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- Nasa’s out-of-this-world plan to rescue a Space Shuttle
- Launch On Need: The Quest to Save Columbia's Crew by Daniel Guiteras
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On day two of the STS mission, the Columbia astronauts are alerted to the danger.
Systems are powered down, exercise is restricted to reduce the production of carbon dioxide and food is rationed. With just hours to spare, and with carbon dioxide levels on Columbia rising to dangerous levels, the second shuttle blasts into orbit with four crew on board. Once the spacecraft reaches the stricken craft, the Atlantis pilot positions his shuttle above and at right angles to Columbia to avoid the tails hitting each other. With each spacecraft spinning around the Earth at seven kilometres per second, a small lapse in concentration could have resulted in catastrophe.
Meanwhile the other two Atlantis astronauts begin the first of many spacewalks, delivering lithium hydroxide canisters to the Columbia crew to bring down life-threatening carbon dioxide levels. They also deliver two spacesuits.
Next, the Atlantis astronauts position an extendable pole between the two Shuttles. This will be used to guide the Columbia crew across the handful of metres between the two spaceplanes. With everything in place, two at a time, Columbia astronauts are helped out of the airlock, across the gap and into the Atlantis airlock. Despite what the movie Gravity might have you believe, it takes more than a couple of minutes to put on a space suit. And even a relatively simple spacewalk is fraught with difficulties.
Nasa’s out-of-this-world plan to rescue a Space Shuttle
One slip could send an astronaut spinning off into the void. Transferring the whole seven-person crew would have taken at least 48 hours. When NASA learns Columbia's heat shield is damaged and that it cannot support reentry, the race begins to find a way to rescue the crew before Columbia's resources run out. Read more Read less. Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser.
Launch On Need: The Quest to Save Columbia's Crew by Daniel Guiteras
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There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. The foam knocked a hole in a Reinforced Carbon-Carbon RCC panel that was critical for protecting the wing's structure from the heat of atmospheric re-entry. Ground-based photographs showed the foam strike, but from poor angles.
The evidence of damage was inconclusive. If NASA managers had insisted, one of America's top-secret photo-reconnaissance satellites could have imaged Columbia in orbit--a complex and difficult task, but not impossible. Such imagery likely would have shown the hole, and would have proven that Columbia could not return safely to Earth.
We all know what happened next. On re-entry, superheated plasma surged irresistibly through the breach in the wing, and Columbia disintegrated high over East Texas. In the novel, unlike in reality, NASA managers immediately take the ambiguous ground-based photos of the foam strike very seriously. They order two Columbia astronauts to perform an EVA to inspect the wing. With the extent of the damage thus revealed, NASA has no choice but to extend Columbia's time in orbit while feverishly readying Space Shuttle Atlantis for an unprecedented rescue mission.
Part 1, "The Discovery," tells how a few dedicated NASA engineers assess the foam strike and convince the Mission Management Team that there really is a serious problem with Columbia's wing. Part 2, "The Challenge," relates the intense schedule of activities involved in preparing Atlantis for launch, in far less time than it would normally take, before Columbia's air supply runs out. At Mission Control in Houston, the flight controllers monitoring Columbia 's descent began to notice erratic telemetry readings coming from the shuttle, and then all voice and data contact with the orbiter was lost.
Controllers continued to hope that they were merely looking at instrumentation failures, even as evidence mounted that a catastrophic event had taken place. It was an acknowledgement that the worst had happened; the mission was now in "contingency" mode. Mission Control was sealed off, and each flight controller began carefully preserving his or her console's data. Columbia was gone, and all seven of its crew had been killed. The world of human space flight paused—first to mourn, then to discover what had happened.
My own memories of the time immediately following the accident are dominated by images of somber meetings and frantic work. I was a junior system administrator at Boeing in Houston, and because we supported the shuttle program, we had to locate and send cases and cases of backup tapes—containing everything that happened on every server in our data center during the mission—over to NASA for analysis.
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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. That focus on narrow, group-specific work and reporting, without a complementary focus on cross-department integration and communication, contributed at least as much to the loss of the shuttle as did the foam impact.
Those accusations held a faint echo of familiarity—many of them had been raised 17 years earlier by the Rogers Commission investigating Challenger's destruction. A number of prominent shuttle program managers were reassigned. Many involved with the mission—including many still working at NASA—to this day struggle with post-traumatic stress and survivor's guilt. All pending shuttle missions were put on hold, and Columbia 's three surviving companion ships— Discovery , Atlantis , and Endeavour —were grounded. That's the way events actually unfolded. But imagine an alternate timeline for the Columbia mission in which NASA quickly realized just how devastating the foam strike had been.
Could the Columbia astronauts have been safely retrieved from orbit? During the writing of its report, the CAIB had the same question, so it asked NASA to develop a theoretical repair and rescue plan for Columbia "based on the premise that the wing damage events during launch were recognized early during the mission. They carry the low-key title " STS In-Flight Options Assessment ," but the scenario they outline would have pushed NASA to its absolute limits as it mounted the most dramatic space mission of all time. NASA planners did have one fortuitous ace in the hole that made the plan possible: