To: Wolfstar
But they could have assumed that this was serious and prepared the Atlantis Shuttle for a possible rescue mission. They have the capabilities of getting Atlantis ready for such a mission in a week. They had the time. They could have rescued all but the pilot of the Columbia before they attempted to bring it back to earth.
If they thought this was serious they should have done something. Let's hope that they truly didn't think it was a big deal. Let's hope that they didn't deliberately risk the lives of those seven people. Lets hope they didn't know this was going to happen when they had time to try to save them.
4 posted on
02/03/2003 4:55:37 PM PST by
P-Marlowe
To: P-Marlowe
Please tell me how NASA could assume a 5 to 10' brick hitting the shuttle moving in excess of 1000 mph would do no damage. I'd like to hear the parse on that.
To: P-Marlowe
But they could have assumed that this was serious and prepared the Atlantis Shuttle for a possible rescue mission.No, they couldn't.
52 posted on
02/03/2003 5:29:04 PM PST by
Howlin
To: P-Marlowe
But they could have ...They did.
To: P-Marlowe
I watched a former shuttle astronaut on PBS saying even if they knew there was a problem a day after liftoff they had very limited or any options - Their orbit was too low to go to the space station and too low to maintain with limited supplies etc... He made very calm and rational comments about the incident - very logical and very convincing. Much different than some of the accusations steeped in uninformed bais I have read over the past couple of days at the du and sadly from a few posters here.
To: P-Marlowe
They have the capabilities of getting Atlantis ready for such a mission in a week.That's absolutely untrue. Even if the Atlantis were on the pad, there is too much work to be done to launch within one week. Just the final launch countdown takes four days. Prior to that is Hypergol Load, Pyro installation, and a bunch of other tests that are necessary for safe flight. It normally takes about a month on the pad before launch.
NASA has no procedures for an "emergency launch", anyway, although they should have, IMO.
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