Columbia's Final Minutes in Detail 494
grub writes "This article on Newsday has an excerpt from 'Comm Check... The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia,' by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood describing the last minutes of Columbia's final flight in detail."
A moment of silence (Score:2, Insightful)
The complexity... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the purpose of this? (Score:-1, Insightful)
All this does is provide an opportunity to rubberneck.
No Disrespect intended. (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't think it was so bad until I read this... (Score:5, Insightful)
IIRC (if I read correctly) they were about 19 miles up when the fuselage broke apart... So this astronaut had about that far to fall before coming to rest on the ground.
I saw it over and over again on TV and thought, well, at least it was instant and there's nothing left... I was wrong and I now have deep sorrow for these individuals.
Re:I didn't think it was so bad until I read this. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hot Gas != Plasma (Score:4, Insightful)
Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]
Survivability? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure how the crew can survive by "bailing out" of a doomed orbiter during re-entry (take-off is another matter entirely). Once the orbiter drops below a certain speed, a return to orbit is impossible anda very hot descent is inevitable. This "bail out" logic sounds like surviving an elevator crash by stepping out at the first floor to me.
Unless the crew module can gracefully decelerate to less than hypersonic speeds, exiting the compartment is instant death.
Re:I didn't think it was so bad until I read this. (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't make things any better to know that though.
Steve
Re:I didn't think it was so bad until I read this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Karma me down, but I'm just amazed how quickly information about Columbia's last moments is filtering to the media (and the lack of relative umbrage from family and pundits).
In contrast, it took years for NASA to admit that, yes, the astronauts aboard Challenger were most likely aware during their final descent, but that information was quickly coupled with admonishment not to dwell on it, out of respect for the families of the astronauts.
Re:Survivability? (Score:4, Insightful)
bad management kills (Score:5, Insightful)
There are none so blind as those who refuse to see. The folks at NASA could have seen this coming by listening to the engineers who wanted to get a closer look at the spots hit by the foam. The folks at NASA should have been watching for this type of situation if any attention had been paid to the follow up of the Challenger explosion.
It is simply not true that this tragedy was unavoidable and that there was no way to see this coming. The most complicated machine ever built was not knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam. This was murder by management.
Re:The complexity... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to sound cold here, but astronauts know the risks involved yet people line up to get into the programs. Space flight is a damn risky proposition but if I could get in, I'd be there in a second.
Discovery costs lives. Countless explorers drowned over many centuries in the quest for knowledge yet people kept getting on ships wondering what's over the horizon.
Only 38% found... (Score:5, Insightful)
More than 25,000 searchers, who scoured a debris "footprint" that was 645 miles long, found 84,900 individual pieces, about 38 percent of the space shuttle.
Does this not make one wonder how much of the shuttle might still be "out there" waiting to be found, or perhaps sitting on display in someone's house? Granted, much of it would have been literally vaporized, however I think that would amount to far less than the remaining 62% of Columbia.
I heard on CNN that pages of Ilan Ramon's journal were found recently in Texas. A quick google news turned up this article on the Post. [nypost.com]
It has also been stated that remains from all seven astronauts were recovered, and that some of the organisms on the shuttle actually survived.
This all points to the possibility that there is still more shuttle out there, and that perhaps we could be finding Columbia piece by precious piece for years to come...
Re:May their souls rest in peace. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:May their souls rest in peace. (Score:2, Insightful)
Timely: Tomorrow is Challenger's 17th anniversary (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll be outside at about 1130am tomorrow, looking up at the skies as I do every year, thanking that shuttle crew for their sacrifice.
Re:May their souls rest in peace. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I didn't think it was so bad until I read this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hot Gas != Plasma (Score:1, Insightful)
Static can be a huge problem in pipes that move large amounts of non-polar fluids. Guess what most gasses in the upper atmosphere are? Non-polar fluids. So, there is your ionized high velocity, high temperature gas. Plasma.
I don't know alot about the shuttle's design, but I'd guess that if you talked with some NASA aerospace engineers they'd confirm this phenomenon. It's got to be a factor with all very fast aircraft.
Expensive mistake = critical lessons (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Challenger's crew, the Columbia astronauts met their fates alone and the details will never be known.
The initial government line is always that that people die instantly. After the Challenger crew compartment was recovered, it surfaced that some of crew's PEAPs (Personal Egress Air Packs) had been activated. This lead to the debate on whether anyone was conscious prior to impact with the ocean, and if there was any improvements that could be made to escape such a fate.
It may seem morbid as first but spacecraft, unlike automobiles, aren't as easy to crash-test. This promotes learning as much as you can from the mistakes.
