Hugh Sprunt
Tuesday, September 2, 2003

The primary reason I wrote the article was to vigorously dispute numerous official public statements made by NASA, in the hours and days following the destruction of Columbia, that there was no way NASA could have mounted a rescue effort that had any chance of saving the lives of the seven members of Columbia’s crew, even assuming NASA had immediately realized that Columbia’s left wing had suffered fatal damage 82 seconds after lift-off on 16 January, damage that would later cause Columbia to burn up when she attempted to return to Earth sixteen days later at the end of her 28th mission.

The 248 pages that comprise Volume I of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's Report were released on Tuesday, 26 August 2003, at an 80-minute press conference in Washington, DC. A duplicate original of Volume I can be obtained as a .pdf file by connecting to http://lfd.streamos.com/caib/report/web/full/caib_report_volume1.pdf. The board's web site itself is located at http://caib.us/default.asp.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board ("the Board") Report Volumes II through VI, containing Appendices D through H, will be made public in the coming weeks. Appendix D.13 in Volume II will contain Board technical documents covering the rescue mission that NASA, completely reversing course, finally admitted was feasible in late May (only after being prodded by the Board) and should make for interesting reading. Pages 173-176 of Volume I (Section 6.4) summarize the Board's conclusion that an attempt to rescue the Columbia crew by using Atlantis was indeed feasible, contradicting the numerous previous statements by NASA.

Both the Senate (http://commerce.senate.gov/subcommittees/science.cfm) and the House of Representatives (http://www.house.gov/science/committeeinfo/members/space/index.htm) will be holding hearings on the loss of Columbia and the future of NASA starting this month.

The Board's entire report is worth careful consideration. This article will concentrate on the Board's findings primarily as they relate to the content of my 5 February NewsMax.com article and mainstream media coverage of the rescue issue.

The 5 February article has held up rather well over the last seven months. However, my purpose in writing this second NewsMax.com article is not to tout my knowledge of the space shuttle, especially compared to that of experts within NASA. Quite the opposite! I am, at best, a semi-informed layman when it comes to the space shuttle and her systems. It appears to me that NASA employees had the knowledge and the know-how to implement the specific rescue mission described in my 5 February article and in the Board's 26 August Report. The real question is why NASA failed to act.

My primary point, in this article and its predecessor, is that NASA's failure to "power down" Columbia and her crew immediately, if only on a contingent basis, starting the second day of the flight (when NASA first realized a major foam strike had taken place during launch) was an inexcusable failure of logic. The preparation of Atlantis for launching should have been accelerated on the second day as well.

In my opinion, no one, viewing the foam impact video, could reasonably state that the shuttle had not been seriously damaged. Taking action immediately to speed-up the Atlantis launch schedule and to maximize the time the Columbia crew could survive in orbit alive, while concurrently spending a day or so to gather data to determine the extent of the damage (via a spacewalk and through imagery of the left wing) would have been nothing more than simple prudence on the part of NASA.

Given the unexpectedly poor quality of the launch videos depicting the foam strike (a critical camera lens was out of focus due to a maintenance failure), NASA was especially foolhardy to fail to gather reliable and accurate data about the extent of the foam-strike damage immediately and to take concurrent contingent steps to maximize the crew's endurance in orbit. Faulty analysis of incomplete video data is no way to run a railroad, let alone a space agency! While Columbia was in orbit, some in NASA managers seem to have limited their safety role to whistling by the graveyard with their collective fingers crossed.

Had it been determined that there had been no significant damage to Columbia from the foam strike, it is even quite likely that any science or other mission activities that had necessarily been deferred during the one- or two-day power down (to reduce oxygen, power, CO2 scrubbing capacity consumption, etc., until the extent of damage had been determined) could have been completed with little risk on the back-end of the mission: standard NASA procedure provides an extra 5 days' time in orbit after the scheduled end of a mission to allow for bad weather at the shuttle landing sites.

NASA routinely invades this five-day cushion of time when landing site weather is not up to par (or due to its desire to land the shuttle at Kennedy to reduce the turnaround time between launches, rather than land a shuttle at Edwards Air Force Base in California and then transport it to Kennedy to prepare a shuttle for its next launch).

