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NASA Pioneers Testify on Shuttle Columbia Tragedy
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By Marcia Dunn
Associated Press
posted: 05:00 pm ET
24 April 2003
"Kinetic energy of a 2 1/2 or 3-pound hunk of foam when it’s traveling 700 feet per second, that’s high school physics, Thompson said.
the reinforced carbon-composite panels that line the leading edge of the shuttle wings were a technical challenge back in the 1970s and were **never meant to withstand a blow of any sort. **
http://space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_caib_030423.html
Thompson told reporters he was surprised that engineers concluded while Columbia was still in orbit that the piece of foam did not cause any severe damage and that the shuttle and its crew of seven would be safe coming home.
It isn’t “high school physics” to predict that the foam wasn’t going to come off at all, making its kinetic energy if it did anyway a moot point - that was just a bad engineering analysis/decision.
The analysis of the photos available while Columbia was still in orbit concluded that the foam had hit the wing bottom, well aft of the heat-sensitive leading edge, and in a glancing blow with low energy transmission into the tiles. That analysis was also flawed, based as it was on inadequate timely data.
Send up another Shuttle to rescue the Columbia astronauts. It could have, and should have, been done. We have the capability, with military satellites, to take good enough pictures to let us know within the first few days that Columbia’s wing was not safe. Jay Barbree says Columbia could have supported the astronauts at a low level of activity for around 28 days.
We had the time to make a rescue. We had the capability. NASA blew it.
“Basic high school physics.” Right… You repeatedly ignore that it appeared to strike well aft of the vulnerable leading edge, and was a glancing blow that transfers very little of its kinetic energy. It also glosses over the fact that the shuttles have lost large numbers of tiles before without any adverse effect (Columbia itself lost a couple hundred tiles on its first three missions alone, plus about as many damaged ones, and wasn’t hindered by it). This was an event that appeared to be the same as dozens of flights before it.
They’ve also tried using satelites to view the shuttle for damage before. It didn’t work. The resolution was way too low to determine anything more than “Yes, the wing is, indeed, there”. We also have photos taken from inside the Columbia that show no apparent damage along the leading edge of the wing.
If we sent up a rescue shuttle and abandoned the “damaged” one every time something indicates a possible problem but is evaluated as not being a significant risk, we’d have about 5 shuttles abandoned in orbit right now, and no shuttle flights for the past decade or two. Not to mention, an unplanned emergency rescue isn’t going to be a walk in the park, either.
And noting that nobody has discovered exactly why the shuttle was destroyed, maybe you should wait until you know what happened before roasting NASA for it?
Not likely. The latest and best-supported reconstruction of what happened is that the actual damaged part was small, either a T-seal or part of a carrier panel. That would have left a gap of aboput an inch in the wing leading edge - smaller than a single pixel on any likely telescope. Trying to spot a tiny dark gap on a black surface with a black background behind it from very far away won’t work well. Even an astronaut performing an EVA would have had trouble seeing it. If NASA had ordered a spy telescope inspection of the Shuttle, they would almost certanly have missed seeing the damage and would have concluded that the shuttle would land safely anyway.
NASA’s real mistake wasn’t in concluding that this particular flight would be fine after the foam hit. The mistake here was living with an engineering flaw (foam shedding from the external tank) that’s been causing damage to the thermal protection system on every flight since the shuttle started flying, assuming that it won’t endanger this flight because it never caused an accident in the past. That’s the same thinking that caused the Challenger disaster.
Someone is definitely missing some high school physics. The important factor is the difference in the speed between the foam and the tiles. If they are both traveling in the same direction at 700 MPH relative to the earth then there is no problem. The question is what was the relative difference in speed between the foam and the tiles. Not sure at what altitude the foam separated but the air was certainly less dense.
The other factor missing is how soft the foam is. It doesn’t HAVE to transfer its kinetic energy to the spacecraft - it can blow into dust, with the dust particles initially moving very fast, and being vaporized by the heat they shed through friction with the atmosphere.
I’m sure the engineering team understood kinetic energy very well. It’s just one tiny part of the analysis.
