Columbia Was Beyond Any Help, Officials Say

New York Times ^ | 2/03/03 | KENNETH CHANG

[kattracks]

OUSTON, Feb. 3 — Even if flight controllers had known for certain that protective heat tiles on the underside of the space shuttle had sustained severe damage at launching, little or nothing could have been done to address the problem, NASA officials say.

Virtually since the hour Columbia went down, the space agency has been peppered with possible options for repairing the damage or getting the crew down safely. But in each case, officials here and at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida say, the proposed solution would not have worked.

The simplest would have been to abort the mission the moment the damage was discovered. In case of an engine malfunction or other serious problem at launching, a space shuttle can jettison its solid rocket boosters and the external fuel tank, shut down its own engines and glide back down, either returning to the Kennedy Space Center or an emergency landing site in Spain or Morocco.

But no one even knew that a piece of insulation from the external tank had hit the orbiter until a frame-by-frame review of videotape of the launching was undertaken the next day. By then, Columbia was already in orbit, and re-entry would have posed the same danger that it did 16 days later.

Four other possibilities have been discussed at briefings or in interviews since the loss of Columbia, and rejected one by one by NASA officials.

First, repairing the damaged tiles. The crew had no tools for such a repair. At a news conference on Sunday, Ron D. Dittemore, the shuttle program manager, said that early in the shuttle program, NASA considered developing a tile repair kit, but that "we just didn't believe it was feasible at the time." He added that a crew member climbing along the underside of the shuttle could cause even more damage to the tiles.

Another idea, widely circulated on the Internet in the last few days, was that the shuttle could have docked with the International Space Station once the damage was discovered. But without the external fuel tank, dropped as usual after launching, Columbia had no fuel for its main engines and thus no way it could propel itself to the station, which circles the earth on a different orbit at a higher altitude.

"We have nowhere near the fuel needed to get there," said Bruce Buckingham, a spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center.

Another shuttle, Atlantis, was scheduled for launching on March 1 to carry supplies and a new crew to the space station, and it is possible to imagine a Hollywood-type series of events in which NASA rushed Atlantis to the launching pad, sent it up with a minimal crew of two, had it rendezvous with Columbia in space and brought everyone down safely.

But Atlantis is still in its hangar, and to rush it to launching would have required NASA to circumvent most of its safety measures. "It takes about three weeks, at our best effort, to prepare the shuttle for launch once we're at the pad," Mr. Buckingham said, "and we're not even at the pad." Further, Columbia had enough oxygen, supplies and fuel (for its thrusters only) to remain in orbit for only five more days, said Patrick Ryan, a spokesman at the Johnson Space Center here.

Finally, there is the notion that Columbia's re-entry might have been altered in some way to protect its damaged area. But Mr. Dittemore said the shuttle's descent path was already designed to keep temperatures as low as possible. "Because I'm reusing this vehicle over and over again, so I'm trying to send it through an environment that minimizes the wear and tear on the structure and the tile," he said at his news conference on Sunday.

Today he added that he did not know of a way for the shuttle to re-enter so that most of the heat would be absorbed by tiles that were not damaged, on its right wing. "I'm not aware of any other scenarios, any other techniques, that would have allowed me to favor one wing over the other," he said.

Even if that had been possible, it would probably have damaged the shuttle beyond repair and made it impossible to land, requiring the crew to parachute out at high speed and at high altitude. He said there was no way managers could have gotten information about the damaged tiles that would have warranted so drastic a move.

Gene Kranz, the flight director who orchestrated the rescue of astronauts aboard the crippled Apollo 13 in 1970, said that from what he knew about the suspected tile damage, there was probably nothing that could have been done to save the flight. "The options," he said in a telephone interview, "were just nonexistent."

[capitan_refugio]

Call me "retro," but for the Space Station we should go back and use 1960's technology - the Saturn V. It had about 4x the lifting capacity of the Shuttle and never had a failure. We would have to build several new V's (the last one is on display, I think, the three or four from the cancelled Apollo missions were used for Apollo/Soyuz and the Skylab missions, I think).

[Texasforever]

Why not automate as many of the shuttle flights as possible.

Because there is something about Humans that makes them want to go. If Humanity ever loses that basic instinct then space exploration will die.

[TLBSHOW]

Tribute to the Risk Takers

God Speed as Angels trending upward dare to fly

Risk not gamble!

[Texasforever]

Risk not gamble!

Risk is gambling. You do it every time you drive your car.

[Captain Beyond]

Also this is January and the atmospheric density will be greater.

[SteveH]

Because there is something about Humans that makes them want to go. If Humanity ever loses that basic instinct then space exploration will die.

OK, but does that imply that they have to go on all the ferrying flights too? If the base flight failure rate is 2% and humans are limited to 1/N of the flights (N>=2), then the flight mortality failure chance goes down from 2% to 2/N%, which seems acceptable if the cost of automating is "small". It's at least "small" in terms of human cost. I thought lack of automation (insistence on the manned space flight elements of the program) has been the primary criticism of NASA by the astro-scientist set at least since Apollo.

