Here is what I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the loss of Columbia. You can follow the link to “Next Post” at the bottom to see subsequent posts in the subsequent days. My first speculative guess (TPS damage) turned out to be correct.
[Update a while later]
A golden oldie from that time.
I was down sick with the flu at the time. I remember my ex coming into our bedroom and telling me the news about Columbia. Soon we learned about the ice strike on the leading edge of the wing that doomed Columbia. (A reasonable speculation by Rand). It was also sometime later that we learned of NASA declining USAF offers of using National Reconnaissance assets that might have helped awaken NASA out of its presumptive slumber. But to what practical effect? To give the Columbia crew a chance to “put their affairs in order”? I still to this day remain unconvinced that this wasn’t a case of not wanting to know the bad news. In another scenario one could imagine the crew preferring a less painful death via CO2 asphyxiation and leaving the shuttle in orbit for follow on close damage inspections.
The net results to my mind were three distinct eras of the Space Shuttle legacy. The pre-Challenger era of the reliable & reusable “space truck”. Designed to carry cargo both to AND FROM orbit. Including fueled upper stages for exploration of our solar system (or for spying).
Then the post-Challenger era of far more modest expectations. Of a delivery system mainly focused on build out of the ISS but still reliable enough for crewed flight on a regular if less often basis. And the abandonment of Shuttle for EELVs by the military. Then finally the post-Columbia era of a flawed vehicle that is a dice roll every time it flies. That it had better be for a very good reason to risk crew aboard and that the sooner we decommission it (even if there’s no replacement) the better. Interesting that the flight architecture itself remained constant throughout these three eras. Only the perceptions changed.
ET foam strike not ice. Memory burp.
Both, actually. Ice-coated foam.
Happy belated birthday.
There were options ignored in favor of “let’s just take our chances.” Rescue mission was one. Pack the hole with bags of tools and water bags (to freeze). One I thought of at the time was to ship up a repair kit. The Russians could have done it, at the time, using a Progress. They could have lashed panels to the outside (probably robbed from other Shuttles) and glass blankets to stuff inside. It probably would have worked.
Columbia was in a low inclination orbit, IIRC 28.5 degrees. Progress is launched into a 51 degree inclination orbit and doesn’t have anything near the propulsive capability to change inclination that much.
Even if it didn’t work it would have been far better to try. As was, the Columbia “accident” reminded one of nothing quite so much as the Kitty Genovese case of the mid-60s where a New York woman was noisily and protractedly murdered within earshot, and even line-of-sight, of hundreds – none of whom did a thing to help her. The wormy and pitiless Big Apple has, of course, been the scene of countless equivalent scenarios since and they are now so common as to barely be noted.
We were spared any further such lugubrious episodes during the remainder of Shuttle’s checkered career even if far more by good fortune than by design – though Dr. Camarda on the STS-114 Return to Flight mission did smuggle aboard a wing leading edge repair kit of his own design.
And, of course, even with more than eight years between Columbia and Shuttle’s final mission, NASA barely managed to gin up a cargo resupply capability for ISS in the interim and pissed away an additional nine years standing up a crew transport capability.
Yet there are still far too many people who seem to think it would be some sort of national tragedy to hand the entire Artemis program over to Elon – including the funding of same. Why – other than leftist politics of course – can anyone still be that thick in the head? Absent Elon Musk, the US would have had no manned space program to speak of these past two decades-plus. I say we quit pretending NASA HSF will come back from the dead, give it a decent burial and leave HSF matters entirely in the self-funded hands of those both interested and capable of taking it on.
My goodness and wonder of wonders, Elon isn’t even the only one who would now step up.
The biggest mistake was simply not getting imagery. The cost would have been insignificant. Then we would know what happened. We may never have saved the crew, but they would have had a fighting chance. And the engineers would have known what to do for future missions, without the millions spent guessing.
