have been made, like a high-res photo or video image taken from the ISS.

Ah, but what if damage was found? There is no capability to repair tiles in space. So, by NASA's thinking, an examination would have been useless. This, I believe is the second fatal mistake. There are plenty of supplies on the ISS, and it will soon be resupplied by a Progress mission. The shuttle can be landed automatically, repaired on the ground if the landing succeeds, and the crew retrieved on another shuttle mission. If the probability of a successful landing was calculated to be too low to risk flying over the U.S., I think there are alternative landing sites that would have taken the shuttle over an ocean on the way to the landing site.

In short, I think NASA treated the shuttle mission in a vacuum, without considering the ISS, the Russian Progress and Soyuz capabilities, etc. They decided to stay inside the lines and say to themselves "The die is cast."

A stop at the ISS might have vindicated a number of concepts, not least the idea of a space station itself, the flexibility of a space-plane like the shuttle, etc. Instead, conventional thinking and a timid approach funneled events into a disaster.

[SunnyUsa]

"I can't help but notice that Bush's parallels with Reagan are becoming spookier by the day. "

I said the same thing to my husband this morning, while watching this tragedy unfold...how Bush is going to have to face a shocked country after another shuttle tragedy.

I remember Reagan so vividly 17 yrs ago, and how he helped us come together, mourn and go on....

Since 9/11 Bush has shown the world what a wonderful and great leader he's been for our country too.

Of course being a clinton hater I also said that that sociopath probably is whining this lip biting photo op Shuttle nightmare didn't happen on his watch either.....

[snopercod]

Will respond tomorrow. Not capable right now.

[Archangelsk]

There will be the over-reporting by a ghoulish media

You forgot to include ignorance and pandering. One interview I saw between one of the talking faces on CNN and a former NASA engineer absolutely disgusted me. The engineer, who was trying to give a little background on rudimentary mechanics and aerodynamics of suborbital flight, was continuously cut off by the face who haughtly said, "you just lost most of the audience." What did the audience get lost over, you ask? Oh, just a couple of things most folks should have learned in high school: F=ma and KE = 1/2mV².

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

The shuttle crew died from a lack of thinking outside the box.

I agree 100%. As soon as they knew of the debris striking the orbiter and decided to investigate it by running diagnostics...the mission should have been modified. Period.