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I’ve thought of one other scenario to add to my initial list. Since the Shuttle was a spacehab mission, the payload is likely to have been well forward. If the payload tie downs to the longerons were to have broken during the reentry, the payload would have slammed into the back and the payload doors. The vehicle would then break up as in the other scenarios. I rate this idea as extremely unlikely but worth tossing out for the sake of completeness. February 1st, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Okay, I’ve got the timeline and I will strongly bet the booms were off the varous bits. Here is the evidence:
I think it is safe to assume there were numerous sonic booms due to the numerous bits of wreckage each having its’ own shock cone around it. February 1st, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
On this day, the space shuttle Columbia has been lost during re-entry. Rick Husband, Bill McCool, Mike Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, Dave Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon died in the breakup of the spaceship. May their souls rest in peace and guide those who work to carry on their dreams of the high frontier. For so long as humans fare the spaceways this time of the year will be labeled accursed and unlucky. February 1st, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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. February 1st, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have little information at present. The news over here has not cut in over the sports and soaps, but I have received a call and found a short story at Fox. Contact with the shuttle Columbia was lost during re-entry. Whatever you worship, pray. I would have little hope for good news and will soon be calling friends as there is no one around me here how would fully understand. Frontiers are not safe places and are not for the cowardly or the weak of heart. MORE: Channel 4 cut in for 60 seconds and showed the breakup film clip. That’s all. The media here isn’t worth the bandwidth it takes up. Here is my bet based on very little information, including this report:
I suggest there was damage to the TPS on one wing, causing a burn through and structural damage leading to failure of the wing structure when aerodynamic forces built. The shuttle has very high wing loading, so any loss of margin would be disastrous. If one wing fails, the shuttle will immediately roll violently into the direction of the failed wing followed by god only knows what sort of tumble. It would break up into major components almost immediately. That is what we saw on the clip. There would be very little fuel on board. Only some remnants of RCS fuel, a lot of hypergolics for the APU and perhaps a small left over from the reentry burn. Almost all off this is at the extreme rear in the two lumpy bits either side of the vertical stabilizer. A second scenario is catastrophic failure of the APU’s taking out all the hydraulics just when they are needed the most. With or without structural damage directly caused by such a failure, the shuttle will go into uncontrolled tumble and breakup. A third scenario is fatigue failure. I don’t feel this is likely, but if so we can kiss our manned space access goodbye. I give almost zero credence to ideas of terrorism being involved. Ten years ago predictions were for the loss of one more shuttle during the space station construction, just by pure probability (“If it’s not one damn thing, it’s another”). We all prayed we’d continue winning on the dice toss but ultimately knew we’d roll snake eyes. The only hope is for the crew compartment to remain intact and presurized. If it did, if it was through the re-entry interface and if it was not in a high speed (high G) tumble, a bail out by one or two of the crew at lower altitude is concievable… but unlikely. I have very, very little hope of survivors. But miracles do happen so keep praying. They need all the help they can get. MORE: I’ve found that Rand Simberg is on the road and racing home to blog on this. He’ll be worth listening to as he worked on the Shuttles at Palmdale when they were built. MORE: Chatted with Rand. He’s in SF, not going home until tonight (his time). We agree on the most likely scenario and ordering of failure modes. He blogged it before we talked. Great minds think alike. February 1st, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Australian Herald Sun reports there was more found in Finsbury Mosque than items you’d find in the average American woman’s purse:
No wonder Tony Blair has been snapping at reporters and back-benchers lately… February 1st, 2003 | Comments are closed
The BBC on-line has an interesting article called never ending computer games about using vastly improved Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to avoid linear pre-scripted games. Of course this is vastly harder to actually pull off than some people seem to think and in some ways a degree of control over events is essential to maintain an interesting and coherent story line. Nevertheless, any giants leaps in A.I. has to be welcome as it may well lead to entirely new ways of ‘writing’ fiction, relying less on a movie-like approach of pre-scripted actions, but instead driving a story with a series of looser ‘objectives’ which can be solved in many ways, some of which might not have even occurred to the games writer, which is both a potential joy and a source of potential problems… imagine a Lord of The Rings Game:
The games designer had better be on the look-out for possible ‘elegant story killer’ endings! A.I. characters would be ‘accented’, given objectives of their own and then populated around the game in certain contexts, at which point if the A.I. is good enough, the discreet A.I. ‘players’ will take act and react dynamically to event driven ‘reality’ so well that games would be vastly less predictable. It would however require a very different set of ‘rules’ compared to all forms of current fiction, making games more like a high tech form of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’, which is to say an interactive and much looser sort of fiction. Unlike D&D however, the games designer has to balance the game ahead of time rather than on-the-fly. This means good games design will be at a huge premium given that powerful new A.I. technologies will give us whole new ways to make totally crap games as well as transcendently good ones. February 1st, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is a hallmark of all sinister government programmes that they are never advertised in advance as being sinister. Some might argue that this kind of deception is only to be expected, given the old ‘gently-boiling-frog’ theory. My own view is that the architects of these schemes genuinely don’t see them as the slightest bit sinister. In fact, quite the opposite. For example, I have no doubt that the Whitehall mandarins behind this proposal regard it as a laudable exercise in sound administration:
A modern ‘domesday book’ listing who has got what and how much of it; a one-stop reference resource that will prove indispensable to the next generation of public sector wealth-grabbers. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is just another sterile technocratic exercise formulated for the purpose of providing lots of bureaucrats with years-worth of statistic fiddling, an exercise which they appear to love for its own sake. I certainly hope so but I can’t seem to get the word ‘sinister’ out of my mind, especially when the proposal is expressed in terms like this:
Management-speak or polite euphamism? February 1st, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
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