From Fred McCall:
"Scott M. Kozel" wrote:

On Sunday, January 29, 2017 at 8:48:04 AM UTC-5, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

On Saturday, January 28, 2017 at 5:39:54 PM UTC-6, Stuf4 wrote:
My original speculation in this thread about how the shuttle
might have been used in brewing up any kind of attack plan
was referring only to the planners. It was their job to
dream up crazy things.


As it was, the only shuttles that were disintegrated happened
as a result of lack of care, rather than anything intentional.

Correct, they were management failures, not technological failures.

To be fair, middle level shuttle managers were put in a bad spot by the
higher ups. They had to manage what amounted to an experimental program
and pretend it was an "operational" program after five test flights.
The higher ups put a huge amount of pressure on middle management to
increase the flight rate. This created the management culture of "if
we're going to ground it, you have to prove to me it will fail", which
doomed the Challenger crew.

Middle managers were also forced to do this with a budget which was
smaller than it should have been. An example of this was right before
Challenger there was a distinct lack of spare parts. They were pulling
parts from recently returned orbiters so they could be installed on
another orbiter which was being prepared to fly. Imagine if you had two
cars and had to pull the cylinder head from one and install it on the
other when you wanted to use it. Insane, right?

To begin with, the SRBs ought to have been replaced with reusable liquid
boosters, but that would have been *quite* expensive to develop (which
is why SLS is still using solids). Other improvements, like non-toxic
OMS/RCS propellants and replacing the APUs and hydraulics with
electrically operated actuators would have improved the turn-around time
and reduced the risks to ground crews.

It was an avoidable disaster, they should not have launched on such a cold day, and that precipitated the failure of the O-rings.


All disasters are avoidable simply by never flying. The problem, as
Jeff noted, was that to scrub the launch because of the cold it would
have been necessary to PROVE that the cold would lead to disaster.
They'd launched in cold before and gotten away with it and there was
blow-by on the O-rings even in warmer weather.


Columbia could have been saved; if they used ground based telescopes to find the damage, then they would have had 2 weeks to come up with a patch from either material on board or material sent up on an expendable rocket, then EVAs to apply the patch. The ability to patch would have been marginal, but they would have had a good shot at a safe landing.


Do you understand what was damaged on Columbia? I don't think you
could have seen it with a ground based telescope and even if you could
the Shuttle would have been a write off because there was no way to
effect a repair on orbit. There's no way to 'patch' that kind of
damage.

No way? Au contraire. It is quite possible that *duct tape* might have gotten them home.

The Air Force has a program called "ABDR" that teaches how to do such repairs. They will cut things like soda cans and flatten them out and then duct tape them onto holes on a jet's wing or fuselage as a viable patch.

So for doing a MacGyver-style Aircraft Battle Damage Repair of Columbia's wing leading edge, you scour the crew cabin for some flat bendable piece of metal. Maybe use clipboards. Whatever. Then go out and tape it over the gaping hole. On day of Entry, hope it holds long enough to get you home.

As for detecting the damage, they could either have used NRO spy sats, or simply get out and look. Such an EVA could have been done on Flight Day 2.


One of the most heinous issues with the Gehman Report was that while Wayne Hale was the most vocal proponent for using such assets to try and determine that the vehicle was critically damaged...

Hale is one and the same person who in response to the STS-112 SOFI damage, stated his official position that the foam strike risk was acceptable. This was said in a recorded meeting that the investigators were tasked to listen to, leading up to greenlighting the launch one-prior to STS-107. Yet Gehman did not mention this fact in his report at all.

In the aftermath, Hale's efforts were taken to be heroic, when he had all the data he needed to know that continuing to launch without a rescue or repair plan was way short of a smart thing to do.

Linda Ham and Ron Dittemore were hung out to dry when they had followed the exact course of (in)action that Wayne Hale had been subscribing to prior to the launch.

In all, there were inexcusable errors made well before the launch as well as during the mission.

One fatal error goes all the way back to the 1970s:
- Not giving the crew a viable escape option.

Next highest on the list of fatal errors that were totally inexcusable was:
- Not having a viable foam damage repair plan, nor
- Rescue mission plan.

Considering what happened to STS-112, the decision to launch STS-113 was blatantly negligent. Wayne Hale was cavalier in reiterating the program's standard position that the SOFI threat was an accepted risk.

There were plenty of signs going back decades that SOFI was a serious problem that could, on any mission, inflict fatal damage to the orbiter. This is why so much effort was made in photographing the ET's after MECO.
This is why they implemented the ET video camera mod.

STS-112 was ironically the first flight of the ET camera. And that is the mission that was shouting out that SOFI was a problem not to be ignored. How did NASA respond? They ignored it.

~ CT