Shuttle Tried to Right Itself Near the End, Tapes Reveal

The New York Times ^ | 17 February, 2003 | JOHN SCHWARTZ

[jlogajan]

There are a number of video shots which showed that the ship (over Arizona) had already slewed almost 90-degrees sidewise

There is no such video.

[snopercod]

The NYT is flaunting it's ignorance once again. There was so much BS in that so-called article that I scarcely know where to begin.

..two thrusters fired briefly in a last-ditch effort to regain control. The yaw thrusters are nomally firing at this point in the re-entry, because there is not enough air, and the shuttle is in a too high a pitch attitude to make the rudder/speedbrake functional. The thrusters are the only means of yaw control at this point.

The extra data was retrieved from a little-known form of communication on space shuttles. In addition to having communication gear that sends its signals earthward, shuttles have an antenna that points up. These signals are received by Tracking Data and Relay System Satellites, which relay signals from lower orbiting satellites, and from space shuttles, back to the Earth. Little known only to NYT reporters. And there are four S-band PM Quad antennas, and two S-Band FM hemi antennas, as well as the UHF antennas. No matter what the orientiation of the shuttle, the GPCs select which antennae should be used.

The computers are not like the black box used in general aviation, and do not even have hard drives to store information...."investigators held out little hope of extracting additional information." Obviously, this so-called reporter has not been to space camp. The main memory in the GPC's is core memory, and the "hard drives" are the Mass Memory Units which store their data on magnetic tape. Both of these are non-volatile if they survived the re-entry and didn't suffer too much heat.

Each of the computers, which are made by IBM, is 7.62 inches high, 10.2 inches wide and 19.55 inches long. Each weighs 57 pounds. Now there's some really useful information. What a jerk.

[brityank]

Each of the computers, which are made by IBM, is 7.62 inches high, 10.2 inches wide and 19.55 inches long. Each weighs 57 pounds. Now there's some really useful information. What a jerk.

Hey; if he can't baffle you with his brilliance, at least he'll try to baffle you with his bullsh_t! LOL

[Arkinsaw]

There are a number of video shots which showed that the ship (over Arizona) had already slewed almost 90-degrees sidewise

Flare off the camera lens, nothing more.

[eno_]

At 200k feet, aerodynamic forces are a tiny fraction of what they are at sea level, or even at 40k feet. The Shuttle could have been sideways for a fairly long time. If that is the case, it may be being kept quiet because the crew would have certainly known things were very badly wrong.

[Budge]

Thanks for the ping, by.

[Question_Assumptions]

These scraps of flight information, gleaned from data received in the 32 seconds after mission control lost radio contact, suggest that the Columbia astronauts might have had time to develop a sense of the shuttle's plight.

If you've actually heard the last transmission from Columbia, it sounds pretty clear to me that they knew something was wrong. When they mention the tire pressure problem, the pause and uncertainty in the response, before it gets cut off, sounded to me like it came from someone who knew something was going wrong. This is similar to the Challenge accident, where you can hear the microphone get keyed and the initial pop of the explosion because their panel indicated the engines were overheating and shutting down and they were about to call down to ask what was wrong. In both cases, the crews could see that something was wrong but everything played out too quickly for them to do anything about it.

[John Jamieson]

It was all over by then. The last gasps of a dying ship.

[XBob]

22 - "The main memory in the GPC's is core memory, and the "hard drives" are the Mass Memory Units which store their data on magnetic tape. Both of these are non-volatile if they survived the re-entry and didn't suffer too much heat. "

---

The original computers were core memory computers circa 1953 design.

We replaced these in about 1990-92 time frame, by new electronic computers, similar in design and capability to the 1983 286 chip computers.

[XBob]

thanks for the bump.

I think the firing of the right rear RCS OMS (1 second before LOS) was a last effort, not usual, as the front left FRCS rockets and max elevons (2 seconds before LOS) were still not correcting the attitued enough.

I think LOS was casued when the attitude control was lost, even with maximum control capabilites working.

I do think this was the last emergency attitude recovery attempt. She had nothing more to give.

[Paul Ross]

That is my hunch, in view of how they treated the Challenger data. However, while the aero forces may have been far less than at sealevel, they were not insignificant at 40 miles up...at those speeds (12,000+ mph). There has to be a lot of frictional 'pressure' for the atmosphere to superheat to a plasma far above the surface temperature of the sun.

The loss of the stabilizer of course would have been all she wrote. Even as it was, if the fuselage's overall control system integrity had been maintained, with the drag forces encountered, I wonder if they were looking at a real possibility of landing far, far short of Kennedy Space Center...

[cinFLA]

The loss of the stabilizer of course would have been all she wrote. Even as it was, if the fuselage's overall control system integrity had been maintained, with the drag forces encountered, I wonder if they were looking at a real possibility of landing far, far short of Kennedy Space Center...

One of the early lessons in our X- supersonic testing was the need for a large vertical stabilizer; larger than initially thought.