Unfortunately, its unlikely more meaningful debris will be recovered from the Columbia.
Re:bad management kills (Score:5, Insightful)
So every fatal car accident caused by untimely mechanical failure is "murder by manufacturer"?
Every precaution SHOULD be taken to prevent tragedies like this, but calling it "murder by management" is far too harsh a term that unjustly impunes the motives of NASA administrators.
Sometimes you just have to accept the fact that shit happens.
Re:bad management kills (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure. If you create an atmosphere of 'everything must be 100% safe', no engineer would ever approve anything, no astronaut would ever don a spacesuit.
It was human error, and a regrettable one... probably rooted in the difficulty of comprehending physics so far beyond our everyday experience.
Re:I didn't think it was so bad until I read this. (Score:2, Insightful)
A very sobering thought.
Re:Last heard (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a really kind, articulate thing to say. If you actually read the article, you'd realize the intensity and horror of the event. I'm glad that your life has been so blessed that you haven't experienced anything so terrible in it, but please be sensitive to the fact that people lost their lives. Maybe next time you should think about being more courteous about tragedies such as this?
Re:May their souls rest in peace. (Score:3, Insightful)
A million starving children is a Bad Thing, but it is not tragedy [theliterarylink.com]
Seven (14) astronauts and a $3B spacecraft (oops, two of 'em), dying because of fucking powerpoint slides written in bureaucratese, however, is about as tragic as it gets.
That applies double when it's the second time this has happened.
And finally, if - after riding a million pounds of explosives into orbit, phoning home about a foam strike once you get there, being told "Naw, our experts told us it weren't nuthin' to worry yer pretty little heads about", and then seeing the diagnostic panel light up like a Christmas tree as your wing collapses and your ship yaws hard, and your last thoughts probably including "Oh shit, I wonder if we've lost a wing?" doesn't qualify as a "moment of discovery in which the hero realizes what has happened to him", I don't know what does.
Opportunity to reflect (Score:3, Insightful)
We can do the same.
Where were you when this happened? (Score:3, Insightful)
May God rest their brave souls in peace.
Re:The complexity... (Score:5, Insightful)
From here until the end of the lifespan, there will be only a few trips. The odds of a problem are low enough that we'll probably get through those with no more accidents.
At this point it's like software: it's too complex to fix, so you start from scratch. I feel bad about that, just like I do throwing away mostly-functioning software, but it's got to go.
Re:Survivability? (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the forward RCS rockets, RCS fuel tanks [nasa.gov], GPCs, and avionics bays are located in the nose. That makes the nose the heaviest portion of that part of the orbiter, ensuring a nose down descent. If the thermal insulation was changed to let the crew compartment survive heating, and if the RCS rockets were powerful enough, and had enough fuel to retro fire the module to a sane speed where parachutes were usable, It might be possible. Though none of the shuttles systems were designed with something like that in mind.
Re:The complexity... (Score:5, Insightful)
Those are the type of people I hope to run into in the afterlife. Those that died doing something, not of something.
Re:What is the purpose of this? (Score:2, Insightful)
I, for one, find myself wondering what happened in the final seconds, both from a personal perspective (how long did they know, how long did they survive, etc.) and a scientific one (what, exactly, happens to a shuttle wing when there's a hole in it during re-entry, etc.).
Every time I get more information, I can put some of those thoughts away. Eventually, maybe we can all put enough of our thoughts away so that we can move on.
Re:A moment of silence (Score:4, Insightful)
It's odd (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is the purpose I find (Score:4, Insightful)
We see here how the astronauts lives depended critically on technology performing flawless during a complex series of steps, and begs us to wonder how many times in our own life we also depend on technology performing a flawless series of steps. This doesn't just have to be your car your job, but perhaps you live close to a nuclear power plant. One could easily imagine a series of assumptions in this environment leading to even more tragic consequences.
I will not go into my job description, and this is little in my everyday performance of it to remind me that at times peoples'
lives might depend on me having done it correctly and not having cut corners. We are all part of very complex web of interactions both personal and technological. Poignant descriptions of events likes these are a wake up call and a reminder we all have responsibilities to those around us to do our best everyday.
Re:I didn't think it was so bad until I read this. (Score:2, Insightful)
mercifully brief?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
IT was 2 minutes from the time all hell broke loos until the died! 2 freaking minutes!
Ever hold your breath for two minutes? While somebody you don't know is forceably holding your head under water?
Most roller coster last about 40 seconds.
Definition of Heroes (Score:2, Insightful)
To me, what makes them heroes, and the other shuttle crews just as heroic, is knowing that they could die a spectacular flaming death, but getting on the shuttle anyhow.
