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NASA's Theoretical Rescue Plan for Columbia

posted by janrinok on Friday February 28 2014, @03:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the Are-you-sure-this-will-work dept.

germanbird writes:

"ArsTechnica has published a story taking a look at NASA's theoretical rescue plan for the space shuttle Columbia. The ambitious yet plausible plan was included as part of the report prepared during the investigation after the shuttle was lost during re-entry. I appreciate the author's perspective and his analysis of things as a sys-admin at Boeing he was much closer to the situation than most of us were. I for one would have liked to see the men and women at NASA given the chance to try to pull this one off, but I'm not sure it would have been worth the risk to the rescue team or even possible given the compressed schedule."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by dotdotdot on Friday February 28 2014, @04:16PM

    by dotdotdot (858) on Friday February 28 2014, @04:16PM (#8738)

    The comments by STS_Engineer at the end of the article are well worth the read. Here are some excerpts:

    The proposed plan in this article would have been even more difficult because there was no opportunity to use the RMS (robotic arm) to grapple Columbia.

    I am extremely dubious that the manual station keeping would be doable even just from a propellant standpoint ... I don't think there is anywhere near enough RCS fuel ....

    The only hope that this plan would have ever had would have been if the plan had already been in place prior to Columbia's launch, as there is no way on this Earth that NASA would have approved a flight with untested procedures that could destroy both orbiters.

    Sadly, I can't see a path where this would have actually been feasible.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by CoolHand on Friday February 28 2014, @04:29PM

    by CoolHand (438) on Friday February 28 2014, @04:29PM (#8750)

    Yes, I was wondering throughout the entire article why it was that they did not have standby shuttles for rescue operations. Then at the end of the article it said that someone FINALLY thought of using that idea for LON missions before the next flight...

    --
    Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by emg on Friday February 28 2014, @04:43PM

      by emg (3464) on Friday February 28 2014, @04:43PM (#8760)

      A few ideas:

      1. They didn't have enough shuttles to dedicate one to a standby.
      2. Most failures were expected to be catastrophic (Challenger) or survivable (the single engine failure during launch). Being stranded in orbit was expected to be a rare occurrence.
      3. The launch rate earlier in the program was high enough that there probably would be a shuttle close to being ready for launch at any moment. If I remember correctly, the record turnaround between flights for one shuttle was about eight weeks.

  • (Score: 5, Funny) by r00t on Friday February 28 2014, @05:21PM

    by r00t (1349) on Friday February 28 2014, @05:21PM (#8790)

    ...the RMS (robotic arm)

    I wouldn't get Stallman involved with this just yet.