Posted on 02/01/2003 8:02:03 PM PST by Destro
NASA Grounds Shuttle Fleet While Probing Columbia Disaster
David McAlary
Washington
02 Feb 2003, 01:22 UTC
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The U.S. space agency, NASA, is suspending future shuttle flights until it knows what caused the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its seven- member crew. Columbia broke up over Texas Saturday minutes before it was to land in Florida after a 16-day research mission in Earth orbit.
Seven astronauts, including the first from Israel, went down to their deaths in a hail of shuttle debris over Texas. Dramatic videotapes from a Dallas television station show it streaking to Earth in several smoking pieces.
Shuttle officials say the first sign of a problem was the loss of readings from sensors that measure tire pressure and temperature and structural heat on the orbiter's left side as it at headed toward landing at 18 times the speed of sound. Chief flight director Milt Heflin says controllers lost all contact with the shuttle minutes later.
"We lost the data and that's when we clearly began to know that we had a bad day," he said.
News reports tell of shuttle remains strewn across a wide area of east Texas. NASA is sending technicians to Texas to collect it with help from national, state, and local emergency agencies. NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe has established both an internal and independent external review board to investigate the cause of the disaster.
"This is indeed a tragic day for the NASA family, for the families of the astronauts, and likewise tragic for the nation," said Mr. O'Keefe.
The head of the shuttle program, Ron Dittemore, says debris analysis is key to understanding what happened to Columbia. He pledged a non-stop effort to assess it and all related flight data.
"It's going to take us some time to work through the evidence and the analysis to clearly understand what the cause was," he explained. "We will be poring over that data 24 hours a day for the foreseeable future."
Pending the answer, NASA is suspending all space shuttle flights. It has stopped preparing orbiters for flight at the Kennedy Space Center launch site, including the one that was scheduled to exchange crews at the International Space Station in early March.
A Russian supply rocket, set for launch Sunday, is bringing supplies that NASA says will support the station crew through late June.
Seventeen years ago, the shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch, but the Columbia disaster is the first time a shuttle has been lost returning from orbit since the program began 113 missions ago in 1981.
At the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, space expert Joan Johnston-Freese notes that takeoff and landings are the most dangerous times for space shuttles.
"That's when the maximum pressure and velocity occur," she said. "The shuttle lands as a large glider and control is always a challenge, but under those conditions of pressure and velocity, the shuttle is so super-heated at that point that it's a very volatile situation under the best of conditions."
As part of NASA's probe, technicians will look for any signs that an unusual launch incident may have damaged critical insulating tiles on the shuttle's left wing, the side of the shuttle where the sensor readings went dead. Insulation from the rocket that helped boost Columbia to orbit flew off and hit the wing during liftoff.
Shuttle manager Dittemore says that after exhaustive analysis early in the mission, flight engineers determined that it probably would have no affect on the flight. But given Columbia's loss, he did not dismiss the potential impact to the wing.
"We're going to go back and see if there is a connection. Is that the smoking gun? It is not. We don't know enough about it. A lot more analysis and evidence needs to come to the table," he emphasized. "It's not fair to represent the tile damage as the source. It's just something we need to go look at."
When the Columbia disaster occurred, NASA administrator O'Keefe was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida awaiting the shuttle's return with the families and friends of the astronauts. What was to be a happy reunion turned into grief-stricken moments of consolation. Mr. O'Keefe paid tribute to the astronauts, whom he said dedicated their lives to facing scientific challenges for all of us on Earth.
"The loss of this valued crew is something we will never be able to get over and certainly the families of all of them," he said. "We have assured them we will do everything, everything, we can possibly do to guarantee that they work their way through this horrific tragedy."
Security had been tighter than usual at the landing site because the presence of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon prompted government fears that he might be the target of a terrorist attack. However, NASA says there is no indication that terrorism is involved in the shuttle loss.
Brilliant. Only in a bureaucracy like NASA do you order people to sit on their hands for two years every time there is a problem.
Did it ever occur to those morons that we should press on and have a shuttle ready to launch in case of problems on the ISS? Hell, if a generic problem is found, they can always destack and fix it.