Re:A moment of silence (Score:1, Insightful)
The real tragedy (Score:3, Insightful)
The real tragedy is using this as an excuse to keep flying the shuttle and killing more astronauts. The US needs to develop a new vehicle ASAP. NASA needs to step up to the plate, admit that the shuttle is too unsafe to fly as is and too old to reengineer, and get the money to develop its replacement on a fast track. A number of opportunities to develop a replacement and retire the shuttle were wasted before the loss of Columbia. NASA is unwilling to risk ending the shuttle program, their most prominent icon, and their fixation on it blinds them to other possibilities. There are ways to keep the ISS operating and astronauts flying without ever launching another shuttle. NASA just doesn't have the political will to pursue them.
The "studies" of in-flight repair are hideous examples of a cheap hack gone too far. It should be a joke. Who would ever voluntarily go through re-entry in a shuttle with a hand-patched wing?
Why won't NASA just admit that the shuttle is a first-generation vehicle and cannot be "fixed"? Why doesn't NASA recognize that Soyuz, and Apollo for that matter, prove that space flight can be much safer than the shuttle? When was the American way ever to throw people's lives away when there was an alternative?
The shuttle is just a piece of hardware. It has killed fourteen people. Walk away from it. Put the remaining three orbiters in museums. Move on.
Re:It's odd (Score:2, Insightful)
Home probably never felt further away for those astronauts when the shuttle started yawing out of control.
Tom
Complexity? Try basics! (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that amazes me is the 1969 moon mission. Ever see the kind of equipment those guys had back then? Think about what kinds of computing power they had with them. Your car has more computing power than the Apollo mission modules.
Ask yourself this: Would you volunteer for a moon mission using the same equipment as they did in '69? From today's perspective, it'd be suicide! And yet, back then, that was the state of the art, and people did it. Amazing.
Re:A moment of silence (Score:3, Insightful)
Video & photo documentation archived? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know much of it is copyrighted by various parties but an event like this deserves to be properly documented online.
It's not a plasma, something else (Score:4, Insightful)
Ordinary Life vs The Dream (Score:4, Insightful)
(You may argue against that, but have *you* worked out a way to end hunger, to end want, to wave back the forces of nature? No, you haven't. And nor has anyone else. But people *have* worked out how to send people into space - to other worlds, even - and bring them back safely. But yet...)
People dying in the most complex piece of technology ever created, exploring the most dangerous environment known, when they have the backing of the greatest concentration of human brainpower on the planet, and it *could* have been prevented if the bureaucrats hadn't ignored the engineers and scientists... that depresses me. That tells me everything I don't want to hear about humanity. That tells me the Dream - of accomplishing the impossible, of pushing the boundaries, of going beyond mundane everyday existance and achieving what conventional wisdom believes cannot be done - is dead. After reading the Atlantic article, to find that fucking PowerPoint slides helped contribute to the destruction of the Columbia and the death of the astonauts when there was a chance they could have been saved... Jesus Christ!
It's not like I don't feel sorry if I hear that people have died somewhere. It's just that I feel more sorry if they die in space. I can't explain it, but the idea of space travel has always stirred powerful feelings in me... and to have them shattered by what after investigation turn out to be the most stupid of reasons (metric/imperial confusion, slightly too low temperatures at launch, a piece of foam I could hold in my hands) really hits me hard.
Hell, I was depressed all Christmas Day after learning that Beagle 2 had basically cratered. Maybe you might think my priorities are wrong if I care about the fate of a machine, but it's not just the hardware - it's the hopes of all the people who worked to create it, and hoped to discover something new about the universe, being shattered.
(Plus I want to get on good terms early on with our new robot overlords...)
Re:Nasa won't learn (Score:3, Insightful)
Even had it been launched as light as possible it could not have altered its orbit enough from shuttles nominal orbit to match ISS orbit & altitude. The OMS system simply does not have enough delta V capacity for such drastic changes in orbit. thus such plans suggested by some like jettisoning the space hab and thus the large protion of its payload weight on orbit would have been of no avail. However the lower weight upon re-entry may or may not have made a difference in the ability of the damaged wing to survive re-entry.. the question is would such a difference have been significant enough.
The two most promissing prospects for resuce of Columbia where
1) Going to minimum survival rations and atmosphere management. Launch Atlantis on an accelerated time scale. It was already slated for launch in about a month, Figure with around the clock work the time to launch could have been brought to a third with no loss of man hours ( assuming its prep work was only taking one shift of work a day ). That in addition to cutting some checks like its current payload complement being pulled for rescue gear and it could likely have been ready to launch in relatively short order. Easily withen the range of a stretched life support regimen aboard Columbia.
