The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/1/

by raphaelj • 12 years ago

69 43 12 years ago

arstechnica.com

garrettgrimsley• 12 years ago

This seems like a pretty good look into what the race on Earth in "A Walk in the Sun" would have looked like.

aftbit• 12 years ago

This was the most depressing quote for me:

It is unlikely that launching a space vehicle will ever be as routine an undertaking as commercial air travel—certainly not in the lifetime of anybody who reads this.

wyager• 12 years ago

Of course, that could certainly be completely incorrect. It seems to me, from casual observation, that the rate of rocket launches is increasing very quickly. We seem to be getting better at it.

rgbrenner• 12 years ago

It seems to me, from casual observation, that the rate of rocket launches is increasing very quickly. We seem to be getting better at it.

The numbers say otherwise:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight

http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html

morbius• 12 years ago

Unmanned launches, yes. Manned spaceflight, and astronauts themselves, have to adhere to extremely strict standards to maintain safety. Those standards cost $$$, time, and require highly educated and resourceful people.

The economies just don't scale. It costs a few thousand dollars to fly a transcontinental flight on a 777, and passengers don't have to be trained in all types of contingency situations like astronauts do. The cost for a single Shuttle launch used to be an eight-figure sum.

Someday getting to space will be as simple as a transcontinental flight. Unfortunately, rockets aren't the way we're going to get there.

atonse• 12 years ago

That seems like an absolute crazy mission, the kind you'd see in a hollywood movie.

As long as we're imagining, was there maybe an option C, an EVA from the Columbia crew to just replace some of those tiles? Was that even possible?

grecy2• 12 years ago

I assume they didn't have replacement tiles on board, but assuming they did, I wonder if that would have been possible.

It also occurs to me they could have sent an unmanned cargo carrier to dock with them with the required tiles and tools - maybe a Soyuz... but then, they could have all just gotten into the Soyuz.

There is no mention of the Soyuz in the article. I wonder if they considered that option.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

They are not, and as I recall it was one of the criticisms a friend of mine levelled at the report as well. That by sending up a Soyuz, and using both that module and the backup, they could return 6 people to earth. Then a second and Soyuz mission and the Atlantis mission to replace the backup and return excess crew. Leaving Columbia on orbit awaiting some form of repair or scuttling.

Mostly though it re-emphasized how "not routine" going up into space is. Orbital windows not withstanding, you cannot just "decide" to catch the next one and bring up hardware to fly. Something I hope we can get to with Falcon 9 re-use.

dblohm7• 12 years ago

It wasn't tiles that was the problem. It was the reinforced carbon-carbon panels on the leading edge of the wing. That's a little bit more difficult.

jtchang• 12 years ago

Why will launching a space vehicle never be as routine as commercial air travel?

I think it should be one of the goals of mankind. There is no fundamental law of physics that says we can't make it routine. The author states that they don't think it will be feasible in our lifetime. However the amount of technological advancement that has been made over the past century is astounding. There is no reason to think this would be unfeasible.

eropple• 12 years ago

Economics and the progression of aerospace technology have more to do with it than "fundamental laws of physics". Strapping stuff to a gigantic tower of boom just doesn't scale that well and unless you believe that the aforementioned strapping-to-a-tower-of-boom can be iteratively improved to reduce its cost by multiple decimal places, making space vehicles "routine" requires something other than iterative advancement. You can at least somewhat plan iterative advancement, but finding new global maxima is really, really hard and unpredictable.

(I would not be surprised if getting to space eventually becomes unremarkable, though I would be surprised if it happened in my lifetime. I would be stunned if launching a vehicle from dirt to space ever became as routine as air travel is today, however, because it doesn't make very much sense.)

pi-err• 12 years ago

It took >300 years for transatlantic marine routes to reach acceptable levels of safety - and it really had to wait for modern navigation system + coal propulsion + metal.

I wonder if going to space will become routine before supraconduction and MHD drives are widespread. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_1 for air travel.

brudgers4• 12 years ago

No, it will never be as routine as commercial air travel.

