The network news here are utterly clueless. But then I’ve said that before. The reports were not totally without value, although I’d have gotten as much real information with the volume turned off. The various shots of the breakup were informative.
Many report a window rattling bang. This could be due to a number of reasons, but the one I find most likely is sonic booms. There usually are booms from the shuttle re-entry anyway and with the vehicle still travelling at the velocity it was at the time of breakup, I would be highly surprised if there were not severe booms from major structural elements tumbling in a supersonic flow.
I will not guarantee I am correct, but I have my doubts the RCS would have produced a loud enough explosion to be heard on the ground. The APU fuel supply might have, but I think that might even be marginal.
It is apparent from the films that one major structural element left the shuttle first, followed by the breakup of the rest of the vehicle a few seconds later. This is what would be expected from any of the three possible scnarios I discussed below.
Debris has rained down on Texas and apparently one major debris field is around Nagodoches. From what I have seen so far, the bits on the ground are light bits of composite. When you see black bits, those are likely from the underbody. None of the photos showed major structural elements. They have far more mass and will not decelerate as quickly, thus they will have travelled much farther. 12,500 mph is 2/3 of orbital velocity, so they were still deep in the re-entry. In particular, the Main engines and the crew compartment are likely to have travelled a very long distance before impact. Depending on the track at the time of breakup, they might have made it into the Gulf of Mexico. I really can’t guess how far a multon bungalow sized pressure vessel would take to decelerate from that velocity, or even if it could have held together.
This appears to have been an aerodynamically violent event beyond what most of us could imagine. I will guess they died instantly due to the very sudden very high G deceleration.
Best I can do with the very limited information I have so far…
MORE: Just back from stocking up on junk food for a long night. I forgot to mention one useful bit of information pointed out by an “expert” science journalist but not expanded upon. The contrail goes spiral after the first bit comes off. That almost clinches it in my mind. The first bit to break off had to be large from what the image shows: I would think it more likely a wing than the vertical stabilizer; the subsequent spiral looks like a violent roll to me, which is what a would expect after losing a wing.
Since, like Rand, I do not feel fatigue failure of the spar as highly likely, I’d say it is a burnthrough on the wing, possibly abetted by the insulation loss from the ET damaging the thermal protection system (TPS) on takeoff as reported earlier.
It would have been a simply hellish few seconds.
STILL MORE: As I think about it, the puffs of smoke and flashes one sees in the broken bits are most likely the volatiles cooking off. Also the boom would have occured well before the breakup even started if people got outside to watch it happening. I do not have an accurate time line on this yet. But if the booms were explosions, you would have seen bits coming off silently followed perhaps a minute of more later by a muffled boom. The shuttle is perhaps 50 miles away in those pictures you are seeing if it was 200K feet up and not directly overhead. Speed of sound is much, much less than that of light as I’m sure you are all aware but our media seems not to be.
Should NASA engineers have taken the lift-off damage more seriously? It looks like. But if what could have anyone really done? Could Columbia have docked with the space station and try to repair the ship? How long could 10 last on the space station?
Or alternately, could another Shuttle have been launched and the crew been evacuated if they realised the situation was serious? If the damage on launch was in fact the cause of this tragedy and it the shuttle was known to have serious structural damage, at the very least I think they would have delayed the landing to evaluate the situation. My first conclusion is that they therefore didn’t realise the seriousness of the situation (or that the disaster had some other cause).
I doubt any shuttle is close to readiness for an emergency launch; turnaround time is not insignificant.
I’m not one to pounce on the lack of perfect insight by NASA engineers. I want to see the process NASA took to evaluate the damage.
How long can a shuttle stay up with a crew of seven? Is food the limiting factor? (Are water and oxygen recycled?) If so, how much do they carry?
I heard at a NASA briefing that the three on the space station could stay up there until June. If that’s accurate, then 7 more could stay up there at least a few more weeks. They could all get down via the Souez(sp) attatched to the space station along with one or more Russian launches.
The Columbia could not reach the ISS. That would require a very “expensive” plane change maneuver. Columbia has the least capacity of any of the shuttles as it is the oldest one.
Or to put it more bluntly, there is no possible way they could have changed orbit to 50 some degrees needed for an ISS rendezvous; and it isn’t even that easy because you’ve got to do other orbit changes as well. Plane change; intercept (ie catch up or fall back to meet ISS) orbit; match orbit. Not a prayer.
They were at the tail end of an extended mission; they probably had contingency consumables for a few more days, probably could have survived up there for a week more or less. I don’t really have a good handle on how far they could stretch the O2, which would be the limiting factor.
No other shuttle is on the pad, shuttles can not be launched on a notice shorter than months; perhaps they could manage weeks if one was already stacked and on a transporter. The Russians would be the best bet, but I doubt they have anything on the pad or near enough, although that would be worth checking.
The only way they could have checked for certain would have been an unplaned EVA. I believe they always carry one EVA suit for contingencies like the payload bay doors failing to latch.
If they had known, they might have tried a different re-entry trajectory to minimize stress and heating, but… a very, very big but.
Dale, could they have made a rendezvous with the ISS if they had made the decision within the first few days of the mission?
I heard the boom this morning and from my limited experience, I thought it was a sonic boom, rather than an explosion (when I was growing up in East Texas we used to get sonic booms from military aircraft going to or from Barksdale AFB). I’m currently located in Denton, TX, which is approximately 30 miles from both Dallas and Fort Worth (Denton is the the tip of a triangle formed by the three). Given what little I’ve seen on the news today, I must have heard it right about the time it broke up. A friend’s mother, who lives near Big Sandy, TX (about 100 miles east of Dallas) described it as being more like an earthquake (i.e. more drawn out than the usual sharp shock of a sonic boom).
