Hey look. You go from one subject to another. We talked about a real event Columbia and you talk about possible yet unlikely event. You do not actually deal with the death of millions of people. You maybe somewhat plan and even that I am not sure considering what you write here. The point is you are mixing up stuff. Columbia was doomed on reentry. No one really knows if something could have been done *after* the foam impact.

Thanks. Since I don’t know the TPS radiation to space, I don’t know if “slow” re-entry would have worked. Without computer runs of the flows, I also don’t know if the “standard” re-entry profile could have been modified.

CS –

In my “”comet” work I deal with the random unexpected deaths of millions of people and simply astounding NASA incompetence and bureaucracy, as well as a lot of nuts.

Irrelevant. The vehicle went out of control because the wing had become so distorted the controls could not cope with the forces, not because of any pre-planned maneuver. Had the vehicle not been doing any S turns at all (ignoring that it this wouldn’t have been a trajectory that could have landed in Florida), it would still have gone out of control and been lost.

I think you should stick with comets and the likes.

@ vulture4 wrote @ October 4th, 2012 at 10:17 pm

I heard that and I also heard the opposite. Not sure if this was a solution in the end. I just don’t know.

“The wing began to melt before the orbiter began any of its S turns. The timing of when the wing fell off wasn’t because of an S-turn, it was because the wing has become so structurally compromised, and the aerodynamic forces had increased enough”

… which was when Columbia turned into the port wing during the first S.

Hi CS –

I am not going to go through the debris recovery/event timing again for you here.

Nope, there is the APU issue (they only last a cetin amount of time (110 mines I think max) and the heat shield issue (such a reentry of skipping would cause repeated heating of the heat shield which could build.) Anyway the old Von Braun idea was to reenter slowly say and circle once around the world during reentry. This was a 1940ies idea to the problem of reentry heat. It was found that such a reentry is actually worse than a faster one. Basically with the slow reentry the heat shield stays hotter longer which can be transmitted to the vehicle. It is sort of the difference between grabbing a hot pot and dropping before you get too bad a burn and grabbing the same pot but holding on to it. The longer you hold on the more heat will be transmitted to your skin and the more damage will be done.

One option was perhaps RTLS abort but that is meant more for engine failure and could easily result in loss of crew all by itself (very risk maneuver) plus they had no reason to do so since they didn’t know anything was damaged. TAL,AOA, AOO would all require a functioning heat shield.

The best option was launch Atlantis but again they didn’t think there was danger (and later it was learned that Atlantis had an issues and could not have been launched. Discovery was further back in processing and Endeavour was out of service for maintenance.)

The last option is repair but again you need to know something is wrong(they merely think the orbiter got hit around the wheels and probably isn’t damaged(the thing had been hit since flight 1 and made it home over 100 times by the time of Columbia). Even if you tried the area that was hit was a hot spot (leading edge of wing which is carbon-carbon, not tile). Basically you need a material able to withstand thousands of degrees F and some way to hold it in place and hopefully it does not alter the airflow over the wing too much(else you could get over heating elsewhere).

Not sure what this has to do with Columbia and its actual survivability on reentry and the scenarios you suggested.

“The TPS folks were never alerted/never asked.”

No difference either.

“Not much was said afterwards about the integrity of the crew compartment, either.”

Nothing needs to be said when the shuttle disintegrated at such velocity. It is not designed to reenter from LEO and if it is not designed to reenter then it will not. Not even close to compare with Challenger. Assuming that all the so called hypothesis about crew compartment survival is remotely true. I don’t recall any analysis showing so. But maybe there is.

“I knows its comforting to declare the nothing could have been done when you made no attempt to do anything.”

I did not say any such thing. I said, or tried to, that on reentry Columbia was doomed. Period.

“For that matter, NASA wanted to put this behind them so fast they buried the crew before they recovered their bodies.”

Reference?

“While this happened on Administrator O’Keefe’s watch, none of it was due to any dereliction of duty on his part, in my opinion.”

And I did not say that either.

Ground location wasn’t the timing factor, it was when Columbia turned into the damaged wing.

We’re trying to tell you this is irrelevant. The wing began to melt before the orbiter began any of its S turns. The timing of when the wing fell off wasn’t because of an S-turn, it was because the wing has become so structurally compromised, and the aerodynamic forces had increased enough, that the control system could no longer compensate for the increasingly imbalanced forces. At that point, the vehicle tumbled and broke up.