[capitan_refugio]

Thanks for the reply. Oberg had an interesting quote in the papers Monday.

"Still, as James Oberg, a former shuttle flight controller and author who has been bombarded by Armageddon-type resuce ideas via e-mail, said Sunday, 'They may be implausible, but not by much.' He added: 'There's always to question of miracles.'" I very much enjoyed his Soviet disasters book from the early/mid-80's.

In the same article, the author concluded with:

"In theory, NASA could have had the shuttle descend through the atmosphere at a much shallower angle of entry in hopes of relieving the heat on the ship. But that could have had life-threatening dangers too. That kind of flight profile almost certainly would have had the shuttle coming in too fast to make a safe landing."

Since you are very much an expert in this field, what is the maximum landing speed of the shuttle? I saw it come in to Edwards a couple or times. That final flare seemed to burn off some speed. Could a shuttle hold that flare from a higher altitude if it was coming in "hot"? Was it ever contemplated what would happen if the gears could not be lowered and the shuttle pancaked in on a dry lake?

[John Jamieson]

"In theory, NASA could have had the shuttle descend through the atmosphere at a much shallower angle of entry in hopes of relieving the heat on the ship."

Not really so. The minimal angle is determined by the Shuttle's hypersonic lift to drag ratio, which is very low. The reentry used now is the minimum heating path, without a larger surface area to weight ratio (except maybe for the "energy management" wiggles). Extra drag made it worse.

Landing speed would not change, but the location would: somewhere in the Atlantic.

IF, we had known that the tiles were in very bad shape, the correct moves would to have been to jettison the very heavy payload (and any other extra weight), skiped the "energy management" wiggles, and hoped that we could put them near a large dry lake bed for landing. It would have been Apollo 13 type pucker time, but they would have had a better chance than they did.