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."
Re:Hot Gas != Plasma (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hot Gas != Plasma (Score:3, Interesting)
Practically speaking, I don't think it makes a great deal of difference to the story. But it's the tangents that make science fun.
Re:May their souls rest in peace. (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Hats off to those brave souls.
one thing i don't understand (Score:5, Interesting)
though, what could be done 81 seconds after beginning re-entry? anything besides acknowledge that you're going to die? if you level your course, instead of going down into the atmosphere will you just gradually burn up? I'm thinking, skim the outter atmosphere, since the air is thin it isn't having a drastic effect on the structure (compared with a few minutes later the change in atmosphere rips into the shuttle a lot more). skip out of the atmosphere and resume some sort of drift through space. try to control the drift so you're not hurtling into nothingness, although if your travelling at 1,568 mph maybe that is a little far fetched. then, assess the damage, and deal with it somehow (emergency rescue mission, repairs if at all possible?).
i am not a rocket scientist. but at what point of re-entry is it too late to do any sort of constructive abort?
Really never thought it would happen again (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard complaints about feeding starving people instead of exploring space, and that does sound compelling in light of the fact that there is so much human suffering, but I believe (as do many) that space exploration represents a greater destiny for mankind.
Maybe that destiny could be put off a few decades while we solve all the world's problems, but I don't want that long.
It's like that t-shirt my one trekkie buddy used to wear, "The meek shall inherit the Earth... the rest of us shall go to the stars."
Re:Survivability? (Score:3, Interesting)
Humans have free fallen from as high as 19 miles with nothing more than a pressure suite and a hypersonic drag/parachute system.
It's lurid, but I love these forensic accounts (Score:2, Interesting)
We all die alone and nothing can change this fact. How our own lives will end is the ultimate question. Why wouldn't we all be interested in the minutia of how other lives ended. I put myself into their seats and feel the fear and guess at the oblivion that followed. It is natural and I refuse to apologize for these supposedly sick feelings.
Re:I didn't think it was so bad until I read this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Although they've apparently already redesigned the way the foam is applied (or how it works... I forget) so this won't happen again, this and the description of the Challenger breakup both have that one point in common, as noted in the article: The survivability study concluded relatively modest design changes might enable future crews to survive long enough to bail out.
Am I the only one that finds those words hauntingly familiar? I could have sworn the very same thing was said when they finally puzzled out Challenger. I hope they actually figure out a way to do it this time.
Re:Nasa won't learn (Score:5, Interesting)
What I have always wondered is: if they had known, could they have hung out at the ISS and waited for NASA to send up a rescue craft? The Columbia will not have had enough food or oxygen for any extended period of time, but the ISS should have had. A rescue craft coming up a couple of weeks later could have replaced both and taken the crew home.
No idea if this was feasable.
Re:Nasa won't learn (Score:1, Interesting)
Infuriating quote at the start. (Score:5, Interesting)
It takes s special breed of bureaucratic self serving bozo to describe this accident in the most bizzarre terms possible then say something like "I don't know how anyone could have seen that coming" when the truth is people DID see it coming and tried their darndest to stop it happening and long before this NASA had been running foam inmapct studies due to earlier strikes.
Re:Atlantic Monthly (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be very informative if they could add all the existing amateur and telemetric film footage to what was being said in Mission Control during Columbias re-entry. Maybe even show the wreckage that had already reached the ground while flight engineers in Florida are still discussing what may be going on.
A must read (Score:2, Interesting)
However, the final paragraphs describing the last minutes of the crew is quite touching. One can't imagine the horror of the last moments of the crew. Mercifully though, it seems that the end was swift.
Re:Hot Gas != Plasma (Score:4, Interesting)
As I recall, this is how matter arrives at the plasma state
1. Start with some matter.
2. Suck out all the other gasses surrounding that original matter.
3. Seal the container.
4. Heat it up beyond the boiling point, maintain a constant volume.
5. Some of the liquid will become a gas as it boils off. The partial pressure mixture of gas and liquid will equalize and as more heat enters the system more of it will boil out of the liquid phase as gas, and the density of the gas will increase.
