If the shuttle was in orbit, and knew there was a serious problem with it and there was a real potential it wouldn’t make it through re-entry, what would happen? How long could it stay in orbit (food, water, power)? Could the shuttle dock with ISS so the crew would have a place to stay? If the problem was that a whole bunch of tiles were missing, could they fix them in orbit or would the shuttle just be abandoned and the crew rescued one way or another?
How do they know what the condition of the tiles are on the underside of the orbiter? Does a ground based telescope take a picture of it after its in orbit?
Seriously, though. I’m pretty sure they’d have a couple month of reserves. If the problem you mentionned only affected re-entry and not the normal functioning of the shuttle, I’m certain the whizzes at control would figure out a way to couple the shuttle with the ISS to allow the transfer of the astronauts.
To dock with the ISS the shuttle has to have been launched into the right orbit to begin with. The Shuttle doesn’t have enough delta V capacity in orbit to make a very large orbital plane change. So unless it’s a shuttle mission launched to the ststion in the firts place, (which most of them were but this one wasn’t), they can’t reach it.
There’s really nothing they could have done if they knew there was a problem and couldn’t fix it in orbit. Maybe they could have held out in orbit long enough for a rescue mission to be launched, from NASA or the russians, but it’s unlikely.
Ok…when I made my first comment, I had no idea of what had happened to the shuttle Columbia today. I might have come off as a real asshole. Just clarifying…
When Apollo 12 was hit by lightning on launch, there was a concern that the parachutes on the Command Module would not open on the final phase of re-entry. This was discovered before they left Earth orbit for the Moon. They decided to let the flight continue, since the crew would be just as dead if they re-entered right away.
I wonder if Columbia could’ve made it to an emergency landing site if they had aborted the launch at that point.
When Apollo 12 was struck by lightning, there was concern that the parachutes of the Command Module wouldn’t open in the final phase of reentry. This was discovered in Earth orbit, before they left for the Moon. It was decided to continue the flight, since the crew would have been just as dead if they began reentry immediately. Turns out, everything worked fine.
There are reports that Columbia had damage during launch. I wonder if they could have aborted to an emergency landing site at that point. Would’ve been a quick decision.
This seems correct. Columbia was basically on its own. It could not reach the ISS. If the problem was in the Columbia’s (damaged) wing, I’m guessing it will be revealed that there was no materials to repair it in orbit, much less the proper facility. Moreover, a space walk without the robotic arm would have been dangerous. SS Atlantis probably couldn’t be emergency launched for many, many days. There is no escape pod of any kind, nor any parachute of the Apollo years. My own IMHO guess is that a lot of heat will be put on senior NASA engineers for concluding that the orbiter had not been significantly damaged after liftoff. In the end, however, the crew may have had no choice but to risk deorbiting. Completely IMHO, of course.
I was VERY surprised today to hear the NASA shuttle program director on TV today say “there’s zero they can do to fix missing tiles”.
The reason I’m surprised is that I’m sitting here looking at a picture in a book of an astronaut in training for repairing tiles while in space. This book is a touristy/souvenir type picture book titled “Space Shuttle” by Robin Kerrod, copyright 1984. This picture’s caption says:
“Tile damage in a critical area may occur. So, NASA has prepared a tile repair kit which astronauts can use to repair the heat shield in orbit. Here it is being demostrated by astronaut William Lenoir at the Johnson Space Center in Houston”. The pic shows an astronaut with a sort of giant pressurized caulking gun that’s filling whole tile voids with red goop.
As someone said, every tile has a unique size for a perfect fit, so a semi-liquid repair kit would be the only reasonable repair method.
My point is that they’ve feared this problem for decades and tried to find a solution. Obviously, this particular repair solution wasn’t good enough to continue using it. I’m just surprised that after almost 20 years, they’re still fighting the same tile damage/replacement problem and they still don’t have a workable solution.
I don’t intend this as criticism against NASA. I’m a big fan of the space shuttle program. I’m very saddened by the loss and my prayers are with all the families.
If anyone’s interested, here’s a reference site on the various schemes thought up over the years to rescue a stranded spacecraft crew-a couple of them involved what might be called “orbit skydiving.” Yow.
Back to the hypothetical situation, though…Space Shuttle, in orbit, discovers a problem they can’t repair that would prevent them from returning safely to Earth, but everything else works fine…
Well, for one thing, the Russians could send up a Soyuz to rendevous with the shuttle, assuming they have one near ready to launch, possibly even using guidance from the ground. So assuming that reentry could either be remotely controlled, or that ground control could give the stranded astronauts a crash course in Soyuz piloting…that’s at least three people they could get down. I don’t know if the shuttles still carry the old “Rescue Ball” system, but if they do, each of those babies has 1-hour of life support. I don’t know if you’d want to cram a bunch of those in an already manned Soyuz, though.
