Posted on 02/03/2003 4:43:52 PM PST by Wolfstar
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:02:01 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Released Monday morning, a high-speed NASA engineering film shows a piece of debris falling from the large external tank on the space shuttle Columbia's liftoff and hitting the orbiter's left wing. Bear in mind that these are extreme close-ups of a high-speed event. In the top couple of photos, you see only the top of the broken-off piece. Most of it is in the shadows. Depending on which clip you see and how slowly it is run, to the uninitiated person's eye, it can look either like the debris strikes the wing hard enough to pulverize the debris, or the debris strikes a glancing blow and bounces off in the direction of the main and booster engine exhaust.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
<P.
That's nice, but where are all the tracking cameras to film re-entry? There are none. NASA is relying on amateur video.....ridiculous.
We were initially told by Dettemore that it wasn't possible to check the underside of the wing and it didn't matter anyway. They were doomed. Now we find that photographs do exist. It appears this guy was hedging his bets from day one.
I was one of a number of people who took a lot of heat because we said satellite photos and photos taken below the atmosphere could help out here. Well, guess what, somebody in government obviously agreed.
I'll continue to ask questions.
I don't think they can sell, one tile gone and you're Dead. The Tiles are gone, believe me, they are going to have to go with a composite material that can withstand the reentry heat, of course that means a whole new vehicle.
Or dump the Shuttle and go back to Rockets, like the Russians.
Heinsight is 20/20. Why are folks thinking they are qualified, to study data analysis, from brief quips of pictues off the web?
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Tuesday, February 04, 2003
SPACE CENTER, Houston — Space shuttle Columbia may have been doomed from the start.
NASA engineers are focusing on the theory that a flyaway chunk of insulation broke off from the shuttle's external fuel tank during liftoff, severely damaged several thermal tiles on the underside of the shuttle's left wing.
If that theory is correct, then there was nothing NASA could do to prevent the shuttle from breaking up and killing the seven astronauts aboard when it reentered the Earth's atmosphere 16 days later.
NASA is now taking a second, harder look at video, computer data and everything else that led them to conclude — perhaps wrongly — that the flyaway chunk did not harm the space shuttle.
"We are completely redoing the analysis from scratch," shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said Monday, exactly one week after engineers assured him that any damage to the shuttle's thermal tiles was minimal. "We want to know if we made any erroneous assumptions. We want to know if we weren't conservative enough. We want to know if we made any mistakes."
The wrenching duplication of work to determine what doomed the shuttle Saturday morning was to be temporarily halted Tuesday so employees could take part in a memorial service at Johnson Space Center with President Bush.
Practically from the start, investigators have zeroed in on a piece of foam insulation that fell off the shuttle's big external fuel tank during liftoff Jan. 16. The impact by the 2 1/2-pound, 20-inch fragment may have damaged the heat tiles that keep the ship from burning up during re-entry into the atmosphere.
"We're making the assumption from the start that the external tank was the root cause of the problem that lost Columbia," Dittemore said. "That's a fairly drastic assumption and it's sobering."
While Columbia was still in orbit, NASA engineers analyzed launch footage frame-by-frame and were unable to determine for certain whether the shuttle was damaged by the insulation. But they ran computer analyses for different scenarios and different assumptions about the weight of the foam, its speed, and where under the left wing it might have hit, even looking at the possibility of tiles missing over an area of about 7 inches by 30 inches, NASA said.
The half-page engineering report — issued on Day 12 of the 16-day flight — indicated "the potential for a large damage area to the tile." But the analyses showed "no burn-through and no safety-of-flight issue," the report concluded.
High-level officials at NASA said they agreed at the time with the engineers' assessment.
"We were in complete concurrence," Michael Kostelnik, a NASA spaceflight office deputy, said at a news conference Monday with NASA's top spaceflight official, William Readdy.
"The best and brightest engineers we have who helped design and build this system looked carefully at all the analysis and the information we had at this time, and made a determination this was not a safety-of-flight issue."
No one on the team, to Dittemore's knowledge, had any reservations about the conclusions and no one reported any concerns to a NASA hot line set up for just such occasions.
"Now I am aware, here two days later, that there have been some reservations expressed by certain individuals and it goes back in time," Dittemore said. "So we're reviewing those reservations again as part of our data base. They weren't part of our playbook at the time because they didn't surface. They didn't come forward."
On Monday, Readdy said the damage done by the broken-off piece of insulation is now being looked at very carefully as a possible cause of the tragedy.
"It may certainly be the leading candidate right now — we have to go through all the evidence and then rule things out very methodically in order to arrive at the cause," he said.
Monday night, searchers found the front of the shuttle's nose cone buried deep in the ground near the Louisiana border. But even more valuable in trying to piece together what happened would be to locate any tiles from Columbia's left wing.
"That's the missing link that we're trying to find," Dittemore said.
The shuttle, covered with more than 20,000 thermal tiles, broke up 39 miles over Texas and fell to Earth just as it was experiencing maximum re-entry heat of 3,000 degrees.
NASA said temperature data showed that the shuttle's left side — the same side hit by the debris — heated up sharply just before Columbia disintegrated.
The foam that covers the shuttle's 154-foot external fuel tank is hard enough to damage the shuttle when the spaceship is hurtling into space at high speed.
Dittemore said he knows of at least two other shuttle launches in which foam came off and damaged the shuttle, though nowhere near to the extent suspected in the case of Columbia. One of the shuttles — Columbia, in 1992 — had tile damage on the wing.
Engineers relied heavily on the fact that the previous damage was so minor.
Thanks for the comments.
Youre missing something. Apollo 13 had the technology to make rescue possible. The Shuttle did not.
Within hours of this terrible disaster there were some on FR claiming that the disaster was the result of NASA’s incompetence, that the disaster was avoidable and that the cover up had already began. They have offered up memo’s, doctored photos and wild rumor as evidence.
In order to be true than we must also assume that the seven astronauts who died were fools or somehow duplicitous in their own deaths. Are we expected to believe that the knowledge of a few rumor mongers on the internet is greater then that of those who flew on Challenger?
Are we to believe that these seven astronauts were not aware of the foam problems on the shuttle program or the effects of budget cuts on the program? Are we to believe that they were foolish enough to fly a platform into space that was doomed from the beginning as some on FR claim?
If we accept their speculation then we must also assume that their fellow astronauts, walking the woodlands of east Texas looking for their remains, will not seek to discover the real cause of their deaths, but will work to cover up for NASA. Do you really believe this?
Is this what we’ve come to on FR? This doesn’t just smear NASA, it smears the seven brave people we honor today.
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