"MichaelJP" wrote in message
...

"Danny Deger" wrote in message
...
Here's another section of my autobiography on STS-37 landing short of the
runway.

Danny Deger

__________________________________________________ _______

Within days of my taking over this job, a shuttle landed short of the
runway. Fortunately, the landing was on the lakebed and Edwards Air
Force Base, where landing short is not a problem. If the landing had
been at Kennedy, we would have lost the orbiter and the crew.
.. snipped...

Interesting stuff, I didn't know about this.

This has been discussed in the past. A quick web search turns up a posting
back in 1999 from Henry Spencer mentioning this:

STS-37 landed 600ft short of the runway threshold, due to a bad call on
winds aloft. (The Edwards runway has a paved underrun area, so this
wasn't
a disaster. I'm told that heads rolled among the weather people.)

This was part of a short list of "close calls" on landing.

Hypothetically, if this had taken place at KSC, is there nowhere the
orbiter could have been belly landed with some chance of survival? Could a
shuttle ditch without being destroyed?

I'm sure the paved underrun at Edwards helped. A quick web search turns up
this document:

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/news/columbia/fr_generic.pdf

From above:

KSC 15/33 is a 300 ft wide grooved concrete runway with 50 ft
loadbearing
paved shoulders and has a total length of 17,000 ft including the 1,000
ft
underrun and 1,000 ft overrun.

So I have to wonder if the orbiter and crew would really have been lost at
KSC since it's got a 1,000 foot underrun... More web searching...

Here's a quote from a posting by Henry Spencer summarizing the April 22,
1991 issue of AW&ST:

Atlantis returning to Cape after Edwards landing. Engineers are trying
to figure out how a 14-inch external tank grounding strap got caught
in one of the orbiter's umbilical doors instead of being left on the
pad at KSC. The strap was found on the Edwards runway after landing!
As a further complication, Atlantis landed nearly 600ft short of the
official runway threshold on the lakebed. Steve Nagel, the pilot,
blames his own conservatism plus unusual winds aloft. "Had that
happened at KSC, it would have caused a few more gray hairs, but we
still would have been okay". (The KSC runway has a 1000ft underrun
area.) [Note added after publication: this was STS-37, Compton
deployment.]

So, I personally don't agree with Danny's assertion that STS-37 landing
short of the runway threshhold at KSC would have caused loss of orbiter and
crew. I think Danny really needs to have someone else fact check his
stories for him.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)