I ran across this old piece I wrote a few months after the loss of Columbia. It has some of the underlying themes of what later became the book, and holds up pretty well, I think.
One thought on “Hindsight, Twenty Twenty”
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I ran across this old piece I wrote a few months after the loss of Columbia. It has some of the underlying themes of what later became the book, and holds up pretty well, I think.
Comments are closed.
You pretty much nailed it, and the later release of the investigation supports your conclusions in the main.
However, there was an option *IF* NASA had known, pre-reentry, that there was critical damage. (and this is why I condemn them for calling off any attempts to find out.).
It was just the same as the Apollo 13 situation you mention; an option that there was no harm in trying. And also, no cost. And also, unlike with Apollo 13, there were many more lives at risk than those in orbit.
No launches needed, no unfeasible attempt to stay in orbit long enough for rescue. The option was twofold; let the astronauts try to save themselves, and secondly, use a different ground track for reentry so that if disaster happened, you weren’t putting so many innocent lives on the ground at risk for no reason. (the latter, alone, would have been well worth the imaging attempt)
The survivability option (essentially #2 on your scale) was basically this; find and patch the hole. Stuff it with small bags of water and fiber (from seat stuffing or clothing, thus making pykete when it freezes, which melts slower than ice), and top it with anything they could lay their hands on with a high melt point and had a low IR albedo (steel sheeting? Aluminum in a pinch… even a few layers of mylar) . This would have delayed the lethal burn through. Would it have delayed it long enough to matter? At best, maybe … but maybe was a hell of a lot better than what they had. Could they have done the needed spacewalk? I think they could have found a way (probably involving lashing a few things together to form a bar from the cargo bay to the affected area). But, again, it would be damn hard, so at best, their chances of getting it done are “maybe”. But it sure wouldn’t have hurt to look at the idea.
What I blame NASA for is not trying to find out what the damage was; they’d seen the impact, which is why they were concerned in the first place, but they waved off the attempt to try to image Columbia for damage. I call that “the ostrich approach”. You can’t, by definition, know what your options (if any) are until you know what the problem is.