This rescue was considered challenging but feasible.
February 26, 2014 9:13 AM   Subscribe

The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia. As part of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's investigation, NASA devised a plan to save Columbia's crew had they known that the foam strike damaged the shuttle. Previously.
posted by thewumpusisdead (29 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
Behind the direct cause of the foam strike, the report leveled damning critiques at NASA's pre- and post-launch decision-making, painting a picture of an agency dominated by milestone-obsessed middle management.

I just finished Colonel Mike Mullane's book Riding Rockets. In it, he talks about the "normalization of deviance" that infected NASA.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:22 AM on February 26, 2014


...painting a picture of an agency dominated by milestone-obsessed middle management.

It's a pity Columbia couldn't have been crewed by all the people who think government should be run more like a business.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 9:34 AM on February 26, 2014 [6 favorites]


Horse has left the barn (Check)
Close the barn door (Check)
posted by spock at 9:41 AM on February 26, 2014


For the tl;dr. Might have saved Columbia assuming that little to nothing went wrong in a high-risk, corner-cutting launch prep for Atlantis, Columbia crew survival without critical supplies, and probably the most difficult and risky EVA ever performed.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:41 AM on February 26, 2014 [4 favorites]


Basically this is the script for a big-budget space disaster movie. (Seriously, I got all tense just reading it).
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 9:48 AM on February 26, 2014 [3 favorites]


For the tl;dr. Might have saved Columbia assuming that little to nothing went wrong in a high-risk, corner-cutting launch prep for Atlantis, Columbia crew survival without critical supplies, and probably the most difficult and risky EVA ever performed.

One comment on the article raises the possibility that, even in the unlikely event that Atlantis could have been successfully prepared and launched before it was too late, Atlantis might not have had enough RCS propellant to keep station with Columbia for multiple rendezvous if the crew couldn't be completely transferred in a single go. This would have been with a Columbia crew with serious over-exposure to carbon dioxide, no way to train for the specifics of the EVAs, and with the last two people off Columbia having to help each other into their suits with no other assistance. Ars sources speaking off the record evaluate that last task as extremely difficult.

So, assuming a million things went right in the most audacious manned mission since probably Apollo 11, there was still the possibility that Atlantis would have had to abandon some astronauts to burn up over the Pacific, while the world watched.
posted by figurant at 10:07 AM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


Another two-person team would be required to don suits and perform the rescue EVA tasks—tasks which NASA would have had to design from scratch.

Really? I thought this had been worked out already. I remember seeing illustrations of "rescue balls" (probably not the actual name) which were spherical ultra-minimal space suits for just such an emergency.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:12 AM on February 26, 2014


The Personal Rescue Enclosure was indeed designed for exactly this scenario. Since it was only ever prototyped, maybe NASA didn't have any on hand or weren't sufficiently confident in the design without field testing (or maybe the CAIB just never considered them)
posted by figurant at 10:20 AM on February 26, 2014 [2 favorites]


The personal rescue enclosure (PRE) or "rescue ball"

Huh. Sometimes my brain surprises me.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:34 AM on February 26, 2014


Whoops, might have saved Columbia crew. The report in question considered repairs to the shuttle to be difficult or impossible given the constraints.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:42 AM on February 26, 2014


.
posted by mikelieman at 10:54 AM on February 26, 2014


Was there any possibility of using some other nation's space faring capability to either provide supplies or bring astronauts back?
posted by TheLittlePrince at 11:18 AM on February 26, 2014


Was there any possibility of using some other nation's space faring capability to either provide supplies or bring astronauts back?

Supplies? Maybe the Russians. Bringing back a seven person crew? No, just us.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:29 AM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


Ghostride The Whip: "Basically this is the script for a big-budget space disaster movie. (Seriously, I got all tense just reading it)."

Yeah, all through the article I was thinking, "I would go see this movie ... and spend the entirety of it in a fetal position in my chair looking at the screen through my fingers."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:31 AM on February 26, 2014


Was there any possibility of using some other nation's space faring capability to either provide supplies or bring astronauts back?

Supplies? Maybe the Russians. Bringing back a seven person crew? No, just us.


Yeah...even if they had one on the pad, Soyuz has a 3-man return vehicle.
posted by kjs3 at 11:42 AM on February 26, 2014


Basically this is the script for a big-budget space disaster movie.

More a tv-movie from the early 80s -- Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land, with Lee Majors, in which a hypersonic plane gets stuck in orbit and blah blah rescue blah.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:42 AM on February 26, 2014


The Soyuz-TM and TMA variants in service in 2003 carried up to three people, and were intended to dock with the ISS. I don't know if this means they could have been compatible to dock with the Columbia, and in any case ISS dockings are handled with a robotic arm, which Columbia didn't have. Even if you could somehow manage the docking with a single cosmonaut piloting the Soyuz, you'd still need to put up 4 missions to evacuate everyone, although bringing up supplies would have extended the window to do this.

But in all likelihood docking wouldn't have been possible, so you'd need one cosmonaut to pilot, one to EVA, and space for any necessary suits or other protective enclosures for the Columbia crew being transferred. From what I've read, the Soyuz is only intended to seat two cosmonauts if they're wearing spacesuits. I don't think it would have been feasible.
posted by figurant at 11:44 AM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


More a tv-movie from the early 80s -- Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land, with Lee Majors, in which a hypersonic plane gets stuck in orbit and blah blah rescue blah.