There is no evidence I could see in Volume I of the accident report issued on 26 August that indicates the NASA (or the Board) realized the value of powering-down vehicle and crew, as low-risk, low-cost contingency, as of the second day of the mission. Unlike my February 5 article, NASA assumed that no power-down of vehicle or crew took place until the end of Day 5, only after the extent of the damage had been documented.

Powering-down for the three additional days would have further increased the number of days the crew could have remained alive in orbit, meaning more time to safely prepare and launch rescue shuttle Atlantis on her rescue mission. The as yet unpublished Appendix D.13 in Volume II might address the value of powering down, on a contingency basis, on 17 February, but Volume I apparently does not.

The Loss of Columbia

NASA did not learn that a relatively large piece of foam insulation from the left bipod area (the upper attachment point that joins the orbiter itself to 153.8-foot-long external fuel tank) had struck the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing until videos covering the launch were viewed at 9:30 AM EST on Friday, 17 January, the morning after lift-off. NASA realized that any analysis of the foam impact using the videos would be more difficult than it otherwise would be since one of the primary video cameras imaging the shuttle's left wing had been erroneously left out-of-focus. Nevertheless, these videos were the only data NASA actually used to quantify the foam-strike damage.

NASA had had a chance to learn of the impact within two hours after the launch when the Intercenter Photo Working Group examined video from the launch tracking cameras, but it was not until higher-resolution imagery was reviewed the next day that the foam impact was first noticed and analyzed by NASA.

Re-entry on 1 February appeared normal to ground controllers until 8:54:24 AM EST, 10 minutes 13 seconds after Columbia had descended to a 400,000 foot altitude (the so-called Entry Interface, the altitude at which the earth's atmosphere is first discernible), when the Flight Director was informed that four hydraulic sensors in the left wing had failed.

Many days later, after Columbia’s Modular Auxiliary Data System was recovered from the extensive debris field in Texas, it was learned that the first indication (not transmitted to either Mission Control or the flight crew) of the fatal re-entry damage that was ultimately determined to have been caused by a large hole foam debris from the external fuel tank had punched through the 8th of 22 Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC) panels covering the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing almost from the fuselage to the wingtip, had been a higher-than-usual strain reading recorded at 8:48:39 AM EST by a sensor located on the leading edge spar of Columbia’s left wing.

The failure mode of four separate sensors in the left wing, as later determined by analysis of the Modular Auxiliary Data System's memory, indicated that the sensors failed because their wiring was destroyed when the leading edge wing spar burned through, as opposed to having failed due to the destruction of each individual sensor by direct heating.

The last telemetry signals (or video) received directly by Mission control took place at the same time as a broken voice response from the mission commander: "Roger, b– …" Videos made by observers on the ground recorded the general disintegration of the shuttle at 9:00:18 AM EST when it was at an altitude of about 200,000 feet and moving at 19 times the speed of sound.

The destruction of the crew compartment itself took place over a period of 24 seconds beginning at an altitude of 140,000 feet and ending at 105,000 feet. The seven Columbia crewmembers died from blunt trauma and hypoxia sometime after 9:00:19 AM EST; according to official reports, the exact times of death cannot be determined due to the lack of direct physical or recorded evidence.

While Columbia was in orbit, NASA determined that its best estimates (derived only from the launch videos) of 1) The volume of the piece of foam debris that hit the leading edge of the left wing and 2) Its impact speed were, respectively, 1,200 cubic inches and 477 miles per hour.

After a seven-month investigation, the Board determined its best estimates of the debris volume and speed were 1,200 cubic inches (same) and 528 miles per hour (6.9% faster). The piece of foam that struck the leading edge of the left wing weighed 1.67 pounds (seven-tenths of a cubic foot at a density of 2.4 pounds per cubic foot).

According to the Board, citing the quite close agreement described above between the NASA analysis that commenced on 17 February and the Board's final analysis at the end of its seven-month investigation (notwithstanding that NASA management incorrectly concluded while Columbia was in orbit that the foam impact in no way threatened the safety of the crew), "Information available during the mission was adequate to determine the foam's effect both on the thermal tiles and RCC." Also: "The input data available to assess the impact damage during the mission was adequate."

