Did the Columbia astronauts likely "know" or suffer?

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

[Mods: I'm hoping to keep this discussion as factually based as possible.]

Throughout all the investigation and conjecture over the Columbia tragedy, I don't remember anyone discuss this issue--certainly not NASA, whose objectivity might be seen as less than 100 percent in light of their official position that the *Challenger* astronauts did not survive the initial moments of that craft's fatal plunge toward Earth. (Subsequent accounts determined that at least some of the Challenger astronauts survived the craft's destruction and *may* have been alive when it collided with the ocean.)

What I do recall about Columbia is that the spaceshuttle was travelling at about 12,000 mph and at ~200,000 ft. in altitude. Telemetry and subsequent data recovery also determined that the crafted pitched and yawed wildly just before its breakup.

So, as best as we could surmise, would the crew have even *known* that their craft was truly doomed and, given the wind blast at 12,000 mph, would they have suffered for more than a second or two?

[Duckster]

See Columbia's Final Minutes The second-by-second account of the shuttle's last minutes

[Broomstick]

From my reading of that timeline, it looks like there were 2-3 minutes when the crew knew they were in deep doo-doo.

As soon as the shuttle did more than just minor course corrections, the guys up front would have know there was trouble. As soon as you get into major gyrations, everyone would know it.

Given the perils of re-entry, and everyone's memories of Challenger, they probably knew they were going to die for at least a brief while. I don't know about you, but being afraid for my life generates suffering in me. So I'd say, yes, there was certainly mental suffering.

Physical suffering? Aside from possible air sickness from wild mid-air movements and maybe some bruising, no. As soon as what was outside came inside the people were hit by a blast of superheated air several thousand degrees hot moving 18 times the speed of sound. That's as close to instantaneous death as you're likely to get.

[Northern Piper]

Here's the Master's comments on what happened to the crew of the Challenger.

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

From the above link:

"For the astronauts, the final sequence was mercifully brief, but no doubt terrifying."

[b]Broomstick,[/] perhaps my interpretation is bleaker than yours, but my inference is that the crew may have lived more than 2-3 seconds, possibly as long as 10+ seconds. I need to re-read the passage, but investigators suggest the cabin was intact, for at least awhile.

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

Originally Posted by Broomstick

From my reading of that timeline, it looks like there were 2-3 minutes when the crew knew they were in deep doo-doo.

.

From the link:

"Investigators concluded the module fell intact for 38 seconds after main vehicle breakup, plunging 60,000 feet to an altitude of 26 miles before it began to disintegrate from the combined effects of aerodynamic stress and extreme temperatures. From the debris analysis, investigators believe the module was probably destroyed over a 24-second period beginning at 9:00:58 a.m. During that period, the module fell another 35,000 feet, to an altitude of 19 miles or so.

Investigators believe the module began breaking up at the beginning of that window. If any of the astronauts were still alive at that point, death would have been instantaneous, the result of blunt force trauma, including hypersonic wind blast, and lack of oxygen. About 45 percent of the crew module was recovered near Hemphill, Texas, including pieces of the forward and aft main bulkheads, the frames from the forward cockpit windows, the crew airlock, and all of the hatches. About three-quarters of the flight deck instrument panels were found, along with 80 percent of the mid-deck floor panels and numerous parts from the crew's seats and attached safety equipment. From an analysis of pressure suit components and helmets, investigators concluded three astronauts had not yet donned their gloves when breakup began and one was not wearing his or her helmet. In the end, however, having sealed pressure suits would have made no difference."

On second thought, maybe not. Superheated plasma traveling at hypersonic speed would probably instantly blast through the tumbling Columbia. That said, remember what NASA said about the Challenger...

[Broomstick]

I took my 2-3 minute estimate starting from 8:58 (approximately) when, according to the timeline given:

Air Force Lt. Col. Pat Goodman, a CAIB investigator, speculated the sudden change in the shuttle's flying characteristics was caused by a major change in the wing's shape. "I believe you can make a case ... that the wing begins to collapse," Goodman said. But the crew still would not have noticed any dramatic change.

They did, however, notice the loss of tire pressure data. The computers triggered an alarm in the cockpit and displayed a message to alert Husband to possible problems with the landing gear. This was the crew's first notification of potential trouble. Husband called mission control, presumably to report the message -- "And, uh, Hou ... " but his transmission was cut off.

I think this is the point where at least some of the crew realized Something Was Wrong. Just how bad the crew was or wasn't aware their situation was will always be unknown, but this seems to be evidence that something was noticed. By 9:01 the crew module was believed destroyed. That's a 3 minute span, more or less. I assumed not everyone became aware of trouble at the same time, or died at the same time, hence my 2-3 minute range.

