Much later, while the debris recovery effort was going on in East Texas, the trajectory analysts put together an estimated plot of where the Columbia pieces would have come down for a 1 rev late deorbit. The toe of the ellipse – where the heaviest pieces would come down – cut across the southwestern suburbs of Houston. My home – my wife – would have been in the target zone where the 2 ton steel main engine combustion chambers would have hit the ground at supersonic speeds. JSC would have been at ground zero for the debris; the MCC would likely have been struck. That is a scenario that is just too implausible for words.
Knowing what we now know, it might have seemed, in some sense, ironic, poetic justice.
Paul Spudis explains why it should keep its name. “Armstrong” should be reserved for a lunar base, if the government ever builds one (I suspect that there will be a private one first).
Former flight controller (and Shuttle program manager) Wayne Hale has been writing a series of blog posts about his recollections of the events leading up to the disaster. This week, he recalls the harbinger of the previous flight, that should have warned NASA about the problem, but didn’t.
Sorry, but I think that this would be disrespectful to both Hugh Dryden and Neil Armstrong. Leave the name as it is, and come up with something else to name after Neil, that would be worthy of him. Like the first lunar base. Assuming NASA ever builds one. Which seems doubtful.
Here’s a post from the fiftieth anniversary, with links galore, and here’s what I wrote last year.
Note that today is also the eighth anniversary of the winning of the X-Prize. If Virgin Galactic hadn’t made so many bad decisions in the aftermath of that event, they’d probably be flying passengers by now.
I wonder what color the sky is on that planet? I’d fisk it, but I’m trying to finish up my space safety paper, and I’m getting ready to go to the AIAA conference in Pasadena tomorrow (and possibly Wednesday and Thursday, depending on how useful it seems).
ICBMs were never designed to be highly reliable, because to do so would have dramatically increased their costs (many hundreds of them were built), and it wasn’t necessary for their mission. They were designed to be launched in massive numbers, and if a few out of a hundred didn’t make it through, that was all right, because they were often redundant in their targeting (that is, more than one missile would be aimed at a key target). Some estimates at the time of the reliability of the Titan II was only 80% or so (that is, one in five would not deliver its payload to the designated target), based on the fact that eight of its initial thirty-three test launches were failures. The early manned spaceflights were performed on modified versions of them (specifically, the Redstone and Atlas for Mercury and Titan II for Gemini). But what was good enough for a weapon as part of a fusillade of dozens or hundreds wasn’t perceived to be for a single flight carrying a human, particularly with recent memories of nationally televised ignominious failures of rockets on the launch pad. Thus was born the pernicious (and now obsolete) concept of “man rating,” which confuses the space industry and obfuscates policy down to this very day.