If they obtained the imagery early in the mission, the crew could have taken measures to reduce the use of food and energy, perhaps buying some time to attempt some sort of rescue operation. At the time, launches were pretty infrequent, so there might not have been a rocket or Shuttle available to do anything. They might’ve had to pull heroic measures like Apollo 13 to save themselves.
As it was, they didn’t get any imagery until shortly before reentry, and the images didn’t show the underside of the spacecraft. By then, it was too late to do much had they known of the damage.
As an aside, the Kitty Genovese story is yet another example where poor reporting gets accepted as gospel. The New York Times article about her murder has been debunked for over a decade.
https://nypost.com/2014/02/16/book-reveals-real-story-behind-the-kitty-genovese-murder/
Thanks for finding that link to a story I read but didn’t remember where it was published.
I am shocked, shocked that a New York Times article would sensationalize a story for a political agenda.
The Times story wasn’t pushing a political agenda so much as just a crass pursuit of increased readership. The story, after all, was very much a matter that was already red meat to law-and-order Republicans of the period. Perhaps it was exactly those sorts the Times sought to get extra newspaper sales from.
But the story was also very much a paleo exercise in both class snobbery – Manhattan swells vs. the knuckle-dragging outer boroughs – and what we have come to call in more recent times “virtue signaling.”
The Post story doesn’t “debunk” the Times story so much as provide nuance that, in most ways, makes it worse. There was actual cowardice and indifference at play and the one person who acted otherwise was too late an arrival to affect the outcome and would, in all likelihood, have simply become a second victim had she shown up earlier.
But the Post story’s worst revelations are about the NYPD and the Times. The NYPD, in essence, threw ordinary residents of Queens under the bus to cover their own miscues – not that at least some of said residents didn’t have it coming. But the NYPD was assisted in this bit of self-serving obfuscation by a Times eager for a circulation blip even if it involved dumping on an entire borough of the city it supposedly served. But the Times, of course, has never been a New York paper so much as a specifically Manhattan paper – with the Hamptons and the tonier parts of Staten Island thrown in.
Obviously, thought experiments like these are flights of fancy. That said, the kind of particularist thinking exhibited here is exactly how NASA created these problems. What you hear in forums frequented by NASA engineers is, “Rockets are not Legos.” But that’s only true if said engineers deliberately design the Lego-ness out of them.
There was no fundamental reason why a Progress-M vehicle, equipped as suggested, could not have been launched with a Proton-M/Briz-M vehicle into a HEEO, such that the plane change could be effected at apogee and the Progress-M brought down to a rendezvous with Columbia. And, as it happens, both a Proton-M/Briz-M and Progress-M were present at Baikonur and ready to fly at the exact time needed.
Could it have been done? Yes. Would it have been done? Of course not. There are many, many particularist reason why it was impossible. Had it been tried, and failed, the crew would not be more dead than they already were. If it’d been up to me, all rescue possibilities would have been tried. But instead, it was left up to luck. I’ve been rebuked for those kinds of thoughts.
Not by me. Although my reply admittedly sounds fatalist, I’m sure had NASA, via visual evidence, gotten their collective heads pulled out of the sand (or elsewhere) about the potential of an ET foam (with ice) strike causing a catastrophic failure of the TPS, some attempt at rescue would have been made.
One would have hoped it would have been an all-hands on deck, all possibilities explored scenario. Possibly the best opportunity to demonstrate internal co-operation in space since Apollo-Soyuz.
internal -> international
The question remains, did they (NASA) really want to know the truth, when the anomaly was presented well in time to do something about it, or was it another case of ‘settled science’?
Just reviewed the video of Mission Control during Columbia’s last re-entry. One could tell, by the facial reactions of many of the controllers, that they knew the craft was doomed from the telemetry indications they were already getting from hydraulic temperature sensors all during the interval (a short one, less than one minute) while they were still in voice contact with the crew.
Reading the report on what happened to the crew is grim. At least they were rendered unconscious and died from broken necks before being exposed to the “hypersonic wind.”