16 years ago today - Columbia disaster

crimsonaudio · Feb 1, 2019

16 years ago today we lost Columbia. Rest In Peace, brave pioneers.

Crew of STS-107 for the Space Shuttle Columbia, lost on February 1, 2003.
- Commander: Rick D. Husband, a U.S. Air Force colonel and mechanical engineer, who piloted a previous shuttle during the first docking with the International Space Station (STS-96).
- Pilot: William C. McCool, a U.S. Navy commander.
- Payload Commander: Michael P. Anderson, a U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, physicist, and mission specialist who was in charge of the science mission.
- Payload Specialist: Ilan Ramon, a colonel in the Israeli Air Force and the first Israeli astronaut.
- Mission Specialist: Kalpana Chawla, an Indian-born aerospace engineer who was on her second space mission.
- Mission Specialist: David M. Brown, a U.S. Navy captain trained as an aviator and flight surgeon. Brown worked on scientific experiments.
- Mission Specialist: Laurel Blair Salton Clark, a U.S. Navy captain and flight surgeon. Clark worked on biological experiments.

CajunCrimson · Feb 1, 2019

My perception of time has gotten worse as I've grown older.... but it sure seemed longer ago than that.

Didn't realize it was during the W Administration......

AlistarWills · Feb 1, 2019

Remember it well. We were headed down to T-town to watch a basketball game. Kept looking at the sky to see if we’d see any of the debris. My pregnant wife who was enamoured with Brodie Croyle ran in to him in the gym and she also got horribly sick after eating a hot dog which turned out to be her gall bladder giving up on her.

I never did understand if the astronauts knew what they potentially faced on re-entry with the damage the shuttle obtained.

crimsonaudio · Feb 1, 2019

AlistarWills said:
I never did understand if the astronauts knew what they potentially faced on re-entry with the damage the shuttle obtained.

They did not - they were informed of the strike but were told "Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry."

Heck, NASA management even denied three separate requests to have DoD satellites turn and take a look at the damage to see how bad it was, since they didn't think there was any way to repair it...

And there's a good chance they could have been saved, as Atlantis was already in the prep stages for a March 1 launch, and with the extended rations on board Columbia there would have been a five-day overlap.

The loss of Challenger was bad enough, but Columbia is unforgivable.

GrayTide · Feb 1, 2019

During the 17 years years after the Challenger disaster the public took the success of the space shuttle for granted. Considering the many successes during the history of American space flight; the number of tragedies have been really few, but it will always be a high risk profession. RIP Columbia crew.

TIDE-HSV · Feb 1, 2019

crimsonaudio said:
They did not - they were informed of the strike but were told "Experts have reviewed the high speed photography and there is no concern for RCC or tile damage. We have seen this same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry."

Heck, NASA management even denied three separate requests to have DoD satellites turn and take a look at the damage to see how bad it was, since they didn't think there was any way to repair it...

And there's a good chance they could have been saved, as Atlantis was already in the prep stages for a March 1 launch, and with the extended rations on board Columbia there would have been a five-day overlap.

The loss of Challenger was bad enough, but Columbia is unforgivable.

There's even more to it than that. When my BIL was the director down at Kennedy, Liz and I were given a VIP tour of the facility, got to climb through Columbia while it was being refurbished. Guys were busy gluing tiles onto the bottom and, being who I am, I of course had to ask. The answer came back that they came off all the time and it was no big deal, they just glued on replacements. It was not only the foam they became blasé about...

crimsonaudio · Feb 2, 2019

TIDE-HSV said:
There's even more to it than that. When my BIL was the director down at Kennedy, Liz and I were given a VIP tour of the facility, got to climb through Columbia while it was being refurbished. Guys were busy gluing tiles onto the bottom and, being who I am, I of course had to ask. The answer came back that they came off all the time and it was no big deal, they just glued on replacements. It was not only the foam they became blasé about...

That was actually commonplace from day one as there were a lot of EPA issues involved in these disasters - bans on uses of particular chemicals, paints, etc. that were initially part of the design but were banned by the time the Shuttles began being built. Kinda crazy to think that the OEMs and NASA had to cut corners on such a small scale production due to EPA regulations.

NationalTitles18 · Feb 2, 2019

For clarity, wasn't this the foam on the big tank that flew off all the time and hit the wing?

Also, didn't they have to change the composition of that foam and what was used to try to make it stay and that change made it come off more so than before?

I do know that the tiles coming off was always an issue.

ETA: Yes, they did change the tank foam prior to this disaster.

In July 2005, NASA reported that they changed the foam insulation a decade earlier, switching from a foam-blowing agent that used an environmentally damaging chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) to one using a more benign hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) blowing agent. The newer HFC-blown foam insulation is a significant change since it is reported to be more brittle than the originally specified insulation material.

https://insulation.org/io/articles/grounding-the-space-shuttle-nasas-foam-insulation-problem/

AlistarWills · Feb 2, 2019

They had to quit prepping the surface of the external tank with Freon if I’m not mistaken. This led to the insulation not adhering as well.

crimsonaudio · Feb 2, 2019

Yup - EPA regs caused a lot of issues with NASA as the EPA was ramping up more and more bans in the time between the Shuttle design and long-term implementation. Really frustrating that something with an impact as small as the Shuttle fleet would have to compromise due to these regs. I had a ton of friends who worked at NASA and the 80's were brutal - near-constant redesigns that had people hoping the new implementations would work (they often did not).

NationalTitles18 · Feb 2, 2019

Long article on potential rescue mission:

https://arstechnica.com/science/201...penuqTCPO5BOsw8AbVHOyLXon9vA6tJv7f7jc4J6T9oao

AlistarWills · Feb 3, 2019

Really good read. Frankly I could see that getting turned in to a Hollywood script.

NationalTitles17 said:
Long article on potential rescue mission:

https://arstechnica.com/science/201...penuqTCPO5BOsw8AbVHOyLXon9vA6tJv7f7jc4J6T9oao

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16 years ago today - Columbia disaster

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