[Texasforever]

I thought lack of automation (insistence on the manned space flight elements of the program) has been the primary criticism of NASA by the astro-scientist set at least since Apollo.

Of course it has been the criticism. Automation is the holy grail of engineers and scientists and it is a damn good thing too BUT, there is also a visceral need for Human involvement. Does the computerized lathe operator feel the same at the end of the day that the machinist of yore felt? My problem with NASA is the earth orbit fixation. I want to see us actually EXPLORING space not sending multi-billion dollar delivery trucks into orbit.

[SteveH]

For some technologies at least, the cost of finding the last problems can go up geometrically with the increase in reliability. Applying that loose rule to the shuttle, getting from 98% to 99% may be a lot more than most people (e.g., joe and mary SUV) might otherwise expect. NASA is competing with defense, welfare, infrastructure, etc. for tax dollars. What to trade off for an increasingly expensive toy? Or should Uncle Sam raise taxes for NASA to fix the shuttle? Those may not be appetizing choices for voters. A bandaid would inevitably result in more deaths in the longer term, or sooner. Do we want a bandaid quality solution? Would astronauts be content with such a solution?

It seems to me that retrofitting for remote control avoids many of the worst aspects of these issues.

On another tack, I wonder if the NASA investigation will reveal in hindsight that Columbia was inherently more dangerous than the other shuttles to fly. That (and bringing back freon foam, and having formal standby Soyuzes for space rescue option) would seem to permit the shuttle program to get back on track sooner (and so avoid the personnel standby costs).

(I am not a NASA engineer, etc.)

[SteveH]

Of course it has been the criticism. Automation is the holy grail of engineers and scientists and it is a damn good thing too BUT, there is also a visceral need for Human involvement. Does the computerized lathe operator feel the same at the end of the day that the machinist of yore felt? My problem with NASA is the earth orbit fixation. I want to see us actually EXPLORING space not sending multi-billion dollar delivery trucks into orbit.

Sure. I am however considering that our system of government has not, for whatever reason, achieved the level of success it set out the achieve with the shuttle. It is significantly more expensive and significantly more dangerous than originally billed. Also, we no longer have the luxury of being able to say shame on NASA and the USG for fooling us once in this case.

At what point would the American public be convinced that a different direction is necessary, at least for the short term? If most people say we continue to need manned flight because of emotional "human destiny" reasons, and NASA continues its current trend, we can expect another tragedy in another 50 flights or so. That will make three.

Or we could act to reduce losses in a preventative manner and start to squirrel up for something more to your liking (eg moon base, L5, or manned mars expedition) in a delayed gratification manner.

I'm not against manned space travel personally. I rather like the idea, in fact. I just prefer to be realistic, and put robots where it makes the most sense for some of the drudge work. We replaced manned bomber crews with missiles in the early 1950s. We could have done the same with respect to earth orbital platforms in the 1980s. Then we might have had money left over to start on a moon base (manned or unmanned) by now.

Right now few people actually get very excited about earth orbit stuff. Even on the last Columbia flight, it seems as if it was only a few Freepers and assorted nerds who actually bothered to watch the re-entry. Where is the glamor in that?

(I watched exactly one shuttle flight re-entry myself, the first. I suppose I figured that all the others would look just like the first, so I skipped them.)

I think the barriers here are not technical but sociological (and fiscal, if we believe the space program should pay its own way). Collectively, we seem unable to plan rationally beyond the next fiscal year, not to mention decade. NASA and the USG went for the shuttle to keep voter interest high. When it waned anyway, shuttle safety got the short end of the fiscal stick, with predictable results. In hindsight, it may have been in my opinion a collective failure. Our civilization, given our republican mode of government, can only accelerate progress in space so fast, beyond which we end up defeating ourselves one way or another. We may want to go to Mars within 2 decades or so, and we may want a *truly* reliable space shuttle now, but we don't want to have to put up with 75-student classrooms, or a 50% increase in commuter delay, or 10% increase in federal taxes, to pay for it in a fiscally responsible manner. So we put NASA and the astronauts in what is essentially a losing proposition. We press onwards and only unconsciously recognize that we are gambling with peoples' lives with our choices and compromises. (And sometimes, we lose.)

[fire_eye]

When the shuttle was designed, I read the following (and it's been too long for me to remember where, but I am certain of the details, at least):
(1) That the preferred material for the shuttle skin was titanium, but that titanium could not be used due to cost and due to its being a strategic material during the Cold War, when the world's reserves of titanium were largely either controlled by the Russians or off limits to America due to the (Lieberal-produced) embargo of trade with South Africa,
(2) That the tiles were known, and expected, to become detached in small numbers during launch,
(3) That the shuttle carried a tile repair kit with it, for use in orbit, consisting of spare tiles, adhesive, and a rasp for shaping replaced tiles.

I've always had some questions about the preceding - such as how the silicon rubber vulcanizing adhesive could possibly cure at orbital temperatures, whether titanium could really be expected to survive re-entry temperatures, etc. - but those were the "facts" at one time.

