From Bill Harris:
I'd like to see those people involved with that
decision personally contact the 14 families to explain why
Challenger's and Columbia's crews had no way out.
And I'd like to see you expklain just what the "escape mechanism" was for any
spacecraft at the stage where Columbia was lost.
OK. There's a colorful map on p45 of the CAIB report showing black
marks where debris was found. There's another colorful map on p75
showing where WLE RCC was found.
One map that has not been released to the public is one that shows
where debris from the crew cabin has been found. In seeing a tight
geographical grouping on this chart, you would be struck by the
realization that the crew cabin held together for a significant period
of time subsequent to the structural failure of the left wing.
As brutally seen in 1986, the crew cabin is much more robust than
other parts of the orbiter. There is a reason for this. It is
designed as a pressure vessel, whereas other parts of the orbiter have
no such requirement.
It is *easy* to augment the design of this pressure vessel so that it
then becomes a crew escape module. It is also easy to determine c.g.
limits of this module so that after orbiter breakup it has a stable
flight. An escape module design that would have permitted safe escape
for both -51L and -107 crews need not have had excessive weight.
I am certain that Rockwell, back in the early '70s, drew up a design
for an escape module. I expect that it included powerful rocket
motors to blast the crew away from the rest of the vehicle. I also
expect that the design also had an elaborate chute system to include
an envelope that would decelerate the escape module from hypersonic
speed all the way down to touchdown/splashdown. This requires more
complexity for chute weight and impact bags and floatation devices.
Not that I agree with the decision to eliminate this capability, but I
can understand the dilemma facing those who made the decision to
sacrifice crew safety in the interest of increasing payload
capability.
A smart compromise would have been a *lightweight crew escape module*.
There is no need for a huge parachute system. No need for
impact/floatation bags. No need even for giant-thrust rocket
separation motors.
After pyrotechnics separate the module from the rest of the vehicle, a
small motor can be used to build separation (-51L showed that no motor
at all is needed). Then instead of a giant parachute designed to give
the escape module a soft landing, all that is needed is a
stabilization chute system that slows the module down enough for the
crew to bail out of (no escape pole needed because the wings are long
gone).
This is just one idea. I'm sure that others were proposed.
I haven't seen *anyone* being called to testify (or in any other way
being held accountable) to that fatal decision to not give those crews
even a chance of hope.
Imagine a car company that does a study and determines that it is too
expensive to build a vehicle with airbags and even seatbelts, and that
the performance of that vehicle will be degraded by this safety
equipment. So they build it. And there is a long line of people who
still want to buy it and drive it. When those vehicles crash (and
they will crash) and their occupants take their final ride through the
front windshield, I can guarantee you that the NTSB would hold that
car company accountable for willful negligence.
Did Gehman (or Rogers) even ask to speak to those Rockwell/NASA folks
who made that call? Did they ask to speak to those within the
government who were responsible for oversight of that fatal decision?
(the NTSB of spaceflight, if you will) I see no evidence for that.
In summary, it would have been easy to design the shuttle with crew
escape capability covering the vast majority of ascent/entry. It
wasn't done. After the fact it becomes very hard to retrofit this
capability. This point has been discussed many times. Here's one
post (from just prior to Feb1st) with more info:
http://tinyurl.com/maro
(
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...ing.google.com)
~ CT