Horizon tonight

Did anyone see Horizon tonight about the space shuttle disaster? Well i
haven't been on this group for a while. ((but i was right up until the
disaster circa February)
That guy on there (forget his name) suggested they could of easily inspected
the shuttle tiles with a space walk etc. And or travelled across to the
spare shuttle 'waiting' alongside to rescue them.

Hmmm i thought the space lab prevented them from leaving the shuttle as
there was no air lock chamber because of this? And if they could get
outside, without a jet propulsion pack or robot arm, they would drift
hopelessly around? Am i right, who was that guy?

The only revelation for me was the testing of the foam impacting the wing, i
for one was surprised the damage something with such little mass could
cause, as im still not able to fathom how the foam was travelling so fast
into the wing, was it the fact the shuttle was going so fast into the foam/
or the relative deceleration of the foam after breaking from the fuselage to
the velocity of the shuttle?

Sorry i know this has been debated many times, but it's faded from my mind
somewhat.

Thanks for listening.

"Kaptain Kremin" wrote in message
...

Did anyone see Horizon tonight about the space shuttle disaster? Well i
haven't been on this group for a while. ((but i was right up until the
disaster circa February)
That guy on there (forget his name) suggested they could of easily
inspected
the shuttle tiles with a space walk etc. And or travelled across to the
spare shuttle 'waiting' alongside to rescue them.


I'll answer the easy bit - It was our very own Jim Oberg (thus it was all of
us).

--
Dave Kenworthy
-----------------------------
Changes aren't permanent - but change is!

"Kaptain Kremin" wrote in
:

Did anyone see Horizon tonight about the space shuttle disaster? Well
i haven't been on this group for a while. ((but i was right up until
the disaster circa February)
That guy on there (forget his name) suggested they could of easily
inspected the shuttle tiles with a space walk etc. And or travelled
across to the spare shuttle 'waiting' alongside to rescue them.

As Dave said, that was Jim Oberg. The inspection EVA was possible. The
rescue shuttle... well, that's still open for debate. The prox ops were
certainly possible, but the rescue mission analysis was asked to use some
*very* optimistic assumptions for timing.

Hmmm i thought the space lab prevented them from leaving the shuttle
as there was no air lock chamber because of this?

No, there is an airlock on every flight, in the event an EVA is required to
manually close the payload bay doors.

And if they could
get outside, without a jet propulsion pack or robot arm, they would
drift hopelessly around?

In most cases, yes. In this case, the damage turned out to be close enough
to the payload bay doors that an EVA could have been staged from there.

See Appendix D.13 of the CAIB report for NASA's analysis of the
inspection/repair/rescue EVAs:

http://www.caib.us/news/report/pdf/vol2/part13.pdf

The inspection EVA is pictured in Figure 5.

The only revelation for me was the testing of the foam impacting the
wing, i for one was surprised the damage something with such little
mass could cause, as im still not able to fathom how the foam was
travelling so fast into the wing, was it the fact the shuttle was
going so fast into the foam/ or the relative deceleration of the foam
after breaking from the fuselage to the velocity of the shuttle?

Both. The shuttle was moving very fast (Mach 2.5), and the foam, being very
light and draggy, decelerated very quickly into the wing.


--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

On Thu, 27 Nov 2003 23:09:50 -0000, "Kaptain Kremin"
wrote:

That guy on there (forget his name) suggested they could of easily inspected
the shuttle tiles with a space walk etc.

I think Story Musgrave is also on record saying this was possible.

And or travelled across to the
spare shuttle 'waiting' alongside to rescue them.

Hmmm i thought the space lab prevented them from leaving the shuttle as
there was no air lock chamber because of this?

There was an upward-facing EVA hatch in the tunnel between the Crew
Compartment and Spacehab.

Brian

"Kaptain Kremin"

The only revelation for me was the testing of the
foam impacting the
wing, i for one was surprised the damage something
with such little
mass could cause

One only needs to view the foam cannon test to
appreciate the magnitude of force generated by the
foam impact.

The large distance of the shuttle from the ground
cameras helped to hide or distort the seriousness of
the impact. The foam impact tests were a revelation
to everyone.

The program gave the impression that a rescue would have been easy...."just"
send up another shuttle to rescue them, or "just" send up another rocket
with supplies until another shuttle could have been launched.

It also kept saying Columbia exploded........




"Kaptain Kremin" wrote in message
...
Did anyone see Horizon tonight about the space shuttle disaster? Well i
haven't been on this group for a while. ((but i was right up until the
disaster circa February)
That guy on there (forget his name) suggested they could of easily
inspected
the shuttle tiles with a space walk etc. And or travelled across to the
spare shuttle 'waiting' alongside to rescue them.

Hmmm i thought the space lab prevented them from leaving the shuttle as
there was no air lock chamber because of this? And if they could get
outside, without a jet propulsion pack or robot arm, they would drift
hopelessly around? Am i right, who was that guy?

The only revelation for me was the testing of the foam impacting the wing,
i
for one was surprised the damage something with such little mass could
cause, as im still not able to fathom how the foam was travelling so fast
into the wing, was it the fact the shuttle was going so fast into the
foam/
or the relative deceleration of the foam after breaking from the fuselage
to
the velocity of the shuttle?