I THINK NASA REALLY DROPPED THE BALL ON THIS ONE. THEY SHOULD HAVE CHECKED THE WING SOMEHOW SOMEWAY, NOT JUST SAY “OH IT’S ONLY MINOR DAMAGE.IT DOESN’T POSE A PROBLEM” THAT’S A BUNCH OF CRAP. WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY THESE DAYS TO FIGURE OUTA WAYTO LOOK AT THE WING,DON’T JUST LET OUR GUYS BURN UP COMING HOME. THEY WERE UP THERE FOR 16 DAYS THATS LONG ENOUGH TO DETERMINE IF SOMETHING IS WRONG.LIKE I SAID NASA LET THOSE ASTRONAUTS AND ALL OF US DOWN, I AM REALLY DISAPPOINTED IN THE WAY NASA HANDLED THIS PROBLEM…
If the so called “experts” we hear about were really experts we would not have lost the shuttle and we would already know the whole truth. Let’s call them what some of them are: educated fools elevated to false levels by a stupid and compliant news media. Now we are told that pilot error is being considered even though serious damage to the left wing of Columbia is evident before the breakup. Does this make you sick or what? Clint Perner has it right. An EVA could have been done to evaluate the damage done to the left wing, I don’t know if I myself would like to see the damage to my shuttle that would kill me on reentry. My own thought is that NASA knew what was going on but denied it for many reasons.
The shuttle does not recycle oxygen or water. The water is produced in the fuel cells on board as a by-product of electricity production. Carbon dioxide is removed from the air by lithium hydroxide canisters which absorb it.
The shuttle could not reach the ISS. The ISS has an orbital inclination of 57 degrees to the equator and Columbia’s was 39 degrees. Using all its fuel the shuttle can only change its orbital plane by 3 degrees, not nearly enough.
The shuttle can stay on orbit for 30 days if an extra supply of liquid hydrogen and oxygen is taken. It only has so much RCS fuel to power its thrusters.
Lets face it, this space flight is dangerous business even with a good spaceship. The thermal tiles on Columbia are 95% space and the rest is silica coated with a thin layer of glass, they will break if you press hard on them with your finger. The debris which hit the leading edge of the left wing was going at 500 m.p.h. It may have been ice coated foam. For a weight of 5 pounds this debris had a kinetic energy of over 1300 foot-pounds. To get an idea of what this means take a 130 pound weight the size of a seat cushion and drop it from a height of 10 feet. This is the force that destroyed not only the debris but also shuttle tiles on impact. More than enough force to destroy many tiles and it (the debris) did get a good “grip” on the tiles when it hit.
The shuttle is an imperfect vehicle designed by imperfect people. We will hear lies as we did with Challenger. The problems that destroyed both Challenger and Columbia existed before they flew but were ignored by people with a can do attitude but not much else.
Check out the following URL for some nice photos of the Columbia crew before and on orbit:
http://www.mnsdesigns.com/sts-107/index.html
Those who ridicule NASA and space experts and call them fools, or say they should have seen this coming, are just showing their own stupidity. Face it, this is one of those unfortunate situations that nearly all people in and around the space agency did not expect would happen. It didn’t even cross most engineers and scientists minds. It is a situation similar to Sept. 11 that caught us all off guard.
Most of the comments on this page show enormous stupidity and ignorance about the realities of NASA and the space shuttle program.
IF THERE WAS A CHANCE TO RESUCE THE CREW OF THE COLUMBIA, VIA ATLANTIS LAUNCH. I BELIEVE IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN TAKEN, I AM SURE MOST ASTRONAUTS AT NASA WOULD LINE UP FOR SUCH A MISSION. ON A ABC SPECIAL WHICH AIRED 0N 7-7-2003, STORY MUSGRAVE SAID “WE MUST TAKE THE CHANCE” I AGREE. ON THE SAME PANEL ANOTHER FORMER ASTRONAUT WAS UNSURE, THIS SURPRISED ME! MANY ISSUSE MUST BE ADDRESSED IN CREW SAFETY AND ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF RETURNING TO EARTH MUST BE LOOKED AT TO GIVE FUTURE CREWS MORE CHANCES OF SURVIVAL IN AN ENDEAVOR THAT WILL NEVER BE WITHOUT RISK, GOD BLESS THEW SEVEN CREW MEMBERS AND THEIR FAMILIES. SINCERELY, CHARLES C LEONARD
IF THERE WAS A CHANCE TO RESUCE THE CREW OF THE COLUMBIA, VIA ATLANTIS LAUNCH. I BELIEVE IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN TAKEN, I AM SURE MOST ASTRONAUTS AT NASA WOULD LINE UP FOR SUCH A MISSION. ON A ABC SPECIAL WHICH AIRED 0N 7-7-2003, STORY MUSGRAVE SAID “WE MUST TAKE THE CHANCE” I AGREE. ON THE SAME PANEL ANOTHER FORMER ASTRONAUT WAS UNSURE, THIS SURPRISED ME! MANY ISSUSE MUST BE ADDRESSED IN CREW SAFETY AND ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF RETURNING TO EARTH MUST BE LOOKED AT TO GIVE FUTURE CREWS MORE CHANCES OF SURVIVAL IN AN ENDEAVOR THAT WILL NEVER BE WITHOUT RISK, GOD BLESS THEW SEVEN CREW MEMBERS AND THEIR FAMILIES. SINCERELY, CHARLES C LEONARD