Did the Columbia Astronauts have to die?

I wish there would have at least been an effort, they had to know that foam had done some kind of damage.

The possibility that a rescue mission could have been mounted changes some of the decision-making done back then "from being kind of a bureaucratic, administrative fumbling-bumbling to a much more serious life-and-death kind of a decision process," Gehman said.
"Now those kinds of benign administrative decisions which were taken now look more ominous, because now it looks like maybe there was something you could do," he said.

Shuttle Rescue Might Have Been Possible

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer
Space Shuttle Columbia
Special Coverage

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA could have launched another shuttle to rescue the Columbia astronauts if it had realized the severity of the wing damage early on and decided it was worth the extreme risk to the second ship and crew, the chief accident investigator said.
Retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, said Friday that the question was put to NASA earlier this month and that the space agency's preliminary findings indicate that such a rescue would have been technically feasible.
But he added: "I've got no idea if it would have been successful or not."
Gehman stressed that a rushed rescue mission by shuttle Atlantis and four of NASA's best and most seasoned astronauts would have been "very, very risky — but not impossible."
He said astronauts would have been "standing out in the hallways to volunteer."
In the days after the Feb. 1 tragedy, NASA managers insisted nothing could have been done to fix Columbia's wing and save its seven astronauts.
Earlier this week, however, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said he would have strongly considered sending Atlantis to the astronauts' rescue, even if it meant losing another shuttle and crew.
The investigation board asked NASA at the beginning of May to determine what emergency steps could have been taken if the space agency had known that a flying chunk of foam insulation had created a fatal breach in the ship's left wing during liftoff. NASA briefed the board on its findings Thursday.
Gehman acknowledged it would have been chancy to launch a shuttle on a rescue mission without first fixing the problem of foam breaking off.
But he pointed out that in the military, "we frequently launch 120 people to go save one."
"If you've got a pilot down behind enemy lines, we do everything and anything possible to go get that person," he said in a telephone conference with reporters. "It's kind of a contract we have with the people who go into harm's way.
"NASA and the nation have that same contract with astronauts, and it is my opinion, and from my personal background, that if there had been any erring, we would have erred on the side of taking the chance and going after them."
With drastic conservation measures, Columbia's 16-day flight could have been stretched to 30 days to give NASA time to mount the rescue mission, Gehman said.
Because Atlantis was about to be moved to the launch pad for a March 1 launch, it could have been ready to fly as early as Feb. 11 or 12, three or four days before Columbia's air purifiers would have run out, Gehman said.
Atlantis could have arrived at Columbia within 24 hours and flown in formation, 50 to 90 feet apart, with the open payload bays facing one another. Atlantis' astronauts then would have escorted their colleagues from Columbia in a series of four spacewalks, bringing them over mostly two at a time, Gehman said. Extra spacesuits would have been taken up by Atlantis.
As for Columbia, the abandoned ship ultimately would have been guided by remote control into the ocean.
The only other option would have been to try to repair the damaged wing in a spacewalk by Columbia's astronauts, perhaps by stuffing the hole with a bag of water, which would have frozen, and then covering it with Teflon tape, and hope for the best, Gehman said. But he said NASA has yet to determine if such a patch would have held during the fiery re-entry.
"It kind of comes under the category of, at least we would have done something," he said.
During the shuttle's re-entry, scorching gases entered the hole in the wing and caused the shuttle to break apart over Texas.
While Columbia was still in orbit, NASA engineers concluded that the foam had not caused any serious damage. In fact, the space agency decided not to request any special military photography of the shuttle in orbit to examine the potential damage.
The possibility that a rescue mission could have been mounted changes some of the decision-making done back then "from being kind of a bureaucratic, administrative fumbling-bumbling to a much more serious life-and-death kind of a decision process," Gehman said.
"Now those kinds of benign administrative decisions which were taken now look more ominous, because now it looks like maybe there was something you could do," he said.

 

That is a sad comment--the same could have been said for Apollo 13 I suppose, but the outcome was much different. I think our Astronauts may have been caught up in a bureaucratic web in which top level NASA executives simply crossed there fingers and hoped for the best. That certainly happened before the Challenger explosion, they knew and were warned that the O-rings couldn't withstand a rare freeze, but they went ahead with the launch anyways--crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. I'm not putting you down for your comment, I just feel too many feel the same way and that will lead to another tragedy effecting the entire nation.

 

I hope we're not already forgetting this disaster. This is almost as important as Iraq and the war on terror to our national image.


