This is the tone of the article.

I personally would have told the Astronauts immediately and given them the chance to talk with their families.

- Columbia didn't have a robotic arm on board to view the damage, but I have heard reports that our 'KeyHole' satellites did see the damage and this is how NASA knew the chances of successful re-entry were slim to none.

- Columbia was in an orbit were it was impossible to change it to that of the ISS.

- No call for help went out from NASA to Russia, China, or any other 'space players' who could have sent up emergency supplies/O2; also I don't know how long it would have taken to retrofit an ICBM to carry supplies up.

Here is the article ... its very interesting ... well at least I think so:

http://tinyurl.com/acjp3hl

Jonathan

Really hard to believe it has been 10 years ago today.....gosh, how fast a decade goes by these days.


Earl

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This part is just plain silly. Nothing short of docking a Soyuz would have mattered. It wasn't technically feasible given Columbia's configuration and it would have "off-loaded" only three of seven people. Shenzhou would have been an even longer shot (it didn't fly with a man until 2005; didn't fly with mutiple people or demonstrate docking capability until much later). Configuring an "ICBM" in a few days? Yeah, right.

Remember - Columbia wouldn't have just run out of supplies - it would have lost power (no solar arrays on STS). There really wasn't anything anybody could do.....

Let me google and see what other space flights occurred during the 16 day Columbia mission; and remember that 16 figure ... I will get back to in a few lines...

let me state, I am not looking to argue with you or anyone personally ... I'm tired had a rough day at the office, and I am heading out for dinner, then to the vet in the morning. Just saying 'what if?' and not that it could have worked, but I am not to happy that NASA threw its hands in the air and did nothing...

OK, from this site: http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2003.html

We see that there was a Delta Launch while Columbia was in orbit:


2003 SPACE LAUNCH LOG

Date Vehicle ID Payload Mass Site* Orbit**
(kg)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan 6 Titan 23G G-4 Coriolis 815 V SLC4W LEO/P
Jan 13 Delta 7320-10C D294 ICESat 1000 V SLC2W LEO/S
CHIPSAt 85
Jan 16 STS/Columbia OV102 STS-107 175K KC LC39A LEO
REENTRY FAILURE Spacehab-RDM 8400
Jan 25 Pegasus-XL SORCE 300 CC L1011 LEO
"Zephyr"
Jan 30 Delta 7925-9.5 D295 GPS 2R-8 2032 CC SLC17B MTO
Feb 2 Soyuz-U 1676 Progress M47 7250 TB LC1 LEO
Feb 15 Ariane 44L L4116 Intelsat 907 4723 KO ELA2 GTO

Now comes that part about the 16 day mission. Humor me and hear me out...

Columbia was launched Jan 16th. Within 20 days of Columbia's launch, there were 3 missions that could have been reconfigured to possibly make it to the Shuttle and off load
supplies. Maybe not a full docking but could have been configured with door/latches/locks that could have been opened given the tools on board the Shuttle. Lines could have been used to bring supplies over into the air locks. I did some looking and I could neither confirm nor deny that Columbia had any space suits on board that would have allowed astronauts to leave Columbia and make their way over to the supply capsules.

Also I found that a rescue mission from Atlantis WAS possible: http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030523rescue/ So saying there was NOTHING that could have been done isn't totally accurate.

There were three vehicles that could have been reconfigured in a mater of a couple of weeks if not days and launched capable of reaching Columbia. As was pointed out in the spaceflightnow article, Atlantis could have been readied if NASA had either determined/or admitted to Columbia's damaged left wing.

Also, 16 days of life support, could have been extended many more days, if the Astronauts were informed and then started to come up with solutions as did the Apollo 13 crew ...
I am certain that with a reduction of activities, conservation of power, water, and life support systems, the crew could have extended their time another 3 -5 days.

Working around the clock and money NOT an option, we would all be surprised how quickly engineers, scientists and technicians can come up with solutions. And its not like there were no rockets on the pad just waiting, there were 3 and within a couple of weeks or days could have lifted SOMETHING, ANYTHING to Columbia.

Despite all the machinations I have typed above, the one thing that really turns my crank in a bad way is that NASA chose NOT to inform the crew when it KNEW there was a likelihood of the mission ending in failure!

These men and women we call Astronauts are PROFESSIONALS! They are not a bunch of drunken airline passengers flying from Phoenix to Vegas for gambling and sex shows! If they were informed of the situation they would have worked and POSSIBLY come up with solutions to get themselves home alive! This was denied them by the bureaucratic management/managers.

I would have allowed the Astronauts to at least say goodbye to their wives, their husbands, and their children ... but then I am a bit different than most people.

Jonathan

P.s. On the reconfiguration of Minuteman III or MX Missiles, who knows? If the mission could have been extended to 20 - 25 days, again working around the clock, engineers, techs, and scientists can do some pretty amazing things.

But you throw your hands up in the air and do nothing, expect nothing.

Jonathan

Just turned on PBS in time to see the Shuttle special...

The flight director knew ... just watching his body language ... he knew EXACTLY what was happening and had a tear running down his cheek before he even announced to lock the doors to mission control. His body language , his hand to face gestures he knew he knew ... he was briefed ahead of time ... as tire pressure indicators started falling off line ... you could see it in his face he knew he knew ....

