On Saturday, February 4, 2017 at 10:42:55 AM UTC-5, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...

Scott Kozel wrote:
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.


Wrong. The wing leading edge was reinforced carbon-carbon composite.
This was the material on the shuttle which could withstand the most
reentry heating. This isn't something you can "MacGyver" with any spare
parts on board Columbia.

That depends on the exact nature of the damage, and given that it wasn't
surveyed by EVA or by shuttle-based camera or by telescope, we don't know
whether it was a big hole or a small hole, or whether it was on the
leading edge or behind of there. That could not be ascertained after the
fact from the debris on the ground.

Sending another shuttle on a rescue or repair mission would have had its
own risks to that vehicle and crew, so that would need to be considered
carefully before making that decision.

That is why I suggested sending an expendable rocket with materials to
for Columbia crew to make an emergency patch. Titanium sheets and
sheets of ablative material and fasteners, for example.

As far as to whether an emergency patch would work well enough to at
least make a normal landing, NASA investigators determined that on-orbit
repair by the shuttle astronauts was possible but overall considered high
risk, primarily due to the uncertain resiliency of the repair using
available materials and the anticipated high risk of doing additional
damage to the Orbiter.

And again, that would depend on the exact nature of the damage, and that
is unknown due to the fact that they never made any attempt to examine it.
The smaller the hole the higher the chance of a successful emergency
repair. A huge hole might be impossible.

The problem is that they could have known the nature of the damage on
day 2 of a 14-day flight, but there was never any effort to determine the
nature of the damage let alone try to repair it or come to a conclusion
about whether or not it could be repaired.

Saying stuff like, "Well given issues in the STS there was bound to be
a disaster sooner or later" is not an acceptable conclusion, IMHO.
Never the case in aviation or aerospace.

Yes there are risks in flying 120+ STS missions, but on this particular
mission there could have been a much better outcome, but they didn't even
-try- to assess the damage let alone make a decision about what to do
about it. That is what I meant by this mission being a management failure
and not a purely technological failure.