Columbia

tacofangs

Today is the anniversary of the last flight of Space Shuttle Columbia. Challenger's date was just a few days ago.
I'm not sure why it's hitting me harder this year than previous, but it is.
Take a moment today to remember the extremely few people from this planet who have ever actually been to space. It's an amazing feat, and I can't properly express my admiration of them.

Here's to you STS-107.

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steamwright

Back in '92 a friend took me to Arlington Cemetery. At one point, I was in awe at being next to the USS Maine memorial, and the graves of the sailors around it. I don't remember why, but I glanced at the graves next to me. I think I was backing up to take a good photo. That's when I saw the names and my jaw went slack. It was the Challenger crew, those not buried in their home states. Very hallowed moment.

jonsills

patrickngo wrote: »

Shoddy decision making and ill-preparation killed the crew of the Columbia-they knew the shielding was damaged, but nobody even had an attempt at a plan to actually fix it, and there wasn't a backup ride to bring them home.

To be fair, there wasn't any way to repair the shielding once it was damaged; the equipment required would have virtually eliminated the ship's cargo capacity, which was the entire reason for its existence in the first place. And while the orbiter could technically have remained in orbit for some time, it had only been supplied for a short mission. (There I would blame cost-cutting; it was supposed to have been able to last at least two weeks in orbit at all times, thus giving at least a chance for another one to get up there, but the necessary provisions were no longer being loaded in as a matter of course.) So obviously the poor astronauts had no choice but to come back in and hope the ship survived.

Now, for another example of shoddy design threatening human life, we can look at Apollo 13, where the design of the fuel cells required that everything work perfectly every time. One stray spark and, well, we saw what happened. And it could easily have been so much worse...

sander233

My earliest memory was watching the Challenger blow up on TV as my mom cried. It had a huge impact on me - even though it was a tragedy, it inspired my fascination with space and aviation.

The Columbia disaster on the other hand, that shocked and angered me, because that's when I realized we were using quarter-century-old technology to engage in manned space flight... and we had nothing better in the works.

The real tragedy is that so far it seems those seven people have died in vain. The Columbia break up should have been the trigger for NASA to develop the next generation of reusable spacecraft. Instead, they got their funding slashed away and now they don't put anyone in space at all.

The Space Shuttle was designed in 1972 and remains the pinnacle of manned spaceflight technology. And there's still nothing getting off the drawing boards that in any way improves upon it. And that is a tragedy.

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centersolace

And what a way to round out an already bad day.

RIP.

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centersolace

Which is in and of itself depressing.

redsnake721

Sad thing is the russian soyuz could have been sent up to save them pretty quickly. The Russians can launch them left and right. With proper funding the Apollo program could have continued or been expanded and became a backup-utility-rescue vehicle for Nasa. The Russian reusable craft has been around since the 60's and they have refined it and improved it to a point now where it is a solid and extremely relaibale and cheap to oprate and maintain spacecraft. If ever we develope a new shuttle I hope they learn something from the past and build along side it a spacecraft like the Soyus so that if we ever need to get up there fast we can. I know the ISS has a Soyuz perma-docked for emergency use. To bad they could not have use it to get home. As always hindsight is 20/20

jonsills

Yeah, it's true that if Boeing ran its production lines the way NASA does, the 727 would have been discontinued the day the 737 lines cranked up, and by 1975 airlines would have only been able to land at fields that could handle 747s because that would have been the only aircraft platform, used for all air missions. It would have been smart to have kept a few of the old Gemini or Apollo lifters on hand, to lift a repair shop into orbit so that if something went wrong those rescue balloons (inflatable "lifeboats" on the shuttles, essentially one-man balloons one rode in if one didn't have a pressure suit) would have been more than a cruel joke.

Just before Robert Heinlein's death, Larry Niven wrote a short story called "The Return of William Proxmire", which you can read here. If only someone actually had built that time machine while Proxmire was still alive...

steamwright

sander233 wrote: »

My earliest memory was watching the Challenger blow up on TV as my mom cried. It had a huge impact on me - even though it was a tragedy, it inspired my fascination with space and aviation.

Yours is a darker counterpoint to my own first memory. My parents sat me down in front of the old television (of the kind that were the size of loveseats) to watch Neil Armstrong place the "one small step" on the moon. I remember the room being full of excited people, and being told something about how important it was to see this event. I was 2 at the time, and it left an impact on me, too.

moronwmachinegun

Personally, I was furious with NASA for the Columbia tragedy. I watched in the 5th grade as Challenger blew up on live TV with my science teacher. As an adult I read Feynman's book about his research into the accident, which basically boiled down to NASA's bureaucracy diminishing the risk of an anomaly that never should happen down to the point where it was Business as Usual. Burn through the first O-ring? It's OK, we still have the second O-ring...But the specifications for the SRB mandated 0 burn through - the first time the first O-ring was lost should have mandated a tiger team analysis and repair/redesign.

Same thing happened with Columbia - diminishing risk due to "prior experience" with an anomaly that should have raised red flags and grounded the fleet immediately. There had been prior ice/insulation strikes but because their magnitude had been "small" they were deemed an acceptable risk - but the airframe had not been designed for any strikes at all. Some blame the "power point filtering" as the problem bubbled upwards through NASA, which is a fair point as well.

On the rescue/repair front - in the Accident Review Board, NASA did propose a possible repair mission with the astronauts filling the hole with as much heavy metallic objects they could find, and holding them in place with a water bag that would freeze solid in space. It was a high-risk option, obviously, and the ARB suggested it would not have been taken due to that, but since there really wasn't a possibility of launching another spacecraft or modifying the orbit to reach the ISS, had they known they probably would have been stuck with it. IT isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, the reason the shuttle crashed wasn't because the airframe was torn apart through the hole, but rather that the superheated re-entry gases entered the airframe and melted the wing from the inside out. If the hole was plugged and the covering reasonably smooth, it's possible the re-entry gases could have been kept out of the wing long enough to let the shuttle get past max heating and make a landing.

tl;dr - Read this section of the ARB: http://spaceflightnow.com/columbia/report/rescue.html

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startrek1wars

@patrickngo:

NASA is working on getting us back to the moon:
http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/