I don't believe anyone aboard suffered longer than three minutes, but it would be wrong to say they never suffered at all.

[Lissa]

A study done for the CAIB concluded the shuttle's heavily reinforced crew module and nose section broke away from the fuselage relatively intact, separating at the bulkhead that marks the dividing line between the cargo bay and the forward fuselage.

<snip>

But investigators were struck by the way the crew modules of both Challenger and Columbia broke away relatively intact. The survivability study concluded relatively modest design changes might enable future crews to survive long enough to bail out.

Bail out? How on God's green earth could this be even remotely possible? The ship was travelling at super-sonic speeds. Without a mechanism to slow the crew cabin, bailing out would be just as fatal as remaining inside.

How could you slow it? A parachute isn't possible, due to the speed and heat. An engine capable of doing so would be enormously heavy, adding substantially to the cost of a shuttle mission. (IIRC, at one point they said that carrying extra insulating tiles would be too much extra weight.)

I'm utterly ignorant of the physics of a situation like this, but just from my layman's point of view, it doesn't seem possible. Please elucidate if I'm incorrect.

[LSLGuy]

I doubt the CAIB was talking about bailiing out in the middle of the high speed part of reentry. They were merely suggesting that bailout would be more possible over a larger range of situations than had originally been considered in the design of the Shuttle, and so therefore some bailout provisions might be useful, not merely added weight and window dressing.

For example, during the Challenger mishap there were apparently at least a couple of minutes where the combo of speed, altitude, G-forces, etc. would have made bailout at least conceivable. The original Shuttle design had apparently assumed the cabin would shred pretty immediately with the rest of the airframe, precluding surviving long enough to initiate a bail out.

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

Originally Posted by Broomstick

I took my 2-3 minute estimate starting from 8:58 (approximately) when, according to the timeline given:

Good grief! I just noticed you said 2-3 MINUTES. I thought you were saying 2-3 seconds.

I think you're right but, given the investigation's findings, it seems almost impossible the entire crew wouldn't know something was amiss--something terribly serious. I don't know if the Space Shuttle has similar warning systems to airliners, but don't the latter have audible alarms for certain ensuing/impending catastrophic events.

Wouldn't it also seem probable to assume that, once Columbia departed its critical re-entry profile--at Mach 17, no less--the craft would almost instantaneously lose control, perhaps tumbling or spinning wildly?

Given how seconds can seem like minutes during catastrophic moments--and the Columbia crew's knowledge of Challenger--I can imagine the last 30 seconds of your estimated 2-3 minute time frame being filled with helpless terror.

[Ranchoth]

Originally Posted by Lissa

Bail out? How on God's green earth could this be even remotely possible? The ship was travelling at super-sonic speeds. Without a mechanism to slow the crew cabin, bailing out would be just as fatal as remaining inside.

It is, in fact, remotely possible to survive such a bailout. There have beem a few orbital bailout systems developed over the years, quite a few of them little more than an inflatable heat-shield attached to a backpack. Others, while still being far less than a vehicle proper, were a bit more substantial, and could house several crew memebers.

How practical using such a system on an existing shuttle would be is, of course, debateable. But it's at least somewhat possible.

[Hyperelastic]

Originally Posted by Lissa

Bail out? How on God's green earth could this be even remotely possible? The ship was travelling at super-sonic speeds. Without a mechanism to slow the crew cabin, bailing out would be just as fatal as remaining inside.

How could you slow it? A parachute isn't possible, due to the speed and heat. An engine capable of doing so would be enormously heavy, adding substantially to the cost of a shuttle mission. (IIRC, at one point they said that carrying extra insulating tiles would be too much extra weight.)

I'm utterly ignorant of the physics of a situation like this, but just from my layman's point of view, it doesn't seem possible. Please elucidate if I'm incorrect.

You wouldn't bail out in the sense of opening a hatch and jumping out - it would be a jettisonable crew compartment with a parachute. The old B-58 bomber had one, and I believe the F-111 did too.

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

Originally Posted by Hyperelastic

You wouldn't bail out in the sense of opening a hatch and jumping out - it would be a jettisonable crew compartment with a parachute. The old B-58 bomber had one, and I believe the F-111 did too.

In the Columbia scenario, there may not have been enough warning.

The problem with the B-58 bomber scenario is that the B-58 was traveling, what, maybe 700 mph at 50,000 feet?

Columbia was traveling about 12,500 mph at 200,000 feet.

I can't imagine any parachute being able to withstand those conditions.

[bbeaty]

Originally Posted by Carnac the Magnificent!

Good grief! I just noticed you said 2-3 MINUTES. I thought you were saying 2-3 seconds.

