I totally disagree with you.

I can imagine you have a lot of personal investment in your point of view,
as you actually knew about the impact to the wing a long time (many days)
before the Disaster. And, choose to believe what you were being told by
your sources that everything was fine. I can totally understand your
baggage leading to your conclusions. You were hoodwinked like many of the
NASA engineers, that NASA management wouldn't stick their heads in the
ground. Me, I first heard about the Disaster in WalMart, when I overheard
someone talking about the destruction of Columbia.

But, any repair, wet towels or tortillas would have been much better than
leaving a gapping hole in the leading edge of the wing. Entry heating is a
time function, just like thawing your Thanksgiving Turkey. It takes days
to thaw a Turkey in the fridge. A day outside the fridge on your counter.
And with a blow torch, probably well over an hour. Plenty of time to make
it to the runway. I'd suggest that some NASA Engineers should take a
frozen Turkey this year and stick it in their nice arc jet facility for
Thanksgiving. To see just how long it takes to thaw a Turkey heated with a
Shuttle Entry profile. I think by the time their done, they'll find their
Turkey is crispy on the outside, and still raw or frozen on the inside. A
Turkey might even be a relatively accurate frozen thermal mass
representative of the size that would have been inside the leading edge.

I think they would have been standing on the runway, instead of spread out
all over Texas.

--
Craig Fink
Courtesy E-Mail Welcome @
--

On Mon, 13 Nov 2006 16:36:01+0000, Jim Oberg wrote:


"Jorge R. Frank" wrote
Gutierrez is wrong. And it turns out, so were NASA's results from the CAIB
report. The three years of work that have gone into RCC repair capability
since that report have made clear that the in-flight repair options for
Columbia would not have worked.

It's not even clear whether the proposals would have delayed breakup
a few minutes, or hastened it due to higher drag. I'd like to believe that
an attempted repair would have given the ship another minute or two
to get lower and slower, and perhaps cross the boundary where
suited crewmembers thrown free by the cabin break-up might, might,
just might have survived to low enough that their parachutes would
have saved them. But at any altitude, co-existing even briefly with a
debris cloud of jagged metal is problematical. It's what I was saying the
first hour of the live coverage with ABC, when I talked on-air from my
home: the odds of survival were low but not zero and in the initial hours
post-breakup all efforts must focus and looking for parachutes on the
ground because anybody getting out of the ship alive would need help
really bad.

Had there been warning, you also bet that there wouldn't have been
anybody in the ship doing entry without helmets and gloves -- an
appalling failure of safety practices, in real life, but sadly consistent
with safety standards that had crept up on some (not all, or even most)
of the team.