NASA Astronaut on Columbia Repair (and others)

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.

On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 12:45:26 GMT, in a place far, far away, Craig Fink
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

I totally disagree with you.

Who cares?

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.

Again, who cares? How is where you heard about it relevant to the
discussion?

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.

You don't know what you're talking about. Show us the calculations.

Well Rand, I do, I care. I find it interesting reading, to hear about how
people found out about the Disaster. Even the ones who weren't
connected to NASA and just happened to be watching the landing, maybe even
yours. Jim Oberg's story, which he hasn't told yet, as far as I know,
would be interesting to me and maybe some others who read this news group.
He had a posting here before the Disaster that was intriguing to me.
Enough time has passed so that telling the story might not be too
painful. This posting is going to sci.space.shuttle and sci.space.history,
and Jim actually did hear hints of what was going on at NASA at the time.
Historians might find his story interesting at some point in the future
too. How I found out about Columbia really isn't that interesting.

How I found out about the Challenger Disaster might be considered a bit
more interesting to the group. I found out about that Disaster when I
heard a gasp coming from the other side of the room. From over in the
corner where the ARD people were. I couldn't see the video monitor in the
room, so I had to lean around the console, all those stagnant numbers,
to see the television. I can still see the image of the lone SRB flying by
itself. The flash of hope, followed by the realization, nudging my
coworker, stop looking at the stagnant data, look up at the only real data
in the room, the live video feed.

That story might be interesting to others, as Jim's story about Columbia
might be interesting. Maybe not news worthy, but a personal interest type
story, his thoughts and feelings. I was kind of hoping he would share.

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

On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 13:33:57+0000, Rand Simberg wrote:

On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 12:45:26 GMT, in a place far, far away, Craig Fink
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

I totally disagree with you.

Who cares?

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.

Again, who cares? How is where you heard about it relevant to the
discussion?

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.

You don't know what you're talking about. Show us the calculations.

What calculations? It's an experiment, and not a very realistic one, they
didn't have a Turkey with them. There is a really, really big difference
between have the bow shock in front of the wing and having it inside the
wing. I'm sorry you can't see that.

On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:11:24 GMT, in a place far, far away, Craig Fink
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

That story might be interesting to others, as Jim's story about Columbia
might be interesting. Maybe not news worthy, but a personal interest type
story, his thoughts and feelings. I was kind of hoping he would share.

Whether it is or not has nothing to do with whether or not Columbia
could have been rescued. It's a non sequitur.

"Craig Fink" wrote:

Well Rand, I do, I care. I find it interesting reading, to hear about how
people found out about the Disaster. Even the ones who weren't
connected to NASA and just happened to be watching the landing, maybe even
yours. Jim Oberg's story, which he hasn't told yet, as far as I know,
would be interesting to me and maybe some others who read this news group.
He had a posting here before the Disaster that was intriguing to me.
Enough time has passed so that telling the story might not be too
painful. This posting is going to sci.space.shuttle and sci.space.history,
and Jim actually did hear hints of what was going on at NASA at the time.
Historians might find his story interesting at some point in the future
too. How I found out about Columbia really isn't that interesting.

How I found out about the Challenger Disaster might be considered a bit
more interesting to the group. I found out about that Disaster when I
heard a gasp coming from the other side of the room. From over in the
corner where the ARD people were. I couldn't see the video monitor in the
room, so I had to lean around the console, all those stagnant numbers,
to see the television. I can still see the image of the lone SRB flying by
itself. The flash of hope, followed by the realization, nudging my
coworker, stop looking at the stagnant data, look up at the only real data
in the room, the live video feed.

That story might be interesting to others, as Jim's story about Columbia
might be interesting. Maybe not news worthy, but a personal interest type
story, his thoughts and feelings. I was kind of hoping he would share.

No offense, but you just wasted a couple long redundant paragraphs about
something totally unconnected to the original thread, which was an
astronaut's somewhat incorrect opinion about surviving the two Shuttle
disasters.

And while it is irrelevant to this thread, I'll add that among a few people
who closely monitor the shuttle flights, there was clearly hints from
several posts on usenet aside form anything Oberg may have said which can be
found using Google to view newsgroup postings that NASA was looking into the
foam strike several days before the mission ended.

T.B.

No offense taken, sorry for the rudundant paragraphs but totally
unrelated excuse about to occur totally unconnected to the Subject line
isn't totally unheard of on Usenet. And the two long paragraphs were
really to just get Jim Oberg to consider a story from his point of view,
touchy feely one as opposed to technical.

To me Columbia had plenty of margin at the deorbit burn to have done
something wrt a Repair. Even if the payload bay door had to be closed
manually by a space walking astronaut who happened to look over the
side and saw the hole. They could and would have done something.

I have Googled the time frame, and Jim's posting looked like the first to
me. I'd be interested in the others hints you mentioned. Having not found
them in my earlier search, would you happen to know what the hints were or
possibly a link? I'm interested.

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


On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:25:34 +0000, TB wrote:

"Craig Fink" wrote:

Well Rand, I do, I care. I find it interesting reading, to hear about how
people found out about the Disaster. Even the ones who weren't
connected to NASA and just happened to be watching the landing, maybe even
yours. Jim Oberg's story, which he hasn't told yet, as far as I know,
would be interesting to me and maybe some others who read this news group.
He had a posting here before the Disaster that was intriguing to me.
Enough time has passed so that telling the story might not be too
painful. This posting is going to sci.space.shuttle and sci.space.history,
and Jim actually did hear hints of what was going on at NASA at the time.
Historians might find his story interesting at some point in the future
too. How I found out about Columbia really isn't that interesting.

How I found out about the Challenger Disaster might be considered a bit
more interesting to the group. I found out about that Disaster when I
heard a gasp coming from the other side of the room. From over in the
corner where the ARD people were. I couldn't see the video monitor in the
room, so I had to lean around the console, all those stagnant numbers,
to see the television. I can still see the image of the lone SRB flying by
itself. The flash of hope, followed by the realization, nudging my
coworker, stop looking at the stagnant data, look up at the only real data
in the room, the live video feed.

That story might be interesting to others, as Jim's story about Columbia
might be interesting. Maybe not news worthy, but a personal interest type
story, his thoughts and feelings. I was kind of hoping he would share.

No offense, but you just wasted a couple long redundant paragraphs about
something totally unconnected to the original thread, which was an
astronaut's somewhat incorrect opinion about surviving the two Shuttle
disasters.

And while it is irrelevant to this thread, I'll add that among a few people
who closely monitor the shuttle flights, there was clearly hints from
several posts on usenet aside form anything Oberg may have said which can be
found using Google to view newsgroup postings that NASA was looking into the
foam strike several days before the mission ended.

T.B.