A periodic re-boost of Columbia wouldn’t have been possible for a number of reasons—first and foremost, engineers would have had to come up with the procedure and hardware to do so. The idea of re-boosting a dead shuttle to maintain its orbit wasn’t something that had even been remotely studied; engineers would have needed to figure out some method of imparting delta-V to Columbia, be it from externally-attached boosters or via a harddock-n-nudge from another shuttle. (Which also is a procedure no one had ever conceived of studying.)
Cost would have been massive, and you have to balance cost versus gain. What possible purpose would it serve to keep re-boosting Columbia, and what gain would be worth the investment of time and money (at, as noted, $500M per launch as a starting cost)?
That’s all moot anyway, because Columbia’s fuel cells would have run dry of reactants (LH2 and LOX) after 30-ish days (it’s been a while and I don’t remember the exact length of time, but it wasn’t super long). The fuel cells can’t be replenished on-orbit—refilling their tanks could only be done on the ground in the OPF.
So, no, it wasn’t possible, desirable, or really even conceivable to keep Columbia up there.
This is covered in the article, but no. US shuttles were not designed with the ability to land autonomously—physical switch-throws were required to deploy the landing gear, extend the pitot tubes used by the in-atmosphere instruments, and to start the APU.
This changed after the Columbia incident with the design and introduction of the RCO IFM cable, an 8.5-meter multi-headed monster that had to be manually hauled out of storage and connected between the shuttle’s avionics bay and cockpit. With the RCO IFM cable in place, full autonomy was possible (though it was never used).
Isn’t there also the possibility that if they had left it unmanned and in orbit, someone else (presumably the Russians) could have helped themselves? Even if they couldn’t bring it back to Earth (and they are a lost less risk averse than NASA) they could have had a very good look at its tech.
Was there even anything in the Shuttle’s tech that we were worried about the Russians learning? I mean, they already knew enough to be able to build their own copy.
The reason the ISS is at such a honked up 51.6-degree orbital inclination is to make it possible to reach from Baikonur. STS-107 wasn’t an ISS rendezvous mission and so Columbia was at a 39-degree orbital inclination. A normal crewed Russian launch would have had to depart from Baikonur into a 50-ish degree inclination.
Launching from Baikonur with a dog-leg path to orbit (to gain an orbital inclination closer to the equator) is difficult and costs fuel—I don’t have the math or the google skills at the moment to find out how much, but it’s not practical. Launching at 51.6 and performing a plane change maneuver on-orbit to 39 degrees would require a tremendous amount of delta-V and fuel (plane change maneuvers can cost more fuel than it took to get to orbit in the first place!).
And even if they did, they’d run into the same problems approaching and keeping station with Columbia as the potential Atlantis rescue mission would have run into. There’d be no means to hard-dock or otherwise grapple in place, so they’d have to station-keep (and this is an active hands-on process, because the two spacecraft could only remain proximal through constant fine adjustment), then figure out a way to manually transfer themselves across, along with whatever gear they’d brought along to take pix/recordings with.
And that’s not even counting the possibility that NASA locked the keys in the orbiter. (Ha ha, I kid. You can’t actually lock yourself out of a space shuttle.)
There were massive amounts of export-controlled/ITAR stuff in the orbiters.
A few years ago I was visiting the NBL for this piece. When I do on-sites for NASA or other agencies, it’s customary to allow them to review all the photos we take in order to make sure we haven’t accidentally photographed anything that shouldn’t have been photographed (again, this is almost always ITAR or export control stuff). I had to agree not to use a whole bunch of pix from the Suit & Tool lab because NASA felt they likely would violate export control.
Ah, yes, I’d forgotten how silly ITAR regulations get. There’s nothing in the Shuttle orbiter’s tech that would actually matter if the Russians got it, but there are still people who care about it anyway.
I once saw a new method described for changing the orbital inclination of a satellite, at a lower fuel cost than the standard method. The new method involved sending the satellite out past the Moon as an intermediate step. Which should give a good idea for just how expensive inclination changes are.