Yes, there are fundamental laws of physics that say we cannot make it routine. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

lern_too_spel2• 12 years ago

Rocket launches will never be as routine. Other launch methods will eventually become routine.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch

mkramlich• 12 years ago

SpaceX appears to be our best chance currently for one day making it routine. And an order of magnitude cheaper. They've stated as much. And they're still in that lucky stage of business life when they have their founding genius in charge, pushing them to do those possible impossibles. And he has that rare mix of engineering and business sense.

WalterBright3• 12 years ago

Further, even if successful reentry were possible, the shuttle could not be landed entirely from the ground—there was no way for Mission Control to have extended the shuttle's landing gear or the air probes necessary to judge velocity once in the atmosphere. Those functions (as well as starting the shuttle's auxiliary power unit) could only be invoked by physically throwing switches in the cockpit during approach and landing.

It is a mystery to me why it was designed this way. I'd design it so that if the crew were disabled, it could be brought back by mission control.

kabouseng• 12 years ago

And add more cost and complexity to an already costly and complex piece of equipment.

Fact is, when the crew are disabled, 99.99% [1] of the time, so is the entire shuttle, i.e. catastrophically "disabled".

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/?Page=4

emp_zealoth• 12 years ago

I thought it was done to legitimise crew requirement - just so one could say "No, the shuttle cannot fly without humans on board" Nasa was threatened by expendable launchers from military and there were fears it would put human space launches on hold

VLM4• 12 years ago

The shuttle was marketed to all people as capable of all things, leading to some peculiar .mil requirements, and the fairly reasonable cold war fear was the .ru would "borrow" a shuttle of ours and take a look at the spooky payload. Now this would really piss the DoD off if there were american military personnel on board, but if the taxi between a space station and the ground happened to have no humans but did have some spooky NSA satellite on board they could wiggle in some kind of salvage claim.

Maybe the .ru couldn't get away with it politically, but maybe Libya in the bad old days or something... Also I don't know if even the most optimistic "everything for everyone" marketing went this far outside Larry Niven sci fi books, but I could totally imagine if we sold F16 to Pakistan maybe they'd buy a shuttle if it was economic and then India would try to steal it from the ground. Or use a re-entering shuttle as a weapon, 9/11 WTC style.

Its not far fetched. The Iranians stole one of our spooky drones a couple years ago by broadcasting very strong GPS signals and the drone designers not using the authenticated stream making this hack possible.

If you sell something as "do everything for everyone" then you're going to end up with weird "legacy" requirements.

brudgers4• 12 years ago

The reasoned assumption is that if a space crew is disabled, it's because they are dead. The article is interesting because it treats the possibility that a rescue was feasible as if it were viable. It wasn't.

The addition of the cable is more a reflection of the Shuttle Program's changing mission profiles. Remote control makes sense when docking and undocking from the ISS. It makes sense as a way to test unmanned flight operations to service it. But it was still a cable, not an iPhone app.

Once Columbia was far enough from the launch pad that the crew survival systems added in the wake of Challenger could be used, they were "dead men walking". Though we might want to point to Apollo 13 as a reason for hope, it's not a good analogy. It's run what ya' brung: There are no tow trucks in space. Remote control would not have changed that.

The design paradigm that led to the space shuttle is probably an evolutionary dead end. Space craft design looks more like 'nix or biological viruses than Windows or walruses. The fact that the engineering solution that allowed remote control was boosting additional grams in the form of a 28 foot cable rather than upgrades to modular avionics points to the inflexibility of the shuttle design -- Columbia in particular was the oldest in a line of one-off handbuilt airframes.

zb• 12 years ago

IIRC it was done deliberately because the astronauts demanded that the shuttle not be able to fly without them. I always assumed this was a job protection scheme, though more charitably I guess it could have been to make sure that NASA was always equally focused on getting the astronauts home as on getting their expensive hardware back.

nucleardog• 12 years ago

I recall reading that the reason the landing gear had to be lowered manually was because once deployed there was no way to retract it. Reentry with the landing gear lowered would result in a loss of crew and vehicle.

Basically, if anything went wrong and it was deployed at the wrong time it was game over. In the grand scheme of things it was probably fairly prudent to reduce it to a big red button instead of something that could be operated remotely or automatically versus having the ability to remotely land the shuttle in the event all the crew was incapacitated.

For the life I of me I can't find the reference at the moment... I was on a wiki binge on the shuttle program about a week ago and just can't remember whereabouts I saw this.