Concerns. Rushing a launch prep process that just put a critically wounded bird in orbit. The foam strikes were known and now that you decide to rush Atlantis launch you also know it could cause critical damage. Thus in deciding the situation is grave enough to launch Atlantis for rescue you know the threat of foam debris has been under estimated to date and Atlantis faces the exact same elevated risk.
Assumptions. You have managed to determine beyond a doubt Columbia cannot survive re-entry and that a rescue is the ONLY option. Again this assumption goes hand in hand with understanding the go to launch Atlantis will incur the same as yet under estimated risk of crippling Atlantis and thus stranding to birds in orbit with Two crews.
2) Repair. Ideas ranged from palcing all excess metal tools and bric a brac scavanged from the Mid deck and space hab into the breach in hopes of delaying the inevitable burn through presented by a carbon carbon panel breach. Second filling the breach with water which freezes into ice for similar purpose or some combination of the two posibilities.. IE all the metal then frozen into place by water.
Concerns. Requires EVA to the very un EVA friedly underwing area of the shuttle without the use of the 'Jet Pack' or Canada arm. If a sufficient teather was available the threat of a EVA floating away would have been minimal but such reveory would be exhausting and time consuming.
Secondly there was some debate over whether placing material in the breach would make it more survivable or less surviveable during re-entry... IE may have just created molten slag that led to a quicker decintigration of the wing.
Assumptions. Again you have to determin beyond doubt the orbiter is breached to a sufficient degree to warrent a very dangerous EVA. Granted its a given if you know the danger exists. Hindsight tells us it did but that does not change the fact it was not known at the time. Perhaps Military assets could have sufficiently resolved the wing to determin the leading edge was breached.. perhaps not. We will not know until the military releases the resolving capability of its assests in regards to objects in LEO or when Atlantis Returns to flight and such capabilities are put to the test. Off hand I have heard rumors and old hands tales that the capacity would have been more than capable.
Personal Conclusions.
I would have sent Atlantis. The foam strike was almost literally a 1-100 crap shoot. Perhaps you draw the same c
Re:Nasa won't learn (Score:2, Insightful)
The scariest scenario was to use another shuttle without proper preparation. Such a mission would have a significant chance of failure, and such a failure would involve the loss of additional life. Probably any crew would have willing to take that risk, but would NASA allow such a mission?
In the end, there is no way to know if anything would have been different. Would we have risked another set of lives on the off chance we can save everyone? If we managed to get the Columbia crew to a capsule and the capsule failed, wouldn't we still be having this second guessing conversation?
As has been pointed out, exploration is risky. If we are going into space more lives will be lost, perhaps without the neat resolutions we have been blessed with thus far.
Re:Nasa won't learn (Score:4, Insightful)
In my opinion, best case scenario, you use spy satellites to take images of the left wing leading edge and belly on flight day 2. Upon finding damage, you decide the next day to attempt to scramble a shuttle with a crew of 2 (we can bring 9 back). I believe the estimation was that we could get a shuttle up in 10 days, but you're running a huge risk by forgoing the normal safety checks required before flight. Mission control would have the extra stress of flying simultaneous shuttle missions - never been done before. You have the added risk of multiple space walks required to transfer crews (don't be lead to believe that these are a walk in the park either). And to top it all off, you run the risk of losing your rescue vehicle to boot. Would it be the right thing to do? Probably. Gotta wonder what the outcry would be if you lost 2 vehicles and 9 people!!
You mention that Soyuz was at a higher orbit, which means more energy. But that doesn't mean we can "coast" to a lower orbit at a different inclination - any change in your orbital geometry would have to come from a burn of some sort.
Future shuttle flights will probably be restricted to ISS inclinations, even if it's strictly a science mission as opposed to an ISS assembly mission, to save the possibility to dock and hang out if an emergency is encountered.
Re:Complexity? Try basics! (Score:2, Insightful)
In a heartbeat, no hesitation whatsoever. To be that significant a part of the greatest endeavor mankind has ever achieved was what kept me going through my aerospace degree. The short time I spent at NASA (before budget cutbacks caused the first NASA layoffs ever) is still the most memorable and amazing part of my life. I am saddened by the bean-counters and professional managers that seem to have sucked the life and spirit of adventure out of the NASA culture that I knew. While I was there the feeling that everyone was on the edge (or sometimes in the middle of) the most amazing discoveries was palpable. The conversations overheard or participated in in the lunchroom were so far outside of "normal" life that sometimes I had trouble re-adjusting to dealing with "normal" people and conversation.
After all this time I still miss it.