It was my understanding that shuttle crews don't wear helmets during reentry. But the news article above says this:

From an analysis of pressure suit components and helmets, investigators concluded three astronauts had not yet donned their gloves when breakup began, and one was not wearing his or her helmet. In the end, however, having sealed pressure suits would have made no difference.

So apparently nearly all of the crew had time to don helmets.

From reading that and earlier articles, I thought the wing broke off first, and the entire shuttle started spinning. Hard to ignore.

PS
For what it's worth, I had a quite horiffic dream about a group of tourists being incinerated in flowing lava one by one. In great detail. Each broke through a cold black crust and died within seconds, but with many seconds between. It was bad enough to wake me up, but not bad enough that I told anyone about it. And I *never* have nightmares (well, not that I remember, including over a couple years of keeping a dream-journal.) So what? 23 hours after the nightmare, the Columbia broke up. Aaaaaaaaaaarg!

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

Originally Posted by bbeaty

So apparently nearly all of the crew had time to don helmets.

From reading that and earlier articles, I thought the wing broke off first, and the entire shuttle started spinning. Hard to ignore.

Indeed, but deploying parachutes at 12,500 mph and at 200,000 feet?

There's almost nothing up that altitude to fill a chute and, at hypersonic speeds, the hypothesized emergency chute assembly would be trailing plasma behind it. Also, an escape vehicle would have to be similarly shielded as Columbia and achieve an almost instantaneous proper reentry slope to avoid disintegration. At that speed, there's no margin for error, it would seem.

[bbeaty]

Originally Posted by Carnac the Magnificent!

Indeed, but deploying parachutes at 12,500 mph and at 200,000 feet?

No, I was objecting to the idea that the crew never knew what hit them.

If the crew had time to don their suit helmets and gloves, they weren't obvlivious. The noise of the wing collapsing would probably be hard to miss.


From the comments in that article about the crew compartment, maybe they meant that a stronger structure and some secondary heat shielding could keep it intact for quite a while if the ship breaks up.

[Broomstick]

Originally Posted by Carnac the Magnificent!

Good grief! I just noticed you said 2-3 MINUTES. I thought you were saying 2-3 seconds.

And I didn't even yell at you for it, did I? I knew you'd mis-read that, which is why I re-explained it.

I think you're right but, given the investigation's findings, it seems almost impossible the entire crew wouldn't know something was amiss--something terribly serious. I don't know if the Space Shuttle has similar warning systems to airliners, but don't the latter have audible alarms for certain ensuing/impending catastrophic events.

Airplanes have alarms for things that AREN'T dire emergencies, too, which occassionally requires me to calm down a freaked out passenger and fly the airplane at the same time.

It's a WAG, but I'm going to assume that there are some beeps and buzzers that sound during a normal landing of the shuttle. Where a shuttle "passenger" would have an advantage over the typical airplane passenger is that a shuttle rider would, presumably, have spent some time in a simulator and be thoroughly briefed on normal operations.

I'm guessing that with the initial alarm regarding tire pressure problems it's only going to cause concern with the guy(s) doing the actual "flying" (which is mostly monitoring the machine at that point), and they're thinking "How are we going to land with a bad wheel?" not "Oh crap, we're toast". However, as more and more warnings appear concern would rise. Panic? Probably not - someone kept busy in an emergency usually doesn't panic. I think that's one of the reasons pilots are taught to keep trying things in an emergency.

Wouldn't it also seem probable to assume that, once Columbia departed its critical re-entry profile--at Mach 17, no less--the craft would almost instantaneously lose control, perhaps tumbling or spinning wildly?

Given how seconds can seem like minutes during catastrophic moments--and the Columbia crew's knowledge of Challenger--I can imagine the last 30 seconds of your estimated 2-3 minute time frame being filled with helpless terror.

It's been awhile since I studied the layout of the shuttle, but if I recall at least some of the people on board sit out of sight of the cockpit. They wouldn't know anything was wrong until the ship started to tumble - which it would as soon as significant portions of the wing were lost or warped out of aerodynamic shape. At which point there's no hiding the fact Something Bad Is Happening. That's when panic would set it in - if it did at all. It's also quite possible to go emotionally numb in such circumstances.

But yeah, time does seem to slow down in such dire emergencies. Even a minute of knowing you are going to die can be a horribly long interval.

[Carnac the Magnificent!]

Originally Posted by Broomstick

It's been awhile since I studied the layout of the shuttle, but if I recall at least some of the people on board sit out of sight of the cockpit. They wouldn't know anything was wrong until the ship started to tumble - which it would as soon as significant portions of the wing were lost or warped out of aerodynamic shape. At which point there's no hiding the fact Something Bad Is Happening. That's when panic would set it in - if it did at all. It's also quite possible to go emotionally numb in such circumstances.

