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Comment by peter303 | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing too is that both space shuttle accidents the astronauts knew for seconds to minutes what was happening. NASA isnt making full reports to protect relatives. In either accident the astronauts could not do anything. The new Orion system changes this.

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Oh, for Columbia's crew it could have been far worse than that.

There's reasonable evidence [0] that the director of NASA and ground crews knew the Columbia's wing damage was bad enough to make re-entry impossible. But they had two options, tell the astronauts they were never coming home at the start of their mission, or wait until they discovered it minutes before their vehicle disintegrated.

The director chose the former path, and ended up getting fired as it looked like a cover up. It was really just being compassionate.

No pad abort system would have saved Columbia. But on the flip-side, while everyone is up and arms over the loss, NASA's astronauts are trained to WANT to fly. We can hem and haw and say what a tragedy, but there is a class of people who know the risks, who know the possibility of death always exists and will still pilot or crew the vehicles that we send into space.

0: http://goo.gl/vdagzb

I wouldn’t place any trust in the Daily Mail whatsoever. Do you have a more reliable link?

As far as I’m aware, NASA knew that there had been a foam / ice strike on the orbiter but had no idea how bad it was. Given those circumstances, why tell the astronauts about a theoretical risk (that turned out to be very real) ?

NASA had third and fourth options as well. Have the Columbia crew patch the hole and pray while doing what little they could to reduce stress and heating on the damaged wing during re-entry, or expedite Atlantis' next launch as a rescue mission (there would have been something like a four-day margin for launching it without skipping safety checks before Columbia ran out of consumables).

Five days, and they could have expedited it without skipping safety checks.

Do you have a source besides the Daily Mail? There are other ways to get astronauts back from the ISS, if they knew about the issue ahead of time.

Columbia's last mission wasn't an ISS mission. They had a pretty limited amount of time before it became hard to breathe. There was a potential rescue option in the form of Atlantis which was already being prepped for another mission and could have been redirected to pick up the Columbia astronauts, but it would have been a big rush and would have required getting things rolling fairly rapidly after they became aware of the ice strike.

Except that is entirely bullshit.

The reason everyone is up in arms, still to this day, about the Columbia "accident" is because we could have sent a second shuttle to retrieve them very easily.

NASA engineers were fighting the decision for the Columbia to return because they already were assembling a plan to get them home alive.

Seven astronauts died because Bush put Sean O'Keefe in as Administrator of NASA, and Sean O'Keefe decided it'd cost NASA less money to let the astronauts die instead of bringing them back alive.

Sean O'Keefe personally tried to halt any work on sending Atlantis up as a rescue mission, and ended up succeeding, all in the name of budgetary concerns. He didn't give a fuck about those astronauts.

And to him? It was just a revolving door. He's now working some cushy job at Airbus as their US CEO, a military contractor he made friends with when he worked for the DoD and was Secretary of the Navy (under Bush's father, the other President Bush).

So, fuck him. This wasn't an accident, this was murder for profit.

> So, fuck him. This wasn't an accident, this was murder for profit.

Except for the profit part? It's not like he got the Airbus job because he killed some astronauts.

It pretty much is. They wanted a CEO that was a bean counter, and that's what they got. He proved on the job that he's the kind of guy that puts budget before lives.

Do you have sources for this? This is the first time I hear that someone had definite knowledge of damage to the thermal protection tiles on Columbia. The review board didn't mention this, from the accounts I have skimmed through.

> sent a second shuttle to retrieve them very easily

Every report I've read this, the math doesn't check out here. It takes months at a minimum to get a shuttle ready for launch and there's no proven method for accelerating that time frame or keeping people alive in the shuttle for the extended periods of time required to prep another launch. It's not like they had a second one waiting on the pad ready to go.

This isn't even taking into consideration the required engineering and logistics around moving people between shuttles, which there's no procedure for.

These things aren't minor details.

Source: I've played kerbal space program. :-)

They actually had a second shuttle already on the launch pad, ahead of schedule for prep for the next mission.

Wikipedia quote time: "The CAIB [Columbia Accident Investigation Board] determined that a rescue mission, though risky, might have been possible provided NASA management had taken action soon enough.[56][57] They stated that, had NASA management acted in time, two possible contingency procedures were available: a rescue mission by shuttle Atlantis, and an emergency spacewalk to attempt repairs to the left wing thermal protection.

Normally, a rescue mission is not possible, due to the time required to prepare a shuttle for launch, and the limited consumables (power, water, air) of an orbiting shuttle. However, Atlantis was well along in processing for a planned March 1 launch on STS-114, and Columbia carried an unusually large quantity of consumables due to an Extended Duration Orbiter package. The CAIB determined that this would have allowed Columbia to stay in orbit until flight day 30 (February 15). NASA investigators determined that Atlantis processing could have been expedited with no skipped safety checks for a February 10 launch."

56: Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003). "Decision Making at NASA" (PDF). CAIB Report, Volume I, chapter 6.4 "Possibility of Rescue or Repair". p. 173ff. Retrieved March 28, 2013. http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-global/CAIB/C...

