Columbia's Problems Began on Left Wing

NYT.com ^

[Sub-Driver]

Columbia's Problems Began on Left Wing By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:56 p.m. ET

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Investigators trying to figure out what destroyed space shuttle Columbia immediately focused on the left wing and the possibility that its thermal tiles were damaged far more seriously than NASA realized by a piece of debris during liftoff.

Just a little over a minute into Columbia's launch Jan. 16, a chunk of insulating foam peeled away from the external fuel tank and smacked into the ship's left wing.

On Saturday, that same wing started exhibiting sensor failures and other problems 23 minutes before Columbia was scheduled to touch down. With just 16 minutes remaining before landing, the shuttle disintegrated over Texas.

Just a day earlier, on Friday, NASA's lead flight director, Leroy Cain, had declared the launch-day incident to be absolutely no reason for concern. An extensive engineering analysis had concluded that any damage to Columbia's thermal tiles would be minor.

``As we look at that now in hindsight ... we can't discount that there might be a connection,'' shuttle manager Ron Dittemore said on Saturday, hours after the tragedy. ``But we have to caution you and ourselves that we can't rush to judgment on it because there are a lot of things in this business that look like the smoking gun but turn out not even to be close.''

The shuttle has more than 20,000 thermal tiles to protect it from the extreme heat of re-entry into the atmosphere. The black, white or gray tiles are made of a carbon composite or silica-glass fibers and are attached to the shuttle with silicone adhesive.

If a spaceship has loose, damaged or missing tiles, that can change the aerodynamics of the ship and warp or melt the underlying aluminum airframe, causing nearby tiles to peel off in a chain reaction.

If the tiles start stripping off in large numbers or in crucial spots, a spacecraft can overheat, break up and plunge to Earth in a shower of hot metal, much like Russia's Mir space station did in 2001.

Dittemore said that the disaster could have been caused instead by a structural failure of some sort. He did not elaborate.

As for other possibilities, however, NASA said that until the problems with the wing were noticed, everything else appeared to be performing fine.

NASA officials said, for example, that the shuttle was in the proper position when it re-entered the atmosphere on autopilot. Re-entry at too steep an angle can cause a spaceship to burn up.

Law enforcement authorities said was no indication of terrorism; at an altitude of 39 miles, the shuttle was out of range of any surface-to-air missile, one senior government official said.

If the liftoff damage was to blame, the shuttle and its crew of seven may well have been doomed from the very start of the mission.

Dittemore said there was nothing that the astronauts could have done in orbit to fix damaged thermal tiles and nothing that flight controllers could have done to safely bring home a severely scarred shuttle, given the extreme temperatures of re-entry.

The shuttle broke apart while being exposed to the peak temperature of 3,000 degrees on the leading edge of the wings, while traveling at 12,500 mph, or 18 times the speed of sound.

A California Institute of Technology astronomer Anthony Beasley, reported seeing a trail of fiery debris behind the shuttle over California, with one piece clearly backing away and giving off its own light before slowly fading and falling. Dittemore was unaware of the sighting and did not want to speculate on it.

If thermal tiles were being ripped off the wing, that would have created drag and the shuttle would have started tilting from the ideal angle of attack. That could have caused the ship to overheat and disintegrate.

Dittemore said that even if the astronauts had gone out on an emergency spacewalk, there was no way a spacewalker could have safely checked under the wings, which bear the brunt of heat re-entry and have reinforced protection.

Even if they did find damage, there was nothing the crew could have done to fix it, he said.

``There's nothing that we can do about tile damage once we get to orbit,'' Dittemore said. ``We can't minimize the heating to the point that it would somehow not require a tile. So once you get to orbit, you're there and you have your tile insulation and that's all you have for protection on the way home from the extreme thermal heating during re-entry.''

The shuttle was not equipped with its 50-foot robot arm because it was not needed during this laboratory research mission, and so the astronauts did not have the option of using the arm's cameras to get a look at the damage.

NASA did not request help in trying to observe the damaged area with ground telescopes or satellites, in part because it did not believe the pictures would be useful, Dittemore.

