Samizdata

The Washington Post reports that remains of all seven crew members have been found.

This will make it easier on the families. I hope they all get a missing man flyover.

I’ve noted a few interesting items as I’ve read through coverage this AM.

1. My first sighting of the media’s second stage reporting: when they start finger pointing and looking for a “whistleblower” or a “smoking gun”. Jackals need a carcass, and they will find one.
2. I was right about some debris making it into the Gulf of Mexico. Coast Guard cutters have been dispatched to search for locations where debris is supposed to have come down off shore.
3. There is an unconfirmed report of something coming off over California and someone suggested it might have been tiles. I’m a bit skeptical a tile would cause a trail visible at a distance of 70 miles or so. Meteor trails come from dust particles, but they are traveling many times faster.
4. The breakup occurred near the point of maximum temperature. It’s hard to imagine a worse time for it. Or perhaps a more likely one for the top scenario.
5. O’Keefe is immediately putting the investigation into an external investigation team’s hands, which is a wise move. During the days after the Challenger, some of the sleazier denizens of Capitol Hill tried to use it for political advantage. In particular I seem to remember Senator Fritz Hollings (D, Disney and sometimes NC) as one who particularly tried to use the 7 deaths to gain media attention for his own political ends.

I think I will be calling it a night very soon as it has now passed 3am here in Belfast and I am starting to hear my mattress’ siren call; “come to me”.

ONE MORE THING: If you can’t sleep and need reading material, you might find it interesting to relive the past. I believe all the discussions about the Challenger accident will be found in this 2.5 megabyte tar.gz file. Right click and download, Look for January 28th, 1986 and start reading from there.

You might even recognize a few names.

I’d have waited awhile, but the TV mediots are already trying to place the events of today into A Grand Context. They are speaking in sweeping generalization and grand predictions of Its Effect On America, The End Of The Space Station… and so forth.

Yes there will be some effects, but primarily this is a human tragedy. We’ve lost some brave people and many of us empathize with the great vision and are saddened by the loss.

But it is not going to cause any Earth shattering changes. It is not going to scar the national psyche. It is just a family funeral of loved ones in which we are all part of the extended family; those of us in the space community feel it perhaps more deeply than most but not nearly so much as their co-workers in Houston and Cape Canaveral or their families.

With all of that said, I can now plunge into the punditry.

The shuttles are going to be grounded for anything from months to a year. This will cause an enormous impact on the ISS scheduling. Completion will be thrown back by years. It is not only the loss of time while the fleet is grounded; it is the loss of capacity. Columbia was not much use for ISS missions and so it was useful for other non-ISS missions. Now those missions will have to be cut or serviced by the remaining fleet. That means a lengthening of the ISS completion time line. This can be somewhat ameliorated by giving the Russians a bundle of money to handle most of the supply trips.

We can’t abandon the ISS for a long period of time. It must be reboosted at regular intervals because the vast solar arrays give it a lot of drag. There is a small amount of gas even at that altitude. Enough to slowly bring it down. So there is no real option of abandoning it for a couple years. You can’t.

You also can’t risk bringing something that big into re-entry in one piece; and you can’t disassemble it without shuttle support.

So NASA must get the fleet flying again. President Bush has already said we will not abandon space. In the community, we all knew that. It’s simply too important now.

There will almost certainly be a push for a replacement vehicle. The shuttle is, after all, a 1975 base level of technology. It’s been upgraded and retro fitted, but even the newest shuttle, the Endeavour, is nearing 15 years old. The problems are budgetary and the inability of the “old aerospace” to perform on anything like a reasonable time and budget. I had actually much hoped NASA would work with the existing shuttles until the end of the decade, long enough to let the start up companies move in and revolutionize the field.

NASA will go to Boeing or Lockmart for a replacement. They are not going to talk to XCor or Armadillo or any of the other companies who will develop the true space ships.

What is my guess? I will suggest we’ll see a half hearted program for a shuttle replacement initiated. It will run over budget or be stillborn like every other such program in the last 15 years. The ISS schedule will stretch out to a completion date of 2010, almost 30 years after Ronald Reagan called for a space station to be completed in 10 years. An X-Prize space ship will fly suborbital this year or next year and there will be private tourists on private suborbital flights by 2006 and orbital by 2010. NASA will then buy one for crew turnaround. The Russians will get a big capital infusion to turn out more Soyez and Protons.

The world will keep turning and the sky will stay firmly in place.

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.

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.

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:

“On launch day, a piece of insulating foam on the external fuel tank came off during liftoff and was believed to have struck the left wing of the shuttle.”

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.