WalterBright3• 12 years ago

Contrary to popular belief, the heat a spacecraft faces on reentry isn't generated by simple friction but rather by ram pressure—the fast-moving shuttle compresses the air in front of it, forming a massive shock zone in which air molecules ionize and break apart.

Finally! It always annoys me when people, even those who should know better, call it friction.

venomsnake2• 12 years ago

It is almost perfect adiabatic process. Or the ionization helps to heat even further?

WalterBright3• 12 years ago

When gas is compressed, it heats up. Moving rapidly through the air compresses the air in front, so it heats up.

It's as simple as that.

The ionization has nothing to do with it, though that probably reduces the heat slightly as it takes energy to ionize a gas.

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

Is friction a % of the heating, or is it negligible?

fsloth• 12 years ago

"Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage."

The foam strikes were not uncommon but they were not designed events. Rather, the organization went the slippery slope of considering unplanned debris "normal" since they had not caused any disasters before.

This leads me to think that the communications and security culture had not improved that much from the Challenger days then...

venomsnake2• 12 years ago

Worth the read

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

It was that way in the 80s. If it does not work as planned, but it has not broke yet - it is safe.

vlasev• 12 years ago

That's a very Kerbal way of dealing with things shudders

VLM4• 12 years ago

And to extend your correct remarks and combine them with the article "Russian roulette" section, at that time NASA had no idea if the insulation failure was the usual statistical thing, or if there was a procedure/material failure in that ramp and all ramps going forward, or there is some weird interaction such that the fumes from a slightly different tile glue ruins all current and future insulation.

What I'm getting at is part of what took months after the accident was ruling out a new, previously unknown problem, that might have doomed every single launch going forward rather than merely the russian roulette scenario. The article has a pretty bad case of 20/20 hindsight WRT this topic. Immediately after the accident NASA knew the risk of a ramp failure was about 6/100 and a resulting vehicle loss was about 1/100 but those are LOWER bounds, the upper failure bound due to a manufacturing change or supplier error might very well be 100% on both counts and it took months to rule that out.

If the problem had been a minor catalyst change in the foam chemistry such that every ramp fails under launch conditions, every time going forward, then launching Atlantis would result in two dead crew not one.

dexen• 12 years ago

On a lighter note, a 1983 TV movie [1] follows events on an high-speed passenger airplane accidentally launching into LEO and being rescued by two space shuttle missions.

Concepts shown included transfering passengers and crew through space by improvised means [2] and using a shuttle as sort of heat shield in front of the plane; one character realizes a shuttle could drop into the atmosphere ahead of Starflight, with Starflight riding the plough-wave; the wingtips would burn a little.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight:_The_Plane_That_Cou...

[2] among them, a coffin.

gambiting• 12 years ago

On a completely philosophical note - assuming it was actually fully finished, do you think the Buran Space Shuttle, which could fly fully autonomously, could be sent to rescue the astronauts without endangering more human lives? From what I understand it was ready to fly(it did complete a successful orbit launch and landing, fully automatically) but the whole project was mothballed because the Soviet Union collapsed. What if it wasn't? Would it be a viable alternative? And on a similar note - was there never any interest in automating the US Space Shuttles?

VLM4• 12 years ago

"do you think the Buran Space Shuttle, which could fly fully autonomously, could be sent to rescue the astronauts"

No, not enough fuel. Unless you ship that dude out of the USSR it doesn't have enough fuel, when launched from the USSR, to get to orbit with an inclination below maybe 45 or so degrees (nobody is absolutely sure and you can play a lot of geography games etc). It would have been super borderline at absolute best. Also "orbit" is fuzzy, so "could launch as low as 45 degrees" is technically true if you're cool with only achieving a temporary very low orbit, maybe 40-50 miles lower than columbia was. Of course you could try an insane rescue attempt like re-entering columbia while buran is re-entering and then you got 5 minutes to transfer... Umm this is sounding too hollywood movie to be considered.

Given an infinite tank of fuel or an infinitely low payload you can launch from any latitude into any inclination, but you always get best payload for least fuel if your orbit is over your latitude aka your inclination equals your latitude. This is why the ISS is in such a weird super-high inclination orbit, to make the Russians happy during the cold war.

blaze33• 12 years ago

Previous discussion in feb. 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7305224

The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

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