Long-distance pictures did not help flight controllers when they wanted to see the tail of space shuttle Discovery during John Glenn's flight in 1998; the door for the drag-chute compartment had fallen off seconds after liftoff.

It was the second time in just four months that a piece of fuel-tank foam came off during a shuttle liftoff. In October, Atlantis lost a piece of foam that ended up striking the aft skirt of one of its solid-fuel booster rockets. At the time, the damage was thought to be superficial.

Dittemore said this second occurrence ``is certainly a signal to our team that something has changed.''

[Republic of Texas]

ISS has no engines. How can it do that, and RETURN to it's previous orbit?

[OReilly]

ISS has no engines. How can it do that, and RETURN to it's previous orbit?

Excuse me, how import is that...

[Republic of Texas]

That's MY question to you.

[OReilly]

important

[OReilly]

No, your question was how... I asked how important that was, as opposed to rescuing our guys?

[Republic of Texas]

That way we lose 10 people instead of 7. Brilliant.

[OReilly]

My point was, it doesn't take much to drop the orbit altitude... and Swordmaker claimed it was only 115 miles different. Before the de-orbit burn, Columbia had resources.

[OReilly]

That way we lose 10 people instead of 7. Brilliant

...and how did you calculate that, Watson?

[Swordmaker]

What you do not seem to understand is that SPACE really is the ultimate frontier.

In fact it is far worse than any frontier here on Earth.

When our ancestors travelled beyond the bounds of civilization, they could only take with them that which they could carry, whether it be in a ship, a conestoga wagon, pack mule, or on their backs. If they didn't bring something produced by the technology of their civilization with them, they had to do without... or try to cobble a make-do out of natural products of the environment in which they found themselved. Thus, a needle might be made from a porcupine quill, a lamp out of clay, etc., to replace something not brought. They had it EASY compared to space pioneers!

Because of the very nature of space (Light years and light years of nothing but light years and light years), there ARE NO natural products available to be "cobbled" together into useful things. The Space Pioneers are TOTALLY LIMITED TO THE THINGS THEY BRING WITH THEM! Now add the fact that everything you bring had BETTER BE USEFUL AND NEEDED because it damn expensive to lift anything that isn't into orbit. It costs about $10,000 per pound of cargo to Low Earth Orbit. Very close planning is required because not only do you have limited cash, you have very limited storage for things you "WILL definately need" and adding things "just might need" has to be very carefully considered. Repair kits for certain things are categorized in a range from "definately need" to "totally useless."

The astronauts are also TIME limited when they are in orbit. They have a 16 day mission and certain things to accomplish in that time. They CANNOT spend 15 of those days merely checking things.

To avoid problems, the designers sacrifice some payload for redundancy... duplicate systems for absolutly critical equipment that MUST be operational for survival that CAN be duplicated. For other things, they pay top-dollar for the best that can be had. Some things are inherently non-redundantable (to coin an awkward word) and unrepairable. These, they design and build as best they can, and frankly, cross their collective fingers.

SOMEDAY, we will have repair stations, 911 rescues craft, and probably orbital Chevron stations in orbit... but not today.

You, OReilly, want modern civilization to exist on the frontier and it simply does not. Our brave astronauts have only what they carried with them to edge of space and far beyond civilization... and sometimes, it is not enough.

[OReilly]

Don't give up you day job, Swordmaker...

Your retort gave not one scintilla of science, why that senario would not have worked if NASA was not been worried about their image, and decided to cross their fingers with 7 lives.

All they had to do was inspect the likely broken tiles... I know you said they could not do that either, but since you were wrong on the rendezvous, tell us your reason why they couldn't inspect the tiles.

[Swordmaker]

Getting you further on the record... are you saying ISS could not have dropped their orbit enough to rendezvous with a Columbia that had not wasted their rocket fuel on de-orbit burn?

This is getting ridiculous. Are you totally illiterate?