A smaller spacecraft that was only tasked for transporting people and not cargo would mean a lot less complexity throughout. A smaller spacecraft would mean smaller rockets, and it would mean fewer tiles. We don't fly airliners that carry maybe a dozen pasengers plus several tons of FedEx parcels -- why should we think that what doesn't make sense for routine terrestrial air transport should make sense for what is supposed to become routine space transport?
From a pilots perspective, you comment needs reconsideration. Understanding failure mechanisms in a complex system is crucial to reducing risks, even more so when lives are at stake. I can almost guarrantee you that of those 107 flights, not a single one was launched under identical conditions, with exactly the same hardware at the same stage in its life cycle, with identical software builds, same temperature exposures to tiles and adhesives, carried identical payloads that structurally stressed the airframe, etc. A system like the shuttle is dynamic over its life, and what was safe on flight one may not be safe on flight 28.
The proper course of action is to ground the fleet. The obvious problem with the grounding is that it will be many months, if not years before we can 'safely' fly again.
By the mid-seventies, Nasa was run by astronauts wanting rides, not by scientists exploring space. After the Challenger disaster, astronauts resigned quickly because their hopes of a ride were gone for the foreseeable future. We will see something similar shortly.
If Nasa can't get back to focusing on exploration, instead of providing ponies for jockeys, I say shut it down completely.
Robotics have emerged by leaps and bounds--little cameras will make openheart surgery no longer open heart. If cameras can crawl around your body, why can't they crawl around Mars? We could send them to Mars by the dozens for what it costs to send John Glenn on a sentimental Shuttle journey. If we got these out of work IT engineers reeducated, the technical problems could be solved. THINK of the spinoffs! Right now, the ISS does experiments about the level of a high school science fair. Maintain the ISS as a future docking point for sending masses of unmanned craft into the solar system. So what if most of them fail? It'll still be cheaper than these pointless joyrides.
If the flights were unmanned, they'd shrug with disappointment, but move on quickly. This will be Nasa's third prolonged period of mourning. Think how much farther we'd be if we took the focus off manned flight for unmanned.
I disagree with that statement. If they were in it for the pure science of space flight, they wouldn't fight independent private sector efforts in this country in space travel technology. NASA wants to control everything about America's space technology because they fear loss of power and jobs. They want to protect and control turf to protect and control their federal budget dollars. It's the classic government bureaucracy.
Now is the time to brace up our political leaders to support not only a return of the shuttle fleet to service ASAP, but also the development of a new generation spacecraft to replace the shuttles as a national priority. NASA has tried and failed to develop such a replacement several times, but a combination of techical difficulties and lack of funding has doomed each such effort. Now is the time to decide that we are serious about our space capabilities and put sufficient effort and funding into the program to succeed.
You've obviously never met, talked to, or worked with the professionals that man the astronaut corp. Your comments with regard to good, decent human beings whom you have never met are incorrect, rude, and especially today, insensitive and very much out of line.
NASA has always had a professional 'tension' between its manned and unmanned side. This occurs in any organization that has competing interests for resources. In addition, like it or not, NASA is a political tool, used by congress and administrations as a carrot to other nations, incentive to join us in partnerships, and a symbol of national power. Scientifically, a robotic mission to mars is worth a lot. Politically, manned presence in space is worth 100 robotic missions.
Sounds like a bad idea....
especially after seeing what happened yesterday.
That is the essence of the BDB [Big, Dumb Booster.] The Space Shuttle would be in that league if they dropped the Shuttle itself and used just the motors with a multiton payload on top. It is already of the same order as the Saturn V, just a little less.
Unfortunately, though, the Energias that were being stored at Baikonur were significantly damaged just a few months ago when the roof of their old assembly building caved in. I know of no plans that they have to try and resurrect them.
At this point, RKK Energia is using the engines from the Energia booster as the basis for the Angara rocket. This will be Energia's competition for the Khrunichev Proton M / Briz M combo. Read all about it here: Energia history
Especially interesting is the box about the decision by Bhrezhnev and Ustinov to build the Buran as a shuttle copy; it's about the middle of the link page. Note that the Russian engineers disagreed with this at the time.
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