But yeah, time does seem to slow down in such dire emergencies. Even a minute of knowing you are going to die can be a horribly long interval.

Then this question: Once the shuttle started tumbling/spinning/whatever, wouldn't the tremendous atmospheric forces/heat/blast have destroyed the crew cabin instantaneously, meaning no suffering? Can't we logically assume that?

[mhendo]

Originally Posted by Carnac the Magnificent!

Indeed, but deploying parachutes at 12,500 mph and at 200,000 feet?

There's almost nothing up that altitude to fill a chute and, at hypersonic speeds, the hypothesized emergency chute assembly would be trailing plasma behind it. Also, an escape vehicle would have to be similarly shielded as Columbia and achieve an almost instantaneous proper reentry slope to avoid disintegration. At that speed, there's no margin for error, it would seem.

But why would the chute have to be deployed immediately for an escape device like this to work?

Presumably, you could design a module that would separate from the rest of the shuttle, maybe even using small rockets to push itself away from the main body of debris. Then that module could free-fall, losing speed and altitude all the time, until it was low enough and slow enough to deploy a large chute.

I'm no aeronautical engineer or anything, but that at least seems plausible.

[Daylon]

Originally Posted by Carnac the Magnificent!

[Mods: I'm hoping to keep this discussion as factually based as possible.]

What I do recall about Columbia is that the spaceshuttle was travelling at about 12,000 mph and at ~200,000 ft. in altitude. Telemetry and subsequent data recovery also determined that the crafted pitched and yawed wildly just before its breakup.

So, as best as we could surmise, would the crew have even *known* that their craft was truly doomed and, given the wind blast at 12,000 mph, would they have suffered for more than a second or two?

12,000 miles an hour and untold thousand of degrees? I think when things went bad it pretty much went "poof" when the ship started tumbling.

I think they detected a heat problem in the wing, about 5 seconds later the wing failed, the shuttle tumbled at incredible speed, and the multiple hundreds of g forces mercifully and quickly ended their lives in a millisecond or so.

I'm no scientist or expert, just putting out my theory. I hope and pray that it was over for them in an instant.

D.

[bbeaty]

Originally Posted by Carnac the Magnificent!

Then this question: Once the shuttle started tumbling/spinning/whatever, wouldn't the tremendous atmospheric forces/heat/blast have destroyed the crew cabin instantaneously, meaning no suffering? Can't we logically assume that?

No, that's not what the articles say.


Also, WHAT tremendous atmospheric forces? If there were tremendous atmospheric forces, then EVERY astronaut would die on reentry, always.

During the hot part of reentry, the air is near vacuum. It's NOT like a hurricane. It's more like being hit with an extremely hot, silent, low-density blowtorch: a hot plasma beam. It can eventually vaporize solid objects, but it takes many seconds (minutes?) before the solid objects heat up enough. Ever try cooking somthing with a blowtorch? It takes forever, and the outside chars while the inside stays totally cold.

The wing wasn't torn off. Once the carbon insulation was breached, the wing was essentially cut off as the "blowtorch" slowly burned through the metal struts. I assume the same thing happened to the rest of the craft once it was no longer oriented correctly. Also, the extra friction caused by the wrong spacecraft orientation would make the shuttle descend faster than planned, so it might heat up more than normal.

As I understand it, the white "styrofoam" heat shield tiles are not designed to withstand reentry temperatures, only the heavy black tiles on the bottom of the shuttle and on the leading edges are designed for that. I assume that an incorrect shuttle orientation would be a Very Bad Thing, and the craft couldn't survive that way for very long.

http://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/tps.html
"Very high-temperature areas of the orbiter—the nose cap and wing leading edges—would use a reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) material originally developed by LTV for the Dyna-Soar program. The RCC would provide protection above 2,700 °F, yet it would keep the aluminum structure of the orbiter comfortably below its 350 °F maximum. Tiles were used for the entire underside of the vehicle and for most of the fuselage sides and vertical stabilizer. Black tiles could protect up to 2,300 °F, while white tiles protected up to 1,200 °F. Flexible reusable surface insulation (FRSI) protected areas not expected to exceed 750 °F."

Go read the second-by-second timeline in the URL posted in the second message above (from Broomstick.) It says nothing about a quick "poof" type of disaster.


Other articles state flat-out that the crew compartment survived the breakup, and that the g-forces during the breakup were not even large enough to cause injury, much less causing death. Those crew members without helmets would pass out rapidly from anoxia, but only one lacked a helmet.

And as I said before, it looks to me like the disaster took quite a while to unfold, since most of the crew had time to don their helmets and gloves. (Or do they all wear helmets during reentry now? I'd seen several news stories long ago that showed that they did not.)