Documents detail shuttle what-ifs
By James Oberg
NBC NEWS SPACE ANALYST

June 3 — An in-depth NASA study concludes that while the crew of the Columbia might have been able to be saved had the true state of the shuttle been known in time, the shuttle itself was doomed. In a 34-page presentation, obtained exclusively by MSNBC.com, the NASA team lays out in detail the risks of either repairing Columbia or rescuing the crew with another shuttle.
THROUGHOUT THE two-week flight of Columbia in January, NASA engineers and managers had wrestled with whether the impact of insulating foam on the shuttle’s wing during launch posed any threat. But neither serious inspection plans nor workable rescue scenarios were ever developed because the need for them wasn’t recognized.
After the Columbia disintegrated, killing its seven-member crew, the independent panel investigating the tragedy asked a NASA team to go back and look at what the space agency might have come up with had that need been recognized. The group, led by experienced flight director John Shannon, was assigned to look at the areas of rescue, repair, entry trajectory redesign, and combinations of these three.
The NASA team described their findings in an oral presentation on May 22 to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which verbally described the findings to the news media. But both NASA and CAIB declined to to provide the briefing documents on which those findings were based; documents that MSNBC.com has since obtained.

PARALLEL TRACKS: RESCUE, REPAIR
The study rests on two major assumptions:
That there was a recognized catastrophic threat to the shuttle and crew, either from a 6-inch hole in the leading edge of the wing, or a 10-inch gash from the loss of a panel-to-panel seal.
That NASA management was willing to risk another shuttle launch even before the cause of the fatal damage to the first was known.
From those assumptions, the NASA team developed a timeline of events:
On the third day of flight, military photography of the damaged wing would be taken, while the crew and engineers on the ground planned for an inspection spacewalk, if needed. That spacewalk would take place on the fifth flight day, at which point the lethality of the damage would be known for certain and the emergency procedures initiated.
For the next twenty days, work would proceed in parallel on two options: rescue and repair.
The rescue option depended on whether the shuttle Atlantis could be prepared for launch in such a short time. If it became clear that Atlantis was not going to be ready in time, Columbia’s crew would expend their remaining supplies in the two additional spacewalks needed to make a jury-rigged fix to the hole, and then trust their lives to the repairs and try to land on their own.

INSPECTION SPACEWALK
The inspection spacewalk itself would have been almost trivial, the NASA team discovered, requiring neither a risky free-flight by an untethered astronaut nor complicated lash-up ladders. The two trained spacewalkers aboard Columbia, Mike Anderson and David Brown, would have been able to do it with their hands.
Since the shuttle’s bay doors folded open and down over the wings, the outer edge of a door was already only four feet above the wing surface. One astronaut would grab the door edge with his hands and extend his lower body down to the top of the wing, his feet cushioned by towels to prevent tile damage. The other crewman would then climb down the first astronaut’s body and peek over the wing’s leading edge at the damaged thermal shield. Eyeball descriptions, and photographs, would document the severity of the damage.
As to the problem of extending the Columbia mission until a rescue shuttle arrived, space doctors struggled with how to extend the existing 68 cans of lithium hydroxide — a chemical which absorbs carbon dioxide from the air — from the planned 20 days (this included contingency extension days) to a full 30 days. If the crew could be kept asleep for 12 hours per day — perhaps with medication — the 30 days would have been achievable without ever going over the 2 percent carbon dioxide concentration that is the standard maximum allowable level. But even in a situation where the crew slept only eight hours a day, 30 days was reachable if the carbon dioxide concentration was allowed to reach 3.5 percent, a level the doctors considered “acceptable.”
Columbia already contained enough of every other category of “consumable,” including oxygen, which was used both for breathing and power. The plan would be to allow one inspection spacewalk, then power the shuttle down to below 10 kilowatts — about a third of the level of full operation — and wait out the rescue launch.

REPAIRING COLUMBIA
The repair plans described in the NASA documents are highly innovative. The engineers examined all materials inside and outside the shuttle and its Spacehab science module, and compiled a long list of candidates.
If there was a hole in one of the panels, the preferred solution was to use “sacrificial materials to temporarily block the plasma flow” into the hole. A bag filled with scrap metal would go in first, followed by some spare collapsible water containers. The containers would then be filled with a line running from the airlock water supply valve, and left to freeze. Additional water would be freely sprayed into remaining gaps, to flash freeze, and the hole would be covered with insulation blankets torn off the top of the payload bay door. A Teflon cover would be taped in place to hold it all in until re-entry.
The solution to a crack between neighboring panels was even more ingenious. Once the gap had been measured on the first spacewalk, a second spacewalk would scavenge tile from the “canopy area” around the front windows. The tile would be brought back inside, sculpted with medical knives, and pressed into fit the gap on another spacewalk.
Two astronauts use a ladder to make repairs to a damaged shuttle wing in this illustration from a NASA team's presentation to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
In either case, the first of two repair spacewalks would also be used to move a ladder from the cabin’s middeck onto the edge of the bay door, leading to the work area. Additional time outside could be used to jettison heavy equipment to “lighten the ship.”
The analysis team rated repairing the shuttle as having a “high” level of difficulty, with the risk of additional damage to the shuttle also “high.” The risk to the crew, however, was rated as “moderate” and since the shuttle was presumably already fatally wounded, add-on hazards hardly mattered.
Lightening the space shuttle and descending with a “low-drag profile” or a high angle of attack were also considered by the NASA team. Benefits were seen, but at the cost of shifting the heat load elsewhere: “None of these options will be successful independently,” the report concluded, “but added together they may make a difference.”
Since the repairs could not be guaranteed to work, the team did not want to risk the astronauts’ lives with a wing collapse near the runway and instead proposed that the shuttle crew wait until Columbia had reached an altitude of 35,000 feet and then parachute out.
“Team consensus that bailout will be performed,” the report stated, “due to uncertainties in wing and landing gear structure.”
After the crew had jumped, the Columbia would steer by autopilot to crash over an uninhabited area.

