While I was at tea (or more accurately, pizza) after my earlier flurry of keystrokes, I received a call from Jim Bennett. Some of you know him from “Anglosphere”. I known him from his AMROC and Starstruck launch company ventures. The pizza got cold but the ideas flowing back and forth over the phone line should have been enough to reheat it.
First of all, Jim came up with one more question which needs to be dealt with.
If the engineers saw the insulation hitting the wing, couldn’t they have called for an RTLS (Return To Landing Site) or TAL (Trans Atlantic) abort? No. The material was not easily seen. It was later that it was noticed and at least two days before it was analyzed. An abort would have had to occur almost instantly. Even if we assume someone could have monitored, realized implications and reported it as it happened, we are left with a stark choice. We don’t know if it is a Category 1 problem and the shuttle has never flown an RTLS or TAL outside of a computer simulator. I won’t go into great detail on the maneuvers required. Lets just say they are “interesting”.
As we talked, it struck me there was a possible scenario if a shuttle could be gotten up quickly. Those old rescue balls must surely be in storage somewhere. A second shuttle with a skeleton rescue crew could send one man across to stuff the plastic balls in the outer airlock. Then they could cycle the crew through one at a time and have them carted across. I still had strong doubts a shuttle could be programmed for the weight and balance and particulars of the rendezvous in less than 6 weeks unless NASA took serious risks. (If there is anyone at KSC or HMSFC out there willing to put a hand up, please correct me). Then Jim came up with the idea. Some of the new commercial ELV’s are more easily programmable. All you really need to get up there is probably O2 for breathing and CO2 scrubber cartridges. You could perhaps get some food and water as well, but I don’t believe they are as limiting.
I can only see one problem here. The Canadarm was not installed and there is not (to my knowledge) any sort of portable maneuvering unit on board a flight that only has an EVA suit for the contingency of payload bay doors not closing properly. So the one astronaut in the one EVA suit is going to have to bet his life on a jumping for it. If he hasn’t enough tether, he’ll have to free jump. That’s an all or nothing, life or death bet.
Then they have to survive.
The shuttle is in a low orbit, it would probably re-enter in much less than 6 weeks unless measures were taken to reboost. They could do a small OMS burn since their goal is not re-entry. They might even have enough margin to do it without cutting into the fuel for re-entry.
Then they power every thing down; sit as quietly as they can; talk to friends and relatives on the ground and try to stay alive for 6 weeks or more. It would be simply awful, and I imagine the – how to put this delicately – “scent” would be somewhat like a sewage treatment plant in the summer sun. But they might be able to last.
Then bring the crew across in a combination of rescue balls and EVA suits. If a repair kit can be put together, the damage could be assessed and perhaps repaired. If it cannot, the shuttle can be set on autopilot to do a controlled self destruct re-entry; if repair is possible, a two person crew of pilot and commander could take the risk of bringing it back.
If all of this seems to be moving in the direction of large numbers of dice rolls falling your way… you are absolutely right. There are so many potential problems with the re-supply and rescue I’ve not even bothered listing them. But if there were no other way and we were sure of the consequences of the re-entry, I’m sure drastic measures would have seemed more reasonable than watching seven people die.
NOTE: Many thanks to Jim Bennett for the brainstorm upon which this post is based.
By the way: Here is Jim’s column about the shuttle and its’ replacements in National Review.
All this assumes that the damage would be diagnosed correctly. If NASA had gotten a clear view of the damage would they know exactly how much damage the tiles can take before they are fatally weakened? Three tiles missing? Ten? It may be even if they knew exactly what was wrong they still might have decided that the shuttle could land safely, or at least have a good chance of a safe landing.
It’s too late to save the crew of Columbia. But what Dale is doing here is suggesting contingencies that may become valuable on future missions. This will not be our last foray into space, so it’s critical that we continue to develop methods for making space travel safer.
Dale, great work on this tragedy. Your analyses have been spot-on, and I think you’ve done quite a bit to help people understand the space program better.
Thanks!
I’m at some point going to start a round up of the lessons learned and actions I feel should be taken, as well as some of the fallouts for commercial space. So you are right, I am leading into something.
A question. If the shuttle yawed to the left and the flight controls tried to correct it then why did the front mounted right hand side rocket boosters fire? Wouldn’t that just make the left yaw worse?
You had me right up to the bit about an unmanned self-destruct re-entry. If the thing is up there and can’t return due to damage why not leave it there and boost it to the ISS. I’m sure something useful could be done with it that’d be better than flaming scrap, even if only to be a source of fiddly bits.
Of course it also irks me that the ET’s are allowed to re-enter. After spending all that money to put stuff up only to cause it to fall seems egregiously wasteful.
There is only one direction that shuttle was going. Either uncontrolled re-entry and destruction; controlled re-entry and destruction, or controlled re-entry and landing. One way or another it is going DOWN in a matter of days or at most weeks.
Read my previous article to see why there is no other choice.
Yes, it’s a shame about the ET’s. But there is a reason. The insulation gradually disintegrates in the high UV of low earth orbit and flakes off. Every flake becomes a bullet looking for a target.
ET’s can be had, but you have to be able to show NASA how you will eliminate the orbital debris problem, ensure safe de-orbiting at end of life and keep a stable orbit during use.
In other words, if you can do so without placing lives and property and risk, you can buy one. Of course they are likely to be nit-picking anal bureaucrats about it, but that is another story.
There’s a comment from Ilan Ramon’s father in one of the British papers suggesting that NASA told the Ramon family that the crew knew something was wrong for about 60-90 seconds prior to disintegration. Is this true?
NASA’s been a little fuzzy about it, I think, saying that the Columbia made a number of attitude adjustments to compensate for increasing drag on the left wing, but that the compensations weren’t out of line with past orbiter landings. Considering that the orbiter seemed to be gradually coming apart from the California coast to Texas, I’m not sure I understand how the flight adjustments would have been within prior flight histories. Just wondering.
I’ve heard nothing that definitive and nothing confirmable or from reliable sources at all.
However from looking at the events on the time line, I expect the pilot and commander were at a very high pucker factor during the time frame you suggest. Ilan was an experienced fighter pilot and trained with them, so he would have known… but I don’t remember if he was on the upper deck. I doubt the lower deck had any inkling until the world went dark.
There is at least a chance the lived for some seconds after the wing loss as there appears to have been RCS activity trying and failing to counteract it. Not long though. I don’t think they could have had more than an eyeblink between being alive and healthy and being very dead. The only doubt we can have is exactly at what instant that eyeblink occured.
If nothing else, everyone on the upper deck would have known when the portside tire went red, and I expect they were getting a rough ride and the flight crew were noticing the unusual RCS activity.
Bit of info – here’s the seating at landing:
LANDING……….ASTRONAUT………SEAT
Commander……..Husband………..Up: Front left
Pilot…………McCool…………Up: Front right
MS1…………..Brown………….Down
MS2…………..Chawla…………Up: Aft center
MS3…………..Anderson……….Down
MS4…………..Clark………….Up: Aft right
PS1…………..Ramon………….Down
All of this speculation about rescue is fascinating and, as another poster put it, good for future contigency plans. However, I think everyone should consider how unlikely it would be for NASA to have considered any of these last ditch rescue attempts unless there was a way to inspect the shuttle underside and the observed damage was so gross as to make a survivable reentry unambigously impossible. Now that the accident has occurred, I suspect that for any future shuttle mission there will be a way to inspect the shuttle underside from the cabin, that the threshold for what is considered allowable damage will be considerably less and that a new mission rule will require that a rescue shuttle be ready on the pad during any mission.