6. The pressure inside the container increases.
7. Keep adding heat. Eventually the density of the superheated gas will be the same as the density of the frothy liquid and the state of the entire volume will be roughly the same - this is called Plasma.
I don't recall it having anything to do with electrically charged particles, or electrons being stripped away.
I suggest that you consider foam (mental vision : put ice cream in a tall glass, pour root beer over it - the foam is the fluffy stuff on top
Consider the conditions of the re-entrant space shuttle : hauling ass through upper atmosphere. Friction of the atmosphere on the wing leading edges causing both friction induced heat and pressure. The metal that comprises the shuttle providing the 'matter' in step #1 above, is super-heated and pushed under intense pressure through cracks in the superstructure. Depending on the pressure and temperature, it could have possibly been 'plasma' as I understand it, or it could have been really hot molten metal (which when sprayed on you, feels a lot like plasma, I envision.)
I have a Chrysler minivan to sell you (Score:3, Interesting)
So every fatal car accident caused by untimely mechanical failure is "murder by manufacturer"?
There's a decent-sized step from "In this case NASA didn't exercise the proper degree of caution, and its culture seems to have quashed the concerns of engineers who were worried about this happening" and "Every untimely mechanical failure resulting in death is murder."
Early Chrysler minivan hatch failures resulted in a number of unintended deaths due to failures in rear-end collisions. Not astonishing news, nor did it necessarily imply culpable behavior on Chrysler's part. However, when the company tried to suppress crash test reporting [safetyforum.com] that showed how bad the problem was -- and particularly when an internal memo showed up that said they could improve the latches for 25 to 50 cents apiece, but that doing so would seem to concede that the earlier ones had a problem [joyelawfirm.com] -- then you got a very bad picture of how the company's management had dealt with a safety hazard. Having a problem is one thing; compromising your attempt to fix the problem for reasons to do with bureaucratic self-protection, that's filth. (Scarier example: Bush administration opposing the investigation of 9/11 in every way it can.)
NASA's people did know this foam could be a problem, they'd kept track of the patterns of tile damage for that reason. During Columbia's last flight there were engineers on the ground who were incredulous: those above them were taking the position that the risk of foam damage wasn't worth doing anything about.
Yes, it was an unintended mechanical failure -- but management had something to do with how it went down. Management had to do with the lessons of Challenger not being learned. "Murder" isn't the word, okay, but "shit happens" doesn't keep it from happening again.
The durable crew compartment (Score:3, Interesting)
For a system designed with virtually no abort capability it is interesting that that the crew compartment survived intact immediately after both shuttle disasters. Perhaps if the compartment designed to be detached in the extreme aerodynamic and thermal environment it could have slowed to subsonic speed and have been recoverable by parachute. B-1B bombers have a similar recovery system, though they do not fly in as extreme an environment.
Re:Breaking orbit? (Score:3, Interesting)
Right, which means you need two rockets. One facing forward slowing you down, they already have that (for re-entry, though I'm not sure if it is good enough for this task). It just needs more fuel than they currently carry with them. I doupt it is significant alone, but still quite a bit more, which means loss of payload capacity.
The second rocket is very tricky though. It needs to be powerful enough to keep them above the atmosphere, and slowly get more powerful as forward speed (orbit) slowed. This will need a lot of fuel, more than they carry with them.
As a kid I played several different "lunar landers", and they all had one thing in common: either you wouldn't use your rocket enough, and crash going too fast; or you would use it too much and crash because you ran out of fuel before you hit the ground. It takes a lot of fuel to power a rocket. I don't know if they can get that much fuel in space. Must less do useful science once they arrive. It would for sure cut down the payload of the shuttle. I suspect it could be done for a 2 person crew shuttle with no science mission.
Re:I didn't think it was so bad until I read this. (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed, and I respect them as well. Screw Star Trek, these are the true explorers, and I hope their curiosity and wonderment lives on as an example for the rest of humanity.
But, with that being said, why don't we care about the soldiers, peace keepers, missionaries, etc. that die every day, in countries all over the world, trying to help? Just because they're not going on a relatively routine mission into a place with no atmosphere doesn't make their jobs any less important, nor does this mean they don't deserve our respect for their sacrifice.