Oh well, its just 7 lives; its just a $2 billion vehicle ... why bother digging up the past ... why get all excited over spilled milk ... can't put the milk back into the bottle ... we shouldn't expect more from NASA management then what we have received. So just shut up and enjoy the explosions and the fireballs!

Jonathan

I'm telling you - as a veteran of the space launch business for the USAF and National Reconnaissance Office - that the ICBM and expendable SLV "options" are garbage. You can pump your fist in righteous anger, shouting it's wrong not to try. I'm telling you that SLVs (and, to an even GREATER degree, ICBMs) don't inherently have the ability to go off and rendezvous with shuttle. The guidance algorithms just aren't there (but gosh - those super engineers could just crank it out the software if they had to.....). I did this for a living. I know what the vehicles can do. I managed a Pegasus mission (C/NOFS), I assisted on a Minotaur I mission (JAWSAT/Falconsat 1), and I worked NRO missions which I choose not to name (Atlas V, Delta IV, Titan IVB). Just set the ICBM/SLV option aside. Or at least MOST SLVs....

Soyuz U presents an interesting option, as it IS a redezvous vehicle. Atlantis was the most interesting option - made feasible by the fact it was already stacked. I'd say that one is the real tragedy - the only one with a realistic chance of success.

Interesting insights by Wayne Hale... Hadn't read those before...

I've read a LOT about Columbia and what went wrong. It was a 100% known and understood (and therefore in some respect avoidable) disaster. Shuttles had been coming back with varying levels of tile damage from foam strikes off the ET since the very first shuttle back in 1981. One came back with a hole burned through the aluminum skin under the lining that the tiles are glued to... ALL these warning signs were ignored, because they were relatively small problems requiring only tile repair (or the aluminum skin repair followed by liner repair and tile repair) and hadn't occurred in an area that could potentially destroy the spacecraft. SO, NASA turned a "blind eye" to the problem for decades and grew comfortable with it, as one of their "normal deviations" that they fooled themselves into believing posed "no threat". Until it did...

The vehicle had no realtime sensors monitoring the critical areas of the vehicle like the wing leading edges during ascent, and therefore could not detect the damage in realtime, so the vehicle could have aborted before accelerating to orbital velocity. If it had, Columbia's crew would most likely have survived. As it was, the ground camera ascent footage was the ONLY tool available to assess potential foam strikes and estimate their severity-- NASA didn't even have an ascent cameras on the vehicle filming the tiles and wing leading edges and the tank from the SRB's and such until AFTER COlumbia's loss. Such footage, in real time, would have shown the damage and its extent and could have been the basis to abort the mission in time for them to return to the landing site or do a transatlantic abort. (RTLS would have been much better from a a thermal point of view). With only the ascent ground camera photography to rely on, which wasn't even available for analysis by ground teams until a couple days into the flight, by which time they were in orbit at Mach 25 and the Columbia was doomed, though the crew still might have possibly been saved...

For the crew to be saved, management would have had to listen and act QUICKLY, and determine the level of damage and decide what to do next as far as a rescue was concerned. The engineering team assessing the orbiter foam strikes from ascent ground photography in fact asked for national security assets (spysats or the telescopes at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which had photographed the damage to Skylab after it's rough ascent in 1973 when it lost it's micrometeoroid shield and a solar panel and damaged it's Saturn V in the process) be used to photograph the orbiter to determine the level of damage, even going so far as to do some "back-door" requests outside the normal chain of command, which was rediculously slow in deciding even if the photography should be officially asked for. Instead, the requests got shuffled back and forth between the various offices having oversight of the problem and the shuttle managers having authority over the mission (particularly Linda Ham) who were at best ambivalent to asking for the photography, or outright opposed to it for whatever reason. By the time the proposed photography had wended it's way through the bureaucratic morass to even come to a decision, it was too late... the window had passed for the crew to go into a power-saving low-energy low-consumables use emergency mode to conserve power, propellant, oxygen, water, and food to "shelter in place" until NASA could come up with a rescue plan. Discovery (IIRC) was in processing for flight at the time and theoretically, if the preparations had been accelerated, with the Columbia in an emergency conservation mode from around day 2 of the flight, the CAIB determined COULD have possibly been launched to rendezvous with Columbia to transfer the crew off in suits. (they would have had to transfer suits from Discovery to Columbia, as Columbia only had two suits aboard IIRC). It was a longshot, but it was possible... Columbia was in completely the wrong orbit to get to ISS, period, and had NO docking gear aboard even if it were in an ISS-capable orbit, so using ISS as a lifeboat or safe haven was out. I don't think that the possibility of looking at an unmanned Soyuz launch to rendezvous with Columbia was even ever entertained... Soyuz can hold at most three, and Columbia had seven aboard, and Soyuz's capabilities are quite limited propulsively (plus, Soyuz probably couldn't even get to the Columbia's orbit, because Soyuz (launched from Kazahkstan cannot fly to an orbital inclination of less than 51.6 degrees due to its launch site location.

