Columbia Was Beyond Any Help, Officials Say

[R. A. Hettinga]

Speak of the devil...

Cheers,
RAH
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/national/04OPTI.html?ei=5062&en=f65800eae403a700&ex=1045026000&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=bottom


February
4, 2003 

Columbia Was Beyond Any Help, Officials Say 
By KENNETH CHANG



HOUSTON, Feb. 3 - Even if flight controllers had known for certain that
protective heat tiles on the underside of the space shuttle had sustained
severe damage at launching, little or nothing could have been done to
address the problem, NASA officials say. 

Virtually since the hour
Columbia went down, the space agency has been peppered with possible
options for repairing the damage or getting the crew down safely. But in
each case, officials here and at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida say,
the proposed solution would not have worked. 

The simplest would have been
to abort the mission the moment the damage was discovered. In case of an
engine malfunction or other serious problem at launching, a space shuttle
can jettison its solid rocket boosters and the external fuel tank, shut
down its own engines and glide back down, either returning to the Kennedy
Space Center or an emergency landing site in Spain or Morocco. 

But no one
even knew that a piece of insulation from the external tank had hit the
orbiter until a frame-by-frame review of videotape of the launching was
undertaken the next day. By then, Columbia was already in orbit, and
re-entry would have posed the same danger that it did 16 days later. 

Four
other possibilities have been discussed at briefings or in interviews since
the loss of Columbia, and rejected one by one by NASA officials. 

First,
repairing the damaged tiles. The crew had no tools for such a repair. At a
news conference on Sunday, Ron D. Dittemore, the shuttle program manager,
said that early in the shuttle program, NASA considered developing a tile
repair kit, but that "we just didn't believe it was feasible at the time."
He added that a crew member climbing along the underside of the shuttle
could cause even more damage to the tiles. 

Another idea, widely
circulated on the Internet in the last few days, was that the shuttle could
have docked with the International Space Station once the damage was
discovered. But without the external fuel tank, dropped as usual after
launching, Columbia had no fuel for its main engines and thus no way it
could propel itself to the station, which circles the earth on a different
orbit at a higher altitude. 

"We have nowhere near the fuel needed to get
there," said Bruce Buckingham, a spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center.


Another shuttle, Atlantis, was scheduled for launching on March 1 to
carry supplies and a new crew to the space station, and it is possible to
imagine a Hollywood-type series of events in which NASA rushed Atlantis to
the launching pad, sent it up with a minimal crew of two, had it rendezvous
with Columbia in space and brought everyone down safely. 

But Atlantis is
still in its hangar, and to rush it to launching would have required NASA
to circumvent most of its safety measures. "It takes about three weeks, at
our best effort, to prepare the shuttle for launch once we're at the pad,"
Mr. Buckingham said, "and we're not even at the pad." Further, Columbia had
enough oxygen, supplies and fuel (for its thrusters only) to remain in
orbit for only five more days, said Patrick Ryan, a spokesman at the
Johnson Space Center here. 

Finally, there is the notion that Columbia's
re-entry might have been altered in some way to protect its damaged area.
But Mr. Dittemore said the shuttle's descent path was already designed to
keep temperatures as low as possible. "Because I'm reusing this vehicle
over and over again, so I'm trying to send it through an environment that
minimizes the wear and tear on the structure and the tile," he said at his
news conference on Sunday. 

Today he added that he did not know of a way
for the shuttle to re-enter so that most of the heat would be absorbed by
tiles that were not damaged, on its right wing. "I'm not aware of any other
scenarios, any other techniques, that would have allowed me to favor one
wing over the other," he said. 

Even if that had been possible, it would
probably have damaged the shuttle beyond repair and made it impossible to
land, requiring the crew to parachute out at high speed and at high
altitude. He said there was no way managers could have gotten information
about the damaged tiles that would have warranted so drastic a move. 

Gene
Kranz, the flight director who orchestrated the rescue of astronauts aboard
the crippled Apollo 13 in 1970, said that from what he knew about the
suspected tile damage, there was probably nothing that could have been done
to save the flight. "The options," he said in a telephone interview, "were
just nonexistent." 


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
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