Columbia Was Beyond Any Help, Officials Say

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

[supercat]

Would it be practical to build a protective shield for the tiles which would be mechanically durable enough to provide useful protection during launch, but would burn away harmlessly during re-entry?

[SierraWasp]

Bump for required reading for all the wild speculators postulating all over FreeRepublic from pillar to post!

[yonif]

That's what they said about Apollo 13, and they proved themselves wrong.

[TheDon]

"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."

A brutal assessment of NASA. They didn't prepare for this type of problem. Oh well, you can't prepare for everything. Who would have had the foresight to see that if the tiles were damaged the crew was doomed, and they should make provisions for such an eventuality, one that didn't involve the crew being incinerated?

[Howlin]

Get a place.

[Chad Fairbanks]

Well, how many times do you think we will have to repeat ourselves on THIS one????

[Howlin]

Isn't this what we've been saying all day long? They must be watching.

[stripes1776]

Who would have had the foresight to see that if the tiles were damaged the crew was doomed..."

Who? A scientist and technician who had done his job with competence.

[Doohickey]

You just made me spit coffee. LOL!

[#3Fan]

NASA couldn't have sent up another orbiter without doing it's proper safety procedures to retrieve the astronauts without really knowing for sure the first one had a problem. That's taking a bigger chance than just trying to get Columbia home. Their best bet was to try to get this one home with tile damage like they've done 120+ times before. They got bit this time.

[Lancey Howard]

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."

Then that is the problem. It's 2003, and there should be "options" for a shuttle which is damaged and at peril. There is a space station, three other shuttles, a Russian manned space program - - there should always be "options".

[TLBSHOW]

There is one that comes to mind!

[Lancey Howard]

Amen to your post #5. Agree 100%. (See post #12)

[blackdog]

Can NASA bring those Apollo grunts out of retirement for some serious engineer style foot/butt impact testing?

Does anyone find a basic flaw in the argument that a spacewalk in ZERO GRAVITY is going to damage tiles? I know the nature of the business of putting people in space and back is as dangerous as anything man could dream up even in the best circumstances. But to have the attitude that $hit Happens, and you can't do anything about it is inexcusable.

[paul544]

This is a bunch of crap. America would never have just left them up there to die. Never. We would have done something, especially if they knew right after launch. This is just a way for them to feel better about the fact that they missed it. Thank G*d that this kind of defeatism didn't reign when Apollo 13 ran into problems.

[John Jamieson]

Somebody at NASA has been watching our threads. Good.

Jim, you there?

[Balata]

The simplest would have been to abort the mission the moment the damage was discovered.

Hey, there's a novel idea. If you can't bring them back in case of emergency then any takeoff that is less than perfect should be aborted immediately.

[Chad Fairbanks]

Does anyone find a basic flaw in the argument that a spacewalk in ZERO GRAVITY is going to damage tiles?

Not really, no? Why, do you?

[dead]

It's odd that this whole article presumes that the problem was the alleged damage the tiles suffered on liftoff. That's nowhere near established.

I think the larger problem is that the shuttle was operating in 2003 with a 1978 design.