Repairs were also judged as a veritable impossibility. It's POSSIBLE that spacewalking astronauts COULD have detected the damage, and possibly gotten into proximity enough to attempt some sort of jury-rigged repairs. There were NO procedures for it, or even the materials necessary for "emergency repairs"... the only realistic possibilities that were available was the possibility of packing the damaged area with tools and materials on board the shuttle, and then injecting water into the void to freeze into ice and hopefully "lock it all in place". Since the establishment of the hypersonic shock wave which allows the shuttle to reenter safely depends heavily on the shape of the leading edge (the shockwave actually "trips" the airflow and keeps the hottest part of the air suspended a few centimeters above the actual leading edge surface, reducing the actual temperatures the materials are subjected to during reentry) it's very questionable if this would even work... it's entirely possible that the tools and junk inserted into the wing would simply have burned up or that turbulence in the shock wave caused by the damaged RCC panel would have melted them down and burned through the wing-- BUT, doing ANYTHING is preferable to doing NOTHING... A longshot is better than no shot... NASA experimented with "tile repairs" on orbit and found it to be basically a crapshoot at best, using pre-positioned materials designed for the purpose. An "improvised" solution would be that much worse off, but still preferable to doing nothing IMHO.

to be continued... OL JR

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Continued...

NASA managers (particularly Linda Ham) deliberately torpedoed ANY ideas about photography of the damage, even when the 'back channel' requests came back positive that the DOD was willing to do the photography. Apparently it "embarrassed" NASA to have it's employees ask for the photography through back channels and the offer from the DOD to do the photography was politely declined... Of course by that time, it was too late to go into an "emergency" mode anyway.

Instead, NASA management chose "willful ignorance" rather than actually get the data and see what it showed. This doomed any chances, regardless of how thin they might be. NASA instead CHOSE to "think happy thoughts" and pray the damage wasn't too bad, and deal with the consequences after they returned. NASA had "blinded itself" to the possibility that they might be facing an "Apollo 13" type situation, and simply proceed as planned rather than actually determine the status of the vehicle and develop plans to possibly address the issues. Whether this was what the CREW, whose lives were on the line and ultimately lost, would have chosen, we'll never know... they were kept in the dark... Just like John Glenn during his orbital mission, when a faulty heat-shield release "landing bag deploy" light came on during his flight, and the managers elected to overrule the existing flight operations plans and the flight director and ordered that his capsule reenter with the retropack still attached (which the engineers were unsure how that would affect the reentry-- it could have possibly created hot spots or turbulence that could burn through the heat shield in localized area, or damaged the heat shield when it partially melted and "blew off" during reentry, which could have breached the heat shield and destroyed an otherwise functional vehicle, had normal procedures been followed-- nobody knew for sure... (this incident led to changes in procedures which put the flight director as the ultimate authority on mission changes, unable to be overruled by ANYBODY else inside or above the program).

I suppose that somewhere, sometime, NASA had done the calculations of the impact of finding a crew marooned in orbit with a helpless spacecraft incapable of bringing them back alive... and probably had the cold calculus of plans of what they would do in such an event. This probably influenced the decisions of management NOT to obtain the photography or risk an emergency shuttle flight to attempt a rescue of Columbia's crew. Columbia herself was finished the moment she entered orbit with the damage she had. She would have been ditched in the Pacific via remote control, had the crew been successfully evacuated to another orbiter... It's very likely that NASA management, in making these decisions about whether to order the photography or not, looked at it as "worst case, what happens?? "

"What do we do if we get the photography back and it shows the orbiter cannot survive reentry... How do we actually determine that?? What level of damage is "too much" to survive, and what isn't?? How does WHERE the damage is affect this determination?? Say we photograph it and find out in fact the ship is doomed, what do we do then?? Inform the crew?? (Almost certainly, there would surely be a huge backlash if it were to come out later that NASA DID in fact "know" the ship was doomed and CHOSE NOT to inform the crew DELIBERATELY...) Do we attempt untried emergency repairs using only junk on board, with one astronaut holding the other one's ankles so he/she can attempt to reach the damaged area?? What are the probabilities of success?? What if they can't do it at all, and KNOW they're going to die?? What's going to be the fallout for the program of footage of weeping families conversing with their loved ones aboard the doomed ship before reentry?? What affect will that have on public opinion and the future of NASA and the space program??"

I'm sure that at least subconsciously these factors drove the decision making. After John Glenn's reentry problem, the decision was supposedly made that in the future, astronauts were to be kept "in the loop" and fully apprised of such dangerous situations and the potential ramifications of things done and not done... I guess at some point between early 1962 and early 2003, that decision was reversed or simply overlooked.

By burying it's collective head in the sand, NASA obsolved itself of a lot of worries and possible ramifications of failing in their attempts to rescue the crew... but they also willfully turned to 'blind luck' to determine if the crew lived or died instead of attempting an engineering solution, and didn't even involve the crew whose lives were being gambled with (and ultimately lost) in that decision... To me, that's unexcusable...

Later! OL JR

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YUP!, and I understand he's also the architect behind all those faked moon landings of the '70s.
It's a massive conspiracy I tells ya'!

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