Both John and I have told you SEVERAL TIMES that ISS does NOT HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO CHANGE ITS ORBIT! It has no engines. It has small attitude adjusting rockets to maintain proper angle for the solar panels... that is all. It has NO FUEL beyond a small amount of reaction mass for those itty bitty rockets. THE ISS is not designed to take any thrust at all... there are no structural members strong enough to take any kind of centralized force to change its orbit. Next, the Shuttle is not designed to refuel in orbit. It was NOT LAUNCHED with a trajectory that would enable it to reach or match velocities with the ISS. Not only is ISS 115-130 miles higher than the shuttle, it is literally ON A DIFFERENT ROAD!

SHEESH!

This is NOT Star Trek.

[Dialup Llama]

>Future missions (if ever continued) should include tile repair kits.

I saw the super slow mo video of the debris hitting the left wing. It hit really hard and created a huge cloud of pulverized heat tiles.

NASA said it was no problem and never looked at the tiles with satellites. BS. On the NASA news conference I heard some unusual statments. The first statement was that there was no possiblity of repairing the tiles. The second statement was strange- it was to the effect that the engineers had 'convinced' themselves that the tile damage was not a problem. They 'convinced' themselves because they had no alternative.

[Swordmaker]

Your retort gave not one scintilla of science, why that senario would not have worked if NASA was not been worried about their image, and decided to cross their fingers with 7 lives.

It has become completely obvious that you wouldn't recognize a FACT if it bit you on your hiney, much less know what science is.

IF NASA knew of damaged tiles, there was only ONE choice that gave the astronauts a chance of survival: de-orbit and attempt to come home.

...but since you were wrong on the rendezvous...

Oh, really, OReilly? How do you come to the conclusion that I am wrong about a rendezvous? Who are they going to meet up with?

[OReilly]

...and that's exactly what the engineers said when they first looked at the Apollo 13 problem.

[Swordmaker]

Dialup,

I think you have a very good point. One STS engineer I saw on the NASA channel said they thought it was ICE breaking off of the liquid fuel tank and that further the cloud of debris coming off of the left wing underside was pulverized ice.

However, this impact and cloud were more than one minute after take off... and most ice is shaken loose when the engines start vibrating the entire assembly... but even if it was ice, it was ice that was broken off in a HIGH apparent wind and with the Shuttle accelerating at 3 G's (96 feet per second per second) which means the ice mass (or insullation mass) would have an reletive anti-acceleration of the 3Gs + whatever drag the atmosphere added BEFORE HITTING the tiles. Incidentally, ICE would probably be more massy and denser than a similar volume of insullation foam implying more potential for damage to the fragile tiles.

Many years ago I had occasion to handle some rejected shuttle tiles... while their surfaces are very hard, the backing ceramic foam is very brittle and easily crushed into white dust by your hand pressure alone. What I saw on that video of the impact and cloud could have been ice dust... or ceramic dust.

I think the engineers evaluating the incident did take the least catastrophic conclusion... that it was the mass turning to dust rather than tiles. Reviewing the video shows that dust plume seems to rise from about 2/3rds of the wing... which might imply a gash in the tiles from the leading to the trailing edge!

Note my analysis of the decision tree in a previous post. If such a gash existed, then the ONLY chance the astronauts had was to de-orbit and attempt re-entry. The other choices led to certain death. If the engineers saw this and understood its implications, perhaps subconsciously, then they may have known the outcome... but the "stay in orbit" outcome was more certain.

Would they have told the astronauts? Should they? I don't know.

[Swordmaker]

...and that's exactly what the engineers said when they first looked at the Apollo 13 problem.

Thee Engineers thought you were totally illiterate, too??? Amazing.

OReilly, the Apollo 13 disaster and STS-107 are NOT THE SAME... and all of your wishing will not make it so.

You still have not answered any of the questions I have asked you. Who were they going to rendezvous with in space? How were they going to "lighten" the shuttle?

Your sole talent seems to be the ability to throw rotten tomatoes at people who know the facts when you don't.

[OReilly]

For all their and your talk of Family... NASA has no credibility with the public. They did and have recently taken unnecessary chances with our Astronauts' lives, for political and fiscal reasons.