Sorry i know this has been debated many times, but it's faded from my mind
somewhat.

Thanks for listening.

"Kaptain Kremin" wrote in message
...
Did anyone see Horizon tonight about the space shuttle disaster? Well i
haven't been on this group for a while. ((but i was right up until the
disaster circa February)
That guy on there (forget his name) suggested they could of easily
inspected
the shuttle tiles with a space walk etc. And or travelled across to the
spare shuttle 'waiting' alongside to rescue them.

The programme was quite good on its description of the cause of the
accident, but very poor in its facile analysis of the potential rescue
solutions.

As far as I can see the matter hinged on actually *knowing* that there was
potentially safety-critical damage to the airframe. It would seem that the
best available information suggested that any damage from the foam would not
be safety-critical. The consequences of foam hitting the RCC leading edge
panels were only fully understood AFTER the accident, and the firm belief
(however misleading) that it was substantially stronger than the wing skin
heat shields only compounded this unfortunate oversight.

Everything is obvious with 20-20 hindsight, but from the viewpoint of the
controllers and engineers at the time of the mission there was no striong
argument to justify the risks of an EVA inspection, especially since it is
more than likely that any damage may not have been especially visible. Quite
aside from the standard EVA risks I understand that there is a huge risk of
damage to the underskin heat shield material even if it just catches a waft
from a jetpack thruster, let alone physical contact. As far as I'm aware
none of the crew were experienced airframe structural surveyors, so they may
not have understood what they were looking at anyway. so in light of all
that was known at the time one can understand why the decision was strongly
influenced in the "no inspection" direction.

As for the suggested solutions, the idea of sending up additional supplies
(presumably food & CO2 scrubbers) to extend the mission to await a potential
rescue was glibbly mentioned as if it was something that could be thrown
together in a few hours. Even assuming the supplies existed in suitable
packaging (it something that would protect the items through the
acceleration of launch and the variety of temperature/pressue environments
between the pad and orbit) it would still be necessary to design and
manufacture something to allow these containers to be mounted into the
payload area of the available spacecraft. This isn't the sort of thing you
throw together overnight unless your surname is "Laforge". I would also
presume that there would be a limited range of viable launch solutions which
would place the supplies in a parking orbit close to the shuttle, so this
would add further constraints. Then factor in the possibility of launch
delays of the rescue shuttle due to weather, malfunction etc and this
solution looks dubious.

The programme stated that the crew could have "bailed out" from 40,000 feet,
but ignored the minor point that they never got down as low as 40,000 feet,
and diving down to that height at the time would have increased the thermal
and physical stresses and made a catastrophioc failure *more* likely. I'm
guessing, but I doubt the bail-out solution is available at Mach 18, so both
height AND speed needed to be shed. The craft was the wrong side of an
energy event horizon to use this option.

Other references to doing the re-entry with side-slip to "favour the good
wing" assume the exact nature of the damage was known AND that the data was
available to accurately model/simulate/predict the thermal profile of the
structure in un-balanced configurations. Unless this kind of manoeuver was a
previously identified recovery scenario it is unlikely the data could have
been developed in any useful timescale. In the real world such things are
not done by the seat-of-th-pants by the ace pilot with a cigar clenched in
huis teeth...

The final part of theprgramme seemed to be suggesting that the crew could
have been saved, but I would contend that this could not have been done with
any great degree of certainity given the knowledge available AT THE TIME.
This is surely the only test that can be fairly applied to judge the actions
of the people involved.

£0.02 supplied

PDR

Either Starfire telescopes on the ground or the multiple military recon
satellites could have easily resolved the hole in the RCC. And Story
Musgrove said the inspection EVA would "have been the easiest he had ever
undertaken"

But then, as one of this group's "experts" asked in March, "why would we
want a detailed image of the orbiter's wing ? What, exactly, did program
management think would happen if they backed the engineer's many requests
for images and the images showed nothing? That they would be accused of
being overly careful?

Geez!

"PDR" wrote in message
...
|
| "Kaptain Kremin" wrote in message
| ...
| Did anyone see Horizon tonight about the space shuttle disaster? Well i
| haven't been on this group for a while. ((but i was right up until the
| disaster circa February)
| That guy on there (forget his name) suggested they could of easily
| inspected
| the shuttle tiles with a space walk etc. And or travelled across to the
| spare shuttle 'waiting' alongside to rescue them.
|
| Everything is obvious with 20-20 hindsight, but from the viewpoint of the
| controllers and engineers at the time of the mission there was no striong
| argument to justify the risks of an EVA inspection, especially since it is
| more than likely that any damage may not have been especially visible.
Quite
| aside from the standard EVA risks I understand that there is a huge risk
of
| damage to the underskin heat shield material even if it just catches a
waft
| from a jetpack thruster, let alone physical contact. As far as I'm aware
| none of the crew were experienced airframe structural surveyors, so they
may
| not have understood what they were looking at anyway. so in light of all
| that was known at the time one can understand why the decision was
strongly
| influenced in the "no inspection" direction.
|