1/28/86
Francis R. Scobee
Michael J. Smith
Ellison S. Onizuka
Judith A. Resnik
Ronald E. McNair
Christa McAuliffe
Gregory B. Jarvis
2/1/2003
Rick D. Husband
William C. McCool
Michael P. Anderson
Kalpana Chawla
David M. Brown
Laurel Clark
Ilan Ramon
This time of year is always a sad one for those of us who love space exploration.
Rest In Peace.
Should also point out that the anniversary of the Apollo 1 launch pad fire is January 27, just one day before the anniversary of the Challenger. So I’d propose to add Roger Chaffee, Ed White, and Gus Grissom to the RIP list.
I don’t remember Apollo 1, I was only 5 at the time.
Challenger - Minutes after the explosion I was watching it on a wall of TVs in a department store.
Columbia - I happened to have CNN on as they were waiting for the re-entry confirmation: which never came.
Very sad.
While I’m sad, I can’t help but also be angry about all three of these unnecessary tragedies.
For Challenger, I was about as physically close to the launch and aftermath as any human (I worked at CCAFS at the time, and was at the edge of the evac zone), watching in disbelief. Not disbelief that something bad had happened (I’d seen many rockets blow up), but disbelief that there wasn’t a Plan B.
After some recent discussion with my brother about Roger Boisjoly - the Thiokol engineer who vigorously opposed the Challenger launch but was ultimately overruled by management - my brother remarked that “NASA is amazing for their brilliance and stupidity.” It’s a pretty accurate assessment, I think: they’ve accomplished some mind-blowing things, but their failings have been almost equally profound. Their three most prominent tragedies don’t seem to be due to the inherent dangers of spaceflight, but instead were caused by an almost willful ignorance of the risks - risks that just didn’t need to be taken.
A TV documentary – I think it was the excellent When We Left Earth – discussed the Columbia’s tile damage situation at length. They followed the tense days of speculation leading to NASA’s conclusion that tile(s) probably hadn’t been knocked loose, because the foam strike wouldn’t do enough physical damage.
After the Columbia broke up on reentry, the NASA engineers are shown organizing a test in which actual heat shield tiles were mounted on a frame intended to simulate the bottom of the orbiter, and a piece of appropriately wet/cold foam was fired from some sort of cannon at the tiles. Supposedly this test accurately simulated the foam strike.
The test foam punched right through the tiles and the supporting framework, leaving a huge hole. The looks on the faces of the watching NASA staff was priceless.
Maybe a good time to have run this particular test might have been, you know, BEFORE reentry?
But what could they have done differently for Columbia? She was already in orbit without a repair kit.
There has been a lot of speculation about what might have been done if the problem had been discovered prior to re-entry. It’s possible there was no viable solution. But the point is NASA even didn’t try very hard to verify the existence of a problem.
I was in a graduate carbohydrate chemistry class when I heard about the Challenger explosion, and was waiting in line at the Post Office to mail a package when I realized that what CNN was airing on the TV in the Post Office lobby wasn’t pictures of a missile launch gone wrong, but a catastrophic Shuttle re-entry.
Farewell, brave space crews. You are still remembered and missed.
It was a day off when Challenger exploded. Watching the event live was the only time I ever heard the loudspeakers at the Cape say, “Challenger has exploded,” then the cameras switched to the bewildered faces of the astronaut’s families trying to comprehend what they had seen and heard. Every video since then has the audio muted and some of the video of bewildered faces deleted.
A few weeks after Columbia was lost I was in Texas as part of the recovery efforts. It was so bittersweet having been a spacenut as a kid, and making and firing Estes rockets as a teenager. It was difficult hearing the nightly reports during the recovery efforts of what had been found each day, especially when another body part had been located.
I have been reading a fantastic blog by Wayne Hale, who was a lower-level manager in the Space Shuttle program when the disaster occurred, and was promoted to manager of the entire program after the investigation. He has spent the past month making posts about the lead-up and aftermath to the disaster, including the time spent evaluating the risk to the Shuttle while it was still in orbit.
It is best to start with the oldest posts (scroll all the way down).
It is a tragedy- or a series of them. But these people died in pursuit of knowledge, in the furtherance of science, at the forefront of extending the collective middle finger of the human race towards the philosophies of fatalism and pessimism. They shouldn’t have died as they did, but what matters is that they lived as they did. Rest in Peace, brave ones. Rest in Glory.
I learnt of the Columbia break-up here on the SDMB.
