No Contact with Shuttle Columbia

I lived there myself, I hadn't been down in a long time and I recently took my girlfriend to see where I grew up. My elementary had a Challenger 7 memorial we stopped at, we also went by JSC. I'll never forget the moment I realized the Challenger had exploded, and the loss of Columbia will be with me much the same. My heart goes out to all the families, I know their in a great deal of pain right now.

 

(Thanks Clutch.)

I grew up in Clear Lake also.

In the subdivision I lived in (Bay Knoll) many people that worked for Nasa and there where also a couple of astronauts. Everytime there was a mission a banner would be placed outside the house of the astronaut with kind words from the people around Bay Knoll...

It hits home big-time.

My prayers go out to all the families...

 

It just makes me sick to see the video, they never had a chance.

DD

 

I normally hate seeing a perfectly good rant disappear, but in retrospect.......Thanx Clutch..


What an aweful accident..
God Bless the crew's family...

RIP Columbia crew...

 

I can not bring myself to watch the news of this tragedy. I'm ok reading the news, but seeing the video and thinking what the astronauts must have felt or thought at that time makes me sick to my stomach. I have tried my best to occupy my weekend with family things to get my mind off of this horrible event, but my prayers before bed and my prayers at church are with our seven fallen astronauts, their families, and our country.

I was going home home sick from high school when I found out about the Challenger tragedy. Saturday, I was going home from school after a game when I found out about the Columbia tragedy, and I felt sick again.





"Good night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing
thee to thy rest."

 

FalconsTalon, if it makes you feel any better, best estimates are that they did not have time to worry, much less feel pain. There may have been 30 seconds where they new they were losing sensors, but the heating was apparently what they call "catastrophic," and in this case that means it was incredibly fast. "Over in an instant," probably doesn't even begin to describe how quickly their lives ended.

And sorry if: (1) that sounded cold. I mean it to sound humane. , and (2) if someone has already posted this. I have not, for once read every post in this solemn thread.

 

Interesting read on what might have happened if there had been an inspection of the wing. The article is long so i've chopped of quite a bit.
_____

The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

...imagine an alternate timeline for the Columbia mission in which NASA quickly realized just how devastating the foam strike had been. Could the Columbia astronauts have been safely retrieved from orbit?

During the writing of its report, the CAIB had the same question, so it asked NASA to develop a theoretical repair and rescue plan for Columbia "based on the premise that the wing damage events during launch were recognized early during the mission." The result was an absolutely remarkable set of documents, which appear at the end of the report as Appendix D.13. They carry the low-key title "STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment," but the scenario they outline would have pushed NASA to its absolute limits as it mounted the most dramatic space mission of all time.

NASA planners did have one fortuitous ace in the hole that made the plan possible: while Columbia's STS-107 mission was in progress, Atlantis was already undergoing preparation for flight as STS-114, scheduled for launch on March 1. As Columbia thundered into orbit, the younger shuttle was staged in Orbital Processing Facility 1 (OPF-1) at the Kennedy Space Center. Its three main engines had already been installed, but it didn't yet have a payload or remote manipulator arm in its cargo bay. Two more weeks of refurbishment and prep work remained before it would be wheeled across the space center to the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building and hoisted up for attachment to an external tank and a pair of solid rocket boosters.

So an in-orbit rescue was at least feasible—but making a shuttle ready to fly is an incredibly complicated procedure involving millions of discrete steps. In order to pull Atlantis' launch forward, mission planners had to determine which steps if any in the procedure could be safely skipped without endangering the rescue crew.

But even before those decisions could be made, NASA had to make another assessment—how long did it have to mount a rescue? In tallying Columbia's supplies, NASA mission planners realized that the most pressing supply issue for the astronauts wasn't running out of something like air or water but accumulating too much of something: carbon dioxide.