THE RESCUE OPTION
If the ground processing at Cape Canaveral was fast enough, this risky repair option might have been avoidable. Atlantis could have used a standardized rendezvous profile. Columbia’s crew would have positioned the shuttle top down in orbit, with its left wing leading. Atlantis would have moved up directly below it, its nose leading, with its open payload bay pointed directly towards the open bay of Columbia.
Astronauts transfer from Columbia, top, to Atlantis, bottom, via a pole stretched between the two shuttles as they orbit in space in this illustration from the presentation given to the accident investigation board.
Two spacewalkers from Atlantis would deploy a pole from their spaceship to the other, and cross hand-over-hand to Columbia. They would retrieve two Columbia astronauts in that ship’s only two spacesuits. They would also leave behind them two new spacesuits in the Columbia airlock and some air purifying chemicals to get the carbon dioxide under control.
This process would repeat three more times to retrieve the full crew. The transfer would take several hours, as the two shuttles flew in tandem.
Once the rescued astronauts were aboard Atlantis, Columbia would be remote-controlled to a destructive atmospheric entry over the ocean.
For the return to Earth, the seven rescued astronauts would lie on their backs on the floor of the lower deck of Atlantis and strap themselves in.
In every option, then, the shuttle Columbia was doomed. But enough realistic options to save the crew had turned up, and a bigger team with more urgency could well have found even more. The tragedy was that this time the curtain never went up on NASA’s space miracle workers.

 

Columbia spacewalk plan debated

Astronaut says wing could have been inspected by crew
MSNBC AND NBC NEWS

May 29 — One of America’s most experienced spacewalkers has reportedly told investigators that NASA could have easily drawn up a plan to send two of the shuttle Columbia’s astronauts on a short inspection outing to look for damage. The assessment from retired astronaut Story Musgrave is in contrast to claims made just after the tragedy that such an inspection would have been impossible.
Just after the disaster, NASA officials and some former astronauts said there was no way Columbia’s astronauts could have assessed the damage from space, even though two of the crew members had been prepared for an emergency spacewalk.
“It would be impossible to do a walk and maneuver yourself underneath the belly of the space shuttle to do any type of inspection or repair,” former astronaut Richard Mullane told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Feb. 2.
Shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore, meanwhile, voiced concern that spacewalkers could make any damage worse.
But Musgrave, who choreographed the spacewalks that led to the rescue of the Hubble Space Telescope a decade ago, told the investigation board that such assessments were incorrect, according to a report published Thursday in the newspaper Florida Today.

‘THEY NEVER ASKED’
Florida Today also quoted a member of the investigation board, Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hess, as saying mission managers assumed a spacewalk was unnecessary because there was no serious damage to see.
“They never asked,” Hess told the newspaper.
The Florida Today report was confirmed Thursday by NBC News, and is consistent with what flight controllers have told NBC privately. The controllers have said an inspection spacewalk could have been conducted by canceling two days of research on the 16-day mission.
Musgrave’s testimony raises the profile of such speculation because he is one of the most respected spacewalk authorities in the United States. He joined NASA in 1967 and flew on six shuttle missions for a total of 1,281 hours in space. His career highlights include the first shuttle spacewalk in 1983 as well as the first Hubble servicing spacewalk in 1993. He retired from NASA in 1997.

SPACEWALK SCENARIO
The 67-year-old Musgrave told Florida Today that one spacewalk scenario could have involved sending Columbia astronauts Michael Anderson and David Brown out of the cargo bay along the left wing. One astronauts could have tethered himself to a latch on the cargo bay doors, then the tethered astronaut could have swung the other spacewalker over the edge of the wing for the inspection.
The newspaper quoted Musgrave as saying he double-checked the geometry of actual shuttle wings at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to confirm his calculations.
“It’s not difficult and not dangerous,” Musgrave was quoted as saying. “There would have been zero risk involved. It would have been a 15-minute walk.”