57: Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003). "STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment" (PDF). CAIB Report, Volume II, appendix D.13. p. 391ff. Retrieved January 30, 2006. http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/PDFS/VOL2/D13.PDF

There was a story published about that potential rescue mission recently [1]. Briefly stated, the complexity involved in getting Atlantis up there in time to rescue the Columbia crew members makes the rescue plans depicted in the book/movie The Martian (the Iris probe, and the Rich Purnell Maneuver) look completely safe and sane. Any delay at all in getting Atlantis up would probably have made it too late for the Columbia crew, as their lithium hydroxide canisters would have run out and they would have choked to death on their own CO2. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board came to similar conclusions in their own report [2].

It would have made for great drama. But either having Atlantis get up there too late to save the Columbia crew, or, even worse, losing Atlantis as well, would have been a PR disaster from which NASA might well not have recovered. Hell, they barely recovered from Columbia as it is.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-...

[2] http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html

See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074677

From the AT article: "Atlantis was already undergoing preparation for flight as STS-114, scheduled for launch on March 1. As Columbia thundered into orbit, the younger shuttle was staged in Orbital Processing Facility 1 (OPF-1) at the Kennedy Space Center. Its three main engines had already been installed, but it didn't yet have a payload or remote manipulator arm in its cargo bay. Two more weeks of refurbishment and prep work remained before it would be wheeled across the space center to the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building and hoisted up for attachment to an external tank and a pair of solid rocket boosters."

So Atlantis wasn't actually as close to launching as your comments make it sound. Later in the article, they state that it would be a minimum of 21 days to get Atlantis on the pad and ready to launch. And it always took longer than NASA thought; the article author looked for any instances in which a Shuttle moved from OPF to VAB to the pad and launch without errors or faults, and couldn't find a single one.

That's why they planned for this contingency in the remaining Shuttle missions, with the so-called "Launch On Need" planned missions. (In all but one case, they assumed that the Shuttle crew could take refuge at the ISS until a rescue mission could be mounted. For the one mission where they couldn't assume that, STS-125, the Hubble servicing mission, they actually had a second Shuttle on the pad before the first one launched.)

Just out of simple curiosity. Isn't/ wasn't there any other vector or capsule, from any other nation (that is, Russia) that could have been sent up in rescue?

No, the ars article talks about this. The orbital inclination of the doomed shuttle was so they could not reach the ISS, and likewise the Russian Soyuz could not launch at a similar inclination. Changing orbits seems to burn obscene amounts of fuel.

I don't fully understand why it would not have been possible to put a Soyuz in a different orbit but with a near-collision course though.

Not to recover 7 astronauts. And that only matters if they were prepared to launch inside of 14 days, which the vast majority of vehicles are not.

Regardless, the Soyuz can only hold 110 lbs of extra weight beyond three crew members. So they'd need almost as many skeleton-crew Soyuz modules as there were crew aboard Columbia.

Maybe they could have shipped additional supplies on the Soyuz up to transfer to the Shuttle, to keep the remaining crew alive for enough time to prep additional STS or Soyuz launches to bring them back. Or maybe send up some supplies for them to attempt a repair on the wing in-orbit.

Unlikely. There would have had to have been a Soyuz almost ready to go that could be used for the purpose, and there wasn't. I'm also not sure that a Soyuz could have been launched from Baikonur into the orbital plane that Columbia was flying in; they commonly launch into the ISS' orbital plane, and we already know Columbia couldn't have gotten there. And, even if you could get a Soyuz there in time, Columbia wasn't equipped for retrieving supplies from another spacecraft. It wasn't carrying a RMS robot arm, for instance, nor did they have any SAFER jetpacks for their pressure suits. Getting supplies out of another spacecraft, even one nearby, without either of those would be tricky at best...maybe too tricky for a crew already possibly suffering from partial CO2 poisoning.

Ars has a pretty fantastic write up on the whole thing [1]. Seems like beyond getting Atlantis into orbit, it would have required creating whole-cloth procedures for EVAs for extracting astronauts from a Shuttle and doing it with a skeleton crew of four people, which, even then, would have led to serious space issues on re-entry.

And even with all of that, was the question of, could Atlantis launch without the same insulation damage issue arising? Given that they hadn't prepared any mitigation strategies yet, the answer was "no" and under those conditions, the Shuttle is grounded.

How awful would it have been to lose Columbia AND Atlantis?

1: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-...

Do you mean he chose the latter?

In what way does the new Orion system change that?

Orion and Dragon capsules have a pad-abort system. In the event of a malfunction, the crew capsule will jettison fast enough to escape any explosions.

The acceleration will probably knock out the astronauts and cause internal bleeding, but that's still better than immolation.

Failed re-entry is still going to be fatal, but the Dragon can theoretically recover from a failed parachute with its Draco engines.

The issues with having the Space Shuttle slung on the side of the fuel tank, where falling foam could (and did, many times before Columbia) strike the Shuttle.

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