I think that rescue scenarios are so far down the chart as to be very improbable.
First, you’d have to know a problem existed. Then, the problem would need to be fixable on orbit. Then, you retrain the next Commander and Pilot that was scheduled to go up as the rescuers, leaving behind the payload specialists to have empty seats. Then, you launch and pray your accelerated preparations don’t kill the rescue crew. Rescue crew, at the very least, evacuates damaged shuttle crew into vacant seats in the rescue shuttle, or fixes damaged shuttle back to flight status.
That’s a lot of things piled on top of one another. NASA is capable, but there are things that you can’t fix on orbit right now. If we had funded the space stations that NASA wanted much earlier, I bet we could have had some real shuttle service capability in orbit by now.
Doesn’t NASA train for orbital rescue missions?! After close calls like Apollo 13 I would figure they would try to stave off the impossible/impractical aspects of it as much as possible.
How many Soyuz capsules does the ISS have on it at any given time? Because it seems as though they could take steps to try to avert another disaster by using the ISS as a ‘rescue station’ by sending a soyuz to dock with the stricken shuttle and pick up survivors. Although I’m sure thats far more complicated than it seems.
It seems like for all our efforts for safety in space travel, there are still a lot of things that we are woefully unprepared to deal with. This seems really frustrating to me and makes me really question the future practicality of space travel as it seems several orders of magnitude more hazardous than conventional means of travel.
Incubus - part of the problem is just the magnitude of the task, given any particular rescue scenario. I can’t imagine being able to have a contingency ready for any possibility that may come up during a mission in order to effect a rescue.
Between keeping a second set of boosters, capsules - maybe even an orbiter - up, running, maintained and set to go and simply being able to get something going in time to save a doomed crew, I’m not sure any kind of rescue plan is really going to work. Given orbital mechanics, I’m not sure you’d be able to keep anything in orbit to be able to effect rescue either - unless it was launched right along with each spacecraft.
Then, of course, consider the speed at which any particular accident can happen. Given the extremes of structural loading, temperature and general environment involved in spaceflight, problems have a tendency to get extremely bad extremely quickly.
This is why the design of the systems has to take into account as many of the possible causes of failure as can be thought of. A big part of the solution is simply redundancy in the systems. Beyond that, training, maintenance and continual engineering checks and double checks are really the only viable and relatively cost effective solution.
The bottom line is that going in an out of the earth’s atmosphere is always going to be an extremely dangerous thing to do.
Personally, I think we’re always going to be in a mode of minimizing risk as much as is practical. I don’t see too many rescue scenarios being practical.
Imagine trying to rescue the crew and passengers on a jet, if they could not bail out or attempt any kind on landing. How much more difficult it must be to try that in space. I think NASA more or less gave up on in space rescues when the budget reached the point where they on longer planned to have two shuttles in space at any one time. If there were a more modern and economical alternative to the shuttle, NASA might be able to come up with some kind of rescue scenario. But using the existing shuttles, and with the budget they are given, they don’t seem to have much alternative short of having every flight in an orbit to link up with the ISS, and hoping the Russkies can launch enough Soyuz to get them down. What would happen then, if they had to abandon a damaged shuttle once they linked up to the ISS? Could they automatically jetison it, or launch it to a higher orbit? Could they just leave it there?
Perhaps when the MMU was in use, they could have repaired a few missing tiles, but the fact is there are just too many obstacles for a successful repair to occur. First of all, there is no way for an astronaut to reach the belly of the orbiter. Even if Columbia had had the Canadarm installed, it would not be able to reach the underside. The only other maneuvering system the astronauts have is SAFER, an emergency “jet-pack,” if you will. Could they have used this to reach the affected area? Maybe, but it’s unlikely. Also, once you leave the shelter of the payload bay, you’re completely exposed to the “elements”: heat, radiation, debris, micro-meteorites, etc… Finally, once you did get there, there would be nothing to attach to while you worked. This may not sound like that much of a problem, but believe me it is. Ed White found this out the hard way on Gemini 4, and was almost unable to make it back inside the capsule.
If it was determined immediately after launch that damage made re-entry impossible, it would be possible to initiate a TAL (Trans-Atlantic Landing) or RTLS (Return-to-Launch-Site) abort, or have the crew bailout, but only if absolutely necessary. The risks involved in these scenarios are incredible; for instance, IIRC, the chance of getting the crew back alive in a RTLS abort is only around 10%, so just about anything is preferable to this.
I really doubt it - the X-38 was meant to be just enough to get from the station to the ground. And getting from one orbit to another can take a lot of energy.