MORE WHAT-IFS
If the spacewalkers had detected serious damage, could anything have been done to repair it?
That is the situation considered in another set of scenarios, described last week by the investigation board. NASA could have instituted severe conservation measures aboard Columbia and rushed launch preparations for the shuttle Atlantis for a rendezvous and rescue — or the astronauts could have attempted a jury-rigged repair themselves, using bags of water, insulation blankets and rolls of Teflon tape.
The possible scenarios for detecting damage and mounting a rescue or repair operation are likely to become part of the investigation board’s final report, which is expected to be completed this summer.
The report is also expected to include recommendations for putting the shuttle fleet back into service. During the board’s weekly briefing on Wednesday, Chairman Harold Gehman Jr. said investigators were considering a recommendation that NASA’s return to flight would begin with a scaled-down demonstration mission.

 

No doubt it would have been risky to send up Atlantis, but sometimes just showing some effort is better than nothing. Don't all disasters come with what-ifs? How can you escape the what-if questions if you really want to solve a problem?

 

Crew may have tried shuttle rescue

By the time it broke up the shuttle was spinning out of control
A sensor on board the space shuttle Columbia indicated that one of the crew may have attempted to override the vehicle's autopilot in the last seconds of its doomed flight.
Analysis of the last two seconds of data transmitted by the shuttle as it plummeted to Earth shows that a command was sent to disengage the autopilot.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2835815.stm

 

I think you missed my point or I didn't present it well. I would like to have seen a serious contingency plan to properly prepare the rescue vehicle (shuttle or even a Soyuz). If they would have used our spy satellites to examine the damage along with spacewalks they could have kept the Columbia in orbit up to 30 days while readying Atlantis. My thinking is that Atlantis should have been prepared to a point before Columbia's launch where a rescue mission wouldn't have been so risky. I totally agree with your point on a hastily prepared vehicle that could have doubled the tragedy. NASA made the right call after the fact, but they should have been much better prepared and used all available resources, when they had even the slightest hint of a problem. From recently released documents it is clear NASA was concerned about the foam hitting the wing, and they chose to roll the dice when they knew this tragedy was a possible outcome. You left off my final sentence about asking what-if type questions after a disaster. Asking or stating what-ifs is no different than asking how could we have done this better, or how could this outcome have been different. What changes need to be made to prevent this from happening in the future, the way the question is worded is really not that important.

 

Rethinking all this again NASA very well may have thought the same way. This may have been their "hindsight", make no real preperations for a situation that in reality is a strong possibility on every mission. That way they have to take absolutely no risk, when in reality they could have made a rescue attempt and kept the risks at an acceptable level. The Columbia stranded in orbit, is what would have happened if inspections or satellite images showed damage severe enough to prohibit reentry. There are countless ways this could happen: micrometeor, space debris/junk, or some other object hitting the shuttle. A fleck of paint hit the window on one shuttle mission and left a large pit in the glass. There are countless other ways through a system malfunction etc. that would not allow reentry. This is a possibility that NASA new was going to happen on a mission eventually, there is no way they didn't understand this risk. Which leads me to think they ignored the problem of a rescue mission entirely to avoid jeopardizing the US space program. They most certainly could have prepared another shuttle to the point it could be safely launched within a 30 day period. This would not cost much more than regular preps, it would just be done sooner, just in case. If all goes well it sits ready until its regular launch is scheduled. Also by launching a rescue mission they may have been able to bring necessary supplies to fix the problem, but we'll never know because they didn't even bother to check.

The rescue shuttle wouldn't have to be sitting on the launch pad, it would be in the hanger. Supplies could certainly be loaded within a 30 day period (a day or two at most). The Shuttles are not filled with fuel until they are on the pad so that wouldn't be a problem either. Finding an experienced crew would take a couple of hours, and I have no doubt there would be more volunteers than necessary. They simply would have to make inspections, replace tiles, etc. sooner after each mission so that one of the shuttles was always ready for a worst case. The increased costs would be minimal to moderate, and well worth the pride we would feel as we did with Apollo 13 with a successful rescue. If repairs were possible we would also have another orbiter for future service. Making the rescue mission extremely "cost effective", since that appears to be the bottom line at NASA these days.

 

I missed this statement what other options would we use a Soyuz? That would be cheaper than launching another shuttle, but not really viable. I forgot to mention in my last post the most expensive part of the rescue would be the actual launch and mission not the preparations. I'm sure the costs of the rescue mission could be compensated-- who wouldn't support emergency funding of this nature?