I want to withdraw my rant in the OP. It was written while I was upset, which is a recipe for trouble.
After watching the very open and honest briefings on the day of the accident, I was distressed to hear meaningless blather from Administrator O’Keefe the following day. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the spinning had begun, and the openness and honesty demonstrated on that first day were over.
After all, I think back to the Challenger accident. NASA apparently was well aware that an O-ring was likely to blame from the first days of the investigation, but they withdrew into their shell, taking over four months to convey this info to the public.
However, I have to hand it to NASA this time around. Shuttle program director Ron Dittemore has not vanished, and continues to keep us updated on what they have found to date. I hope they keep this up.
Does anyone know for sure that theydon’t always have that cute little EVA rocket suit with them? If not, why not? Does it really take up so much space?
It seems that having some ability to inspect the craft would be incredibly useful, in that if they find something wrong, even if it’s something they are totally unable to repair, they should be able to kick in some emergency backup plan involving cutting rations drastically so that they could survive long enough to rendezvous with either the ISS or a second shuttle.
It’s always going to be valuable to be able to gather information, so unless having the EVA suit available is borderline impossible on many flights, I don’t see why they wouldn’t bring it.
I believe the Columbia was too large to ever dock with the space station. FWIW the space station isn’t stationary, it too is moving/falling through space. No, the shuttles don’t have ‘air’ brakes.
Columbia can’t carry much high enough to the space station. It did carry crews there.
A shuttle doesn’t stop at the space station, but matches orbit with it. The speed in orbit must be lost to land and friction with the atmosphere in losing speed produces heat.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!! Actually, I misremembered a bit, it isn’t that it was bigger, it was heavier, the heaviest of the shuttles by 7000 pounds. Columbia became the ‘science’ shuttle, so it did not have docking apparatus on board.
Umm…no kidding, folks. I did not state the above–I was quoting (actually paraphrasing) another poster. It was in response to Brutus’s comment about wrong/stupid questions being asked about the accident. You did see the rolleyes smiley ( :rolleyes: ), right?
FWIW, the comment was made recently here on the SDMB.
–robby (former Physics instructor)
P.S. I’ve actually taught basic orbital mechanics in the past. Not only am I well aware that an object in (a given) orbit must be moving (at a specific speed), I fail to see how anyone could make it out of 8th grade science without understanding that objects in orbit must be in motion.