Weight is a precious commodity for spacecraft. Every gram of mass that must be boosted up into orbit must be paid for with fuel, and adding fuel adds weight that must also be paid for in more fuel (this spiral of mass-begets-fuel-begets-mass is often referred to as the tyranny of the rocket equation). Rather than carrying up spare "air," spacecraft launch with a mostly fixed volume of internal air, which they recycle by adding back component gasses. The space shuttle carries supplies of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen, which are turned into gas and cycled into the cabin's air to maintain a 78 percent nitrogen/21 percent oxygen mixture, similar to Earth's atmosphere. The crew exhales carbon dioxide, though, and that carbon dioxide must be removed from the air.

To do this, the shuttle's air is filtered through canisters filled with lithium hydroxide (LiOH), which attaches to carbon dioxide molecules to form lithium carbonate crystals (Li2CO3), thus sequestering the toxic carbon dioxide. These canisters are limited-use items, each containing a certain quantity of lithium hydroxide; Columbia was equipped with 69 of them.

How long those 69 canisters would last proved difficult to estimate, though, because there isn't a lot of hard data on how much carbon dioxide the human body can tolerate in microgravity. Standard mission operation rules dictate that the mission be aborted if CO2 levels rise above a partial pressure of 15 mmHg (about two percent of the cabin air's volume), and mission planners believed they could stretch Columbia's LiOH canister supply to cover a total of 30 days of mission time without breaking that CO2 threshold. However, doing so would require the crew to spend 12 hours of each day doing as little as possible—sleeping, resting, and doing everything they could to keep their metabolic rates low.

If the crew couldn't sustain that low rate of activity, NASA flight surgeons believed that allowing the CO2 content to rise to a partial pressure of 26.6 mmHg (about 3.5 percent cabin air volume) "would not produce any long-term effects on the health of the crewmembers." This would enable the crew to function on a more "normal" 16-hour/8-hour wake/sleep cycle, but at the cost of potential physiological deficits; headaches, fatigue, and other problems related to the high CO2 levels would have started to manifest very quickly.

After the carbon dioxide scrubbers, the next most limited consumable was oxygen. Columbia's liquid oxygen supplies were used not only to replenish breathing gas for the crew but also to generate power in the shuttle's fuel cells (which combined oxygen with hydrogen to produce both energy and potable water). The amount of liquid oxygen on board could be stretched past the CO2 scrubbers' 30-day mark by drastically cutting down Columbia's power draw.

The remaining three consumable categories consisted of food, water, and propellant. Assuming that the crew would be moving minimally, food and water could stretch well beyond the 30-day limit imposed by the LiOH canisters. To preserve propellant, the orbiter would be placed into an attitude needing minimal fuel to maintain.

Exactly when the crew of Columbia would enact these power- and oxygen-saving measures depended on a short decision tree. In the scenario we're walking through, the assumption is that NASA determined on Flight Day 2 (January 17) that the foam strike had caused some damage, followed by at least another day to gather images of Columbia using "national assets" like ground-based telescopes and other space-based sources (i.e., spy satellites) under the control of USSTRATCOM.

If that imagery positively identified damage, Columbia would immediately enter power-down mode; if the images didn't show anything conclusive, the crew would conduct an EVA (extra-vehicular activity—a spacewalk) to visually assess the damage to the wing, then power things down.

In either case, Flight Day 3 would mark the start of many sleepless nights for many people...

full article

 

Very interesting read KC.




RIP

 

Can't believe it's been 12 years. STS-107 was due to land right at the end of my shift, and after it was lost, we spent the next several hours collecting and archiving data. When leaving work around mid-day, I was surprised to see news vans out front from as far away as Oklahoma and Mississippi. They must have been going all-out to get there that fast.

During 2008/2009, we did numerous sims and testing for STS-400, which would have been the launch on need rescue mission for STS-125. Thankfully, it wasn't needed. I believe that with all the preparation, it would have stood a very good chance of success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-400

 

Thanks for posting Cheetah. Very interesting read.

Unfortunately I think risk is a very necessary part of space exploration and if we really want to move off of this rock we are going to accept even more risk than what we currently have.

 

RIP... Always interesting to read and look at history through Clutchfans.

 

I'm reading the novel The Martian (awesome) right now and this article reminds me of the narrative.

Whatever happened to Cohen? I haven't seen a post from him in a long time.