Not to take anything away from the crew of the Columbia, but I don't agree with ignoring the less "interesting" (in the scientific research sense of the word) sacrifices.
But those that do amazing things tend to be more focused on people than those that do more mundane, or in some cases, less enviable tasks.
Re:Survivability? (Score:3, Interesting)
That is, equip the compartment with its own heatshield. And while you're at it, get rid of all the useless and dangerous surrounding stuff like wings etc. That is, build a conventional capsule like Soyuz or Apollo. Which is what they're planning to do, right?
Re:Did you read the CAIB report? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A moment of silence (Score:3, Interesting)
The thought that they were still alive 26 miles up
test it with this sim. (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orb
You can make your own space ships etc..
Sorrow.. and how to deal with Plasma... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm acquainted with plasma, the ionized(electrically conductive) gas, and I've always wondered why they don't use magnetic fields to help steer the plasma away from the critical areas, ie. leading edge of the wings and nose. What would it take to generate such a field?
I can understand if there is a lot of power required, but couldn't some of it be taken from the supersonic plasma/airstream in some way, perhaps through MHD(MagnetoHydroDynamically)? In this way you would have a self balancing system, as the ship goes deeper into the atmosphere, where it's hotter, more power would be generated, and thus the field strength could increase?
I'm not a plasma physicist, but there would seem to be some merit in such an idea for re-entry craft such as the shuttle. Anybody of the appropriate technical persuasion have any comments about such an idea?
In memorium.
Re:A moment of silence (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I'd say it seems pretty likely that at least some of the crew were alive (possibly even conscious, depending on the g-forces in the crew cabin) up to the moment the cabin itself disintegrated.
*shudder*
In any case, I don't think there's any doubt that they knew what was happening to them...
We will never forget you.
SB
What's really amaving to me (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A moment of silence (Score:2, Interesting)
Many of us, after reading such a graphic detail of the possible horrors of exploration, would still volunteer to go up tomorrow. Truly, those that were lost have a legacy that continues. RIP.
Re:Did you read the CAIB report? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Did you read the CAIB report? (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest issue is the effort taken to change orbit. You are travelling at orbital velocity in one direction and then you want to change that direction by 20 degrees, which takes some work.
Thanks for the link. What is interesting is that if the Space Shuttle was declared irreperable, then the shuttle could also change inclination somewhat using the fuel earmarked for reentry. WHilst it cannot hope to get to the altitude of the ISS, it could possibly get into a more compatible orbit.
Re:Complexity? Try basics! (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact is that a moon mission today is impossible despite the rantings of the non-elected, intellectually challenged, presidential impostor, because the software and other complexity issues would make it cost far too much, take far too long, and probably suffer a BSOD.....
Another factor to consider is that in those days the semiconductor industry did support aerospace, which basically they do not nowadays, (it would be less than 0.2% of the total industry output) there are hardly any components fully screened as part of the manufacturing process for example. The surface mount packaging we have to use today has many reliability problems in adverse environments, particularly in coping with temperature cycling, and the packages are not even moisture-proof (not that it matters in space, but it does on the ground!). It would be impossible today to duplicate the reliability of an Apollo computer. BTW I currently work as a Reliability Analyst in a safety-critical industry, so I might know a little bit about the subject.
I have an article in front of me which suggests that the failure rate of the Apollo Guidance Computer was less than 10 in a billion hours, that equates to about the same as one small to medium chip or 5 to 10 best-quality transistors nowadays.
Why? Blame the consumer industry, PCs and mobile phones, areas where solid-state electronics is of no vital importance, but which dominate the semiconductor market. In all fairness, it is true to say that the quality of a normal commercial quality components has improved greatly over the years, but this can rarely be proved, and there is simply no way of getting the extreme reliability rtequired for manned missions, unless by using a much greater degree of redundancy, and therefore more complexity, than used to be the case.
Not only that, but with the increase in bloat in complex systems, overall software reliability is declining, hastened by "unsafe" languages like C++, and the tendency to use "junk" operating systems (we all know which, it has been debated here many times...) in critical applications.
This generation is making backward progress, and with the rise in the use of cannabis and other mind-damaging drugs as a direct result of corrupt government policy, it will soon be impossible to get sufficient fully sane people to undertake a major project anyway.