O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dash’d all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish’d.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallow’d and
The fraughting souls within her.
Sad indeed, I suspect such pioneers would do the job without thought for fame and glory because that’s what they love and that is just the way they are but it doesn’t make them any less brave.
My wife and I were on vacation from the UK and in Florida at the time of the Colombia disaster. We had mooted getting up early and going to the cape for the landing but overslept and decided against it. Hence we watched it all unfold on TV that morning. An unsettling experience to be right in the centre of it all.
I was working for Eastern Airlines in Boston when Challenger exploded. At the time, Eastern had hourly shuttle service from Boston to New York. Someone came in and told us that the shuttle exploded and I said “which one?” I couldn’t even comprehend that it was the space shuttle.
Fucking hell, that’s well said. I think the SDMB’s found its resident speech writer, if it ever needs one.
(Poem #1162) Almighty Ruler of the All
Almighty ruler of the all
Whose power extends to great and small,
Who guides the stars with steadfast law,
Whose least creation fills with awe -
Oh grant Thy mercy and Thy grace
To those who venture into space.
– Robert A Heinlein
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board had some thoughts to offer on that.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Possible emergency procedures
The CAIB determined that a rescue mission, though risky, might have been possible provided NASA management had taken action soon enough.[48][49] They stated that had NASA management acted in time, two possible contingency procedures were available: a rescue mission by shuttle Atlantis, and an emergency spacewalk to attempt repairs to the left wing thermal protection.
Normally a rescue mission is not possible, due to the time required to prepare a shuttle for launch, and the limited consumables (power, water, air) of an orbiting shuttle. However, Atlantis was well along in processing for a planned March 1 launch on STS-114, and Columbia carried an unusually large quantity of consumables due to an Extended Duration Orbiter package. The CAIB determined that this would have allowed Columbia to stay in orbit until flight day 30 (February 15). NASA investigators determined that Atlantis processing could have been expedited with no skipped safety checks for a February 10 launch. Hence if nothing went wrong there was a five-day overlap for a possible rescue. As mission control could deorbit an empty shuttle but could not control the orbiter’s reentry and landing, it would likely have sent Columbia into the Pacific Ocean;[48] NASA later developed the Remote Control Orbiter system to permit mission control to land a shuttle. Docking at the International Space Station for use as a safe haven while awaiting rescue (or to use the Soyuz to systematically ferry the crew to safety) would have been impossible due to the different orbital inclination of both vehicles.
NASA investigators determined on-orbit repair by the shuttle astronauts was possible but risky, primarily due to the uncertain resiliency of the repair using available materials.[48][49] Columbia did not carry the Canadarm, or Remote Manipulator System, which would normally be used for camera inspection or transporting a spacewalking astronaut to the wing. Therefore an unusual emergency extra-vehicular activity (EVA) would have been required. While there was no astronaut EVA training for maneuvering to the wing, astronauts are always prepared for a similarly difficult emergency EVA to close the external tank umbilical doors located on the orbiter underside, which is necessary for reentry. Similar methods could have reached the shuttle left wing for inspection or repair.[48]
For the repair, the CAIB determined the astronauts would have to use tools and small pieces of titanium, or other metal, scavenged from the crew cabin. These metals would help protect the wing structure and would be held in place during re-entry by a water-filled bag that had turned into ice in the cold of space. The ice and metal would help restore wing leading edge geometry, preventing a turbulent airflow over the wing and therefore keeping heating and burn-through levels low enough for the crew to survive re-entry and bail out before landing. Since the NASA team could not verify that the repairs would survive even a modified re-entry, the rescue option had a considerably higher chance of bringing Columbia’s crew back alive.[48]
[/QUOTE]
Note that NASA not only didn’t ask for satellite imagery of the tiles, at a time when a rescue mission might have been possible, but intervened to prevent its own engineers from obtaining such imagery from the Department of Defense.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
In a risk-management scenario similar to the Challenger disaster, NASA management failed to recognize the relevance of engineering concerns for safety for imaging to inspect possible damage, and failed to respond to engineer requests about the status of astronaut inspection of the left wing. Engineers made three separate requests for Department of Defense (DOD) imaging of the shuttle in orbit to more precisely determine damage. While the images were not guaranteed to show the damage, the capability existed for imaging of sufficient resolution to provide meaningful examination. NASA management did not honor the requests and in some cases intervened to stop the DOD from assisting.[11]
[/QUOTE]