Kind of telling that Hollywood was imagining this problem, but NASA apparently wasn't.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:49 AM on February 26, 2014


Oh, and there wouldn't have been any space for propulsion packs for a Russian EVA, not that the current Russian space program has any or has personnel trained in their use. Performing a transfer between two vehicles without one would have been nearly impossible.
posted by figurant at 11:51 AM on February 26, 2014


Sending a second Space Shuttle into orbit when they still didn't know what had gone wrong with Columbia's launch or how to fix it would have been a huge risk. There would have been a non-trivial chance of having two damaged Space Shuttles in orbit, especially when launching the second one in an extreme rush.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:52 AM on February 26, 2014


Each shuttle would have its own flight control room operating in NASA's Mission Control Center—and, with the ISS also requiring a flight control room, this would have tasked the control center to capacity

That's something I never really thought about. I don't image they're trained to handle that sort of load in mission control.

I'd never seen that shot on the last page, the one of the shuttle plasma trail from the ISS. Pretty amazing.

Sending a second Space Shuttle into orbit when they still didn't know what had gone wrong with Columbia's launch or how to fix it would have been a huge risk.

That's the thing, they knew exactly what had gone wrong. It would have been a huge risk, sure, and if eleven astronauts had died instead of seven that would have been the end of the manned space program for a long, long time.

Interesting article about something I'd always wondered about. I suspect the whole thing would have been deemed too risky to even attempt.
posted by bondcliff at 11:59 AM on February 26, 2014


I seem to recall the entire point of the STS thing was that we'd be turning these things around and launching monthly. I know, like the rescue balls, that a lot of NASA's work product was vapor, but still.

In conclusion. Fuck You Richard M. Nixon. Fuck You.
posted by mikelieman at 12:11 PM on February 26, 2014


Kind of telling that Hollywood was imagining this problem, but NASA apparently wasn't.

I rather doubt that NASA hadn't imagined it -- the difference is that Hollywood lives in the pretend world where you can just launch a handy shuttle to fix it, and then land it and relaunch it a day or two later. NASA has to live in the stupid old real world where that's impossible and where nobody handed them an extra few billion to keep an extra shuttle on alert in the first place.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:12 PM on February 26, 2014


they knew exactly what had gone wrong

Right, but they didn't know how to do anything about it.

Grimly, I wonder if suicide by some of the Columbia's crew was considered as an option. 30 days of supplies for seven is 50 days of supplies for four. An extra three weeks might have made a rescue mission more feasible.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:16 PM on February 26, 2014 [1 favorite]


the difference is that Hollywood lives in the pretend world where you can just launch a handy shuttle to fix it

Which was sort of the plan, initially. Hence the "rescue balls" et al.

I may be being unfair to NASA, but pulling apart bureaucratic incompetence and lack of funding taxes me.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 12:18 PM on February 26, 2014


One thing that reading this does is help drive home just what an accomplishment human spaceflight is. Look at everything they have to plan, everything they have to think of, everything that can possibly go wrong, every bit of engineering that has to be done to ensure that everything can do what it is designed to do. The insane amounts of preparation to launch a shuttle, which is something that people thought of as "routine." All of this with very, very little margin for error. (And in the 60's they were doing this with slide rules and extremely primitive computers. No AutoCAD or anything like that.) The fact that the US has lost 17 astronauts over 50+ years is amazing when you consider how little would need to go wrong to kill a lot more of them.

This is one of the reasons we need to fund space exploration. There are few places where you can put physics, engineering and problem solving into actual application like you can with spaceflight.
posted by azpenguin at 12:25 PM on February 26, 2014


Exploration entails risk. There's no reasonable way to remove that.

I just saw a show last night that explained that there are about 800 ships in the hazardous waters south of Cape Horn (Tierra del Fuego). "Notorious as a sailors' graveyard" since first navigated in 1616, it therefore cost "thousands of lives".

Nearly all of those sailors knew what they were betting.
posted by Twang at 9:29 PM on February 26, 2014


I just finished reading The Martian* in which an astronaut gets stranded on Mars (no spoilers but the rest of his crew think he's dead and don't have time to retrieve the body). It has a lot of similarities to the Columbia issue - How long can you survive with X amount of oxygen? How do you stop CO2 killing you? Do you rush a rescue mission to save the stranded crew, maybe saving them but also risking extra lives?

*Worth a read, it's quite heavy on the science which may be off-putting if you're not into that but is interesting if you are.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:09 AM on February 27, 2014


Was there any possibility of using some other nation's space faring capability to either provide supplies or bring astronauts back?

You can't launch directly from Baikonur to the orbit the shuttle was in, you'd have to do a delta-v intensive orbital plane change maneuver. The standard Soyuz/Progress launch stack can't do that. A Proton could, but I don't think they've mated a capsule to a Proton in a long time. Anyway, a heavy lift rocket like a Proton is used rarely enough that it's unlikely one would be available.

You could launch into that orbit from French Guiana but those rockets don't have crew capsules available on them.
posted by atrazine at 2:13 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


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