Personally, I don't understand, given all of the preceding, why replacement of the insulating surface as soon as sufficient supplies of titanium became available - or replacement with a molded ceramic material which would not be susceptible to fragmentation - was not a high priority with NASA from the very beginning. But, what do I know... I'm a EE, not a rocket scientist... and my company simply refuses to build devices for military, medical, or aerospace applications, for liability reasons...

[Swordmaker]

Looks like we were right, John... of course the super-optimists will ALWAYS believe that there is a solution if only you wish hard enough.

Sometimes I hate being right.

[Swordmaker]

OK, so the orbiter was in the wrong orbit/inclination to make it to the ISS. What about using the Soyuz docked at the ISS as a ferry between the orbiter and the ISS? It holds 3 bodies so it would have taken 4 trips (with pilot) to get everyone off the orbiter. I've not heard this option discussed at all.

The reason you have not heard it discussed is because the Soyuz is basically a "one-trip" lifeboat for the ISS. It can only leave and come down. It, like Columbia, does not have enough fuel to change orbits except to de-orbit and enter the atmosphere.

[Swordmaker]

I am aware they didn't know the foam had fallen off until they reviewed the film the next day.

You don't really believe that, do you? That's their fig leaf for now, and too many freepers are buying it.

Why yes, Fred, I do believe it. The video is not watched in real time. In addition, the foam falling incident takes LESS THAN ONE SECOND. What we see on the replays is about 10 frames of a video that is recorded at 30 frames per second.

Had someone noticed the impact and realized the implications, the launch could have been aborted by releasing the SRBs and detaching the External Fuel Tank and the shuttle could return to Kennedy Space Center. This option is available up to 3 minutes 45 seconds into the flight. After that a Trans-Atlantic abort could be used. When the orbiter has flown too far to land across the Atlantic, then the only choice is Abort to Orbit... but that would require re-entry into the atmosphere to get down... with the catastrophic results we have seen.

[tictoc]

There is some truly amazing stuff coming on line that will make spaceflight much safer.

This article in Space Daily talks about fullerenes and other exotic materials that will be stronger, lighter and even capable of repairing themselves.

I have faith in the extremely bright men and women working on new discoveries and translating them to the manufacturing stage. I am still optimistic about the future of spaceflight, with and without humans on board.

[Swordmaker]

Let's see, three weeks to launch the Atlantis. Columbia had enough oxygen, supplies and fuel for five more days. It was in orbit for 16 days. In my math, sixteen + five equals twenty one. That's three weeks. Three weeks to launch the Atalantis. Sounds like it could have been done.

"It takes about three weeks, at our best effort, to prepare the shuttle for launch once we're at the pad," Mr. Buckingham said, "and we're not even at the pad."

Exactly what part of "and we're not even at the pad." don't you understand?

[Swordmaker]

You know what sounds useless, the damed ISS, I mean it is a SPACE STATION for goddsakes yet it was of no use to those on a damaged space craft. It's as if you were on a ship that couldn't divert to a dry dock because that dry dock was desiged to to cute little science experiments instead of being useful.

You know what sounds useless, the damed Orbiter Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, I mean it is a place where they repair Space Shuttles for goddsakes yet it was of no use to those on a damaged space craft. It's as if you were on a ship that couldn't divert to a dry dock because that dry dock was built down on Earth instead of being useful where I want it.

Your argument is specious... and silly.

[CWOJackson]

Everyone knows that NASA will take far too long to answer the questions and will probably just try to cover their tails. If the President were smart he would just turn the investigation over to the many aerospace experts here on FR; they had all the answers in just a couple of hours and have already blamed the culprits.

[strela]

Not only doing "that sort of thing" but celebrating the doing of it, a vain and glorious Endeavour. Nature and Nature's God, however, take a colder and truer read of things.

Sen. Smith was referring to the tragic sinking of the Titanic when he talked about "this sort of thing," not the journey/adventure itself. We don't "celebrate" the loss of life that sometimes occurs. We mourn for a while, we remember, and we do our level best as a people to ensure that it doesn't happen again. But unfortunately, it always does and always will.

It's not that we shouldn't build big ships -- we must! It's that we'll never have a sea full of USS Titanics

(nitpick ON)

Royal Mail Steamer (RMS) Titanic. The designation (also known as Royal Mail Ship by some) was a mark of distinction used to refer to specific British flag ships that met certain standards of speed and quality.

HMS (His/Her Majesty's Ship) designates British warships, USS (United States Ship) designates Men o' War of the United States, and USNS (United States Naval Ship) designates non-combatant ships flying the American flag.

(nitpick OFF)

It is a great and true of the US culture that we ARE indeed fond of preserving life and put great stock in it.

Absolutely correct, which is why these Columbia threads bring out the best (and sometimes the worst) in all of us. Couldn't have said it better.

[bvw]

Is your attitude that we shouldn't stop sending up shuttles untill we lose every dang one of them? Hell, we shouldn't even bother looking into this minor mishap, there's nothing we could do about it. Let's go! Fire 'em up, keep on space trucking while we can. We still have two more to lose!

[bvw]

"RMS" ... thanks -- I should have written "HMS" last night, but that was not quite correct either.