Lord, this thing has been flogged to death. The mistake NASA made was in assuming that the foam would never cause enough damage to put the shuttle at risk on re-entry. We’ve gone over this in thread after thread on these boards. NASA made a human error (i.e. we’ve done this hundreds of times before and not had a problem with it, so this time should be no different.), we’ve all done it, at one time or another in our lives. According to the piece I read in USA Today on it, the investigation board still isn’t willing to assign total blame to the foam.
IAC, there’s ZERO evidence that if a rescue mission had been attempted it would have succeeded. Indeed, we might have ended up with seven, just as dead, astronauts floating in space, instead of being returned to the cool, green hills of Earth.
I know I’m coming into the game way too late to ask the dumb question I’m about to ask, but:
Had the damage been detected ahead of time, was the shuttle in an orbit that would’ve allowed it to dock with the International Space Station? (And would docking have been possible without specialized, mission-specific docking hardware on board the Shuttle?) If worse came to worst, the I.S.S. has an emergency descent pod of some sort that can carry 2 people down through the atmosphere; and I’m sure astronauts can survive onboard the I.S.S. for a lot longer than they could survive on board the Space Shuttle.
Nope. The Columbia was a fat bird compared to the others and no docking hardware onboard, since she couldn’t link up with the ISS. I’m not even sure if she had enough fuel onboard to put her into a matching orbit with the ISS so that the astronauts could attempt a spacewalk.
Little nitpick. They didn’t assume that it would “never” cause enough damage, they went through a lot of analysis (2 days, IIRC) before deciding it wasn’t a notable problem. Still human error, though, yes. And, as should be done with all mistakes, they should learn from this. Hopefully.
Tracer, as for the ISS… As Tuckerfan noted, Columbia wasn’t equiped to dock with the ISS (I think it was the only shuttle that wasn’t), and they also did not have EVA suits, so they couldn’t leave the Shuttle. And I think they were in an -opposite- orbit, so they didn’t have nearly enough fuel to meet up with the ISS, even assuming they had the ability to move from the Shuttle to ISS.
I can’t be bothered to find any of the other threads that answer refer to this, but the answer to tracer is no. The orbits differed wildly in both height and velocity, and Columbia had only an airlock, nothing like the docking hardware req.
As for kinetic energy being easy, sure. How about figuring out how heavy the foam was, what it’s density was, what happens to it in a collision? (It was underestimated at first). How about the location, angle, etc of the impact? Whats the ability of the material where it hit to absorb that kind of collision? Does it fracture? Crack? Deform? Transfer load to some other place?
Gawd. The team “Monday morning armchair quarterback” is lit up in my head in neon. Some many small faults co-incided with some many unknown variables, and there weren’t clones of Heisenberg, Einstein and Hawking manning every post. Stuff happens. Some people learn, and some people harp on failure forever. If NASA “blew” anything, it’s 'cause it’s hard, not because you weren’t there.
Not satellites necessarily, or even optimally, but ground-based cameras exist that can do it, and have done so in the past with resolution that would certainly have been adequate. Such pictures have even been published before. NASA management decided not to request USAF to do so this time, although it was considered.
If Columbia’s inability to re-enter safely had been known in time, a rescue could have involved an accelerated launch schedule for Atlantis along with a minimum-oxygen-consumption routine for Columbia’s crew - yes there was barely time; Atlantis was already just a few weeks away from a scheduled launch. An EVA for each crew member, presumably along a jury-rigged tether, would have been required but could also have been done.
Perhaps the basic problem, one which Adm. Gehman’s team is studying, is organizational - NASA has, over the years, contracted nearly all shuttle operations to private contractors under pressure from the free-market-solves-all-problems ideologues, and the resulting cost-cutting may have gone so far that the human and financial resources to understand and address such seemingly-low-level problems may not be there anymore. But that’s the kind of stuff that kills, isn’t it?
It’s not only hard, it’s also unnecessary. We need the shuttle to build the space station, and we need the space station to give the shuttle something to do. The on-board experiments on the rare shuttle mission devoted to science are apparently pretty trivial, and hardly constitute a justification for continuing the program.
And above all, the shuttle is a shuttle. It’s not involved in exploration. It’s just a glorified bus through a dangerous but nearby neighborhood. So astronauts aren’t even dying in the quest to go where no man has gone before.
If we’re gonna go somewhere, let’s go. But the existing US manned space program is a joke, and dangerous to boot. Let’s dump it.