The Board cites eight separate times that a request for high-resolution imagery of the left wing in order to determine the degree of damage was cut-off by NASA management. Furthermore, even though it was known that the Columbia crew had photographed the external tank in detail shortly after it separated from the orbiter, managers on the ground failed to ask the crew to transmit all this imagery of the external tank to the ground so that NASA could examine the exterior of the tank to help determine the volume of foam missing from the left bipod area.

When it was suggested by many engineers that high-resolution imagery be taken of the left wing to make a damage assessment, the Mission Management Team Chair raised concerns that the time spent turning Columbia to obtain the best images of the left wing would unduly impact the mission schedule (As noted in my 5 February NewsMax.com article, shuttles routinely have a five-day "cushion" on the back end of every mission to allow the weather to clear at shuttle landing sites)!

According to the Board, NASA management informed the Columbia crew of the foam debris impact on the left wing, "not because they thought it was worthy of the crew's attention, but because the crew might be asked about it in an upcoming media interview."

Referring to the possible damage from the foam debris strike six days into Columbia’s mission, the Mission Management Team Chair, in a meeting of that team, closed the foam issue by stating:

And I really don't think there is much we can do so it's not really a factor during the flight because there is not much we can do about it [sic]

Factually, the statement of opinion above is completely incorrect (as will be seen below) and, separately, displays a general attitude that is, in my opinion, casual to the point of negligence.

For what it's worth, the Board also noted, while decrying the lack of engineering data used by NASA managers in the decision-making process, that the all too numerous PowerPoint slides used in management meetings contained factual errors and misleading statements minimizing the seriousness of the foam strike (compared to the view held by many NASA engineers).

According to the Board:

Shuttle managers exhibited a belief that RCC panels are impervious to foam impacts. Even after seeing the video of Columbia’s debris impact, learning estimates of the size and location of the strike, and noting that a foam strike with sufficient kinetic energy could cause Thermal Protection System damage, management's level of concern did not change. . .

The engineers found themselves in the unusual position of having to prove that the situation was unsafe – a reversal of the usual requirement to prove that a situation is safe . . .

Further, when asked by investigators why they were not more vocal about their concerns, Debris Assessment Team members opined that by raising contrary points of view about Shuttle mission safety, they would be singled out for possible ridicule by their peers and managers.

After noticing the foam impact on Columbia’s left wing when the higher resolution launch video was first viewed at 9:30 AM EST on Flight Day Two, instead of ordering an immediate spacewalk to inspect for damage or requesting high resolution imagery of the left wing (or both), NASA used a modeling tool known as "Crater" to estimate the amount of damage to the left wing from the foam strike.

Crater was created to estimate the amount of damage to the shuttle's thermal protection tiles (not to the RCC on the leading edge of the wing where it appeared at that time the foam debris could have struck). In any event, Crater was designed to model the damage caused by very small bits of debris that might strike the shuttle's thermal tiles, not an object known to have a volume of around 1,200 cubic inches.

Indeed, according to the Board, NASA knew, when Crater was used to estimate the damage to Columbia while the shuttle was still in orbit, that the foam debris that struck Columbia’s left wing was up to 640 times larger than the largest debris for which Crater had previously been used (According to later, more refined, estimates made by NASA and the Board, the foam debris turned out to be "only" 400 times larger than the debris Crater was created to analyze).

That foam debris had often separated from the external tank during the ascent from the launch pad and then collided with various orbiters during past shuttle missions was well known to NASA. In fact, there was photographic evidence of foam shedding on 65 of the 79 missions for which imagery was available (Night launch imagery could not show foam loss). However, of the 34 missions for which there was no imagery, foam loss could be inferred from the number of divots on the lower surface of the orbiter.

Over the course of the shuttle program, orbiters returned with an average of 143 divots in the thermal protection tiles with 31 of them being over an inch in size in at least one dimension. The board concluded that foam debris shed from the external tank was likely responsible for most of the debris hits.

Indeed, there had been six prior cases where foam debris had shed from the left external tank bipod ramp (once with Atlantis, once with Challenger, and four times with Columbia), though the foam debris that caused the loss of Columbia was by far the largest chunk of foam to actually collide with an orbiter.

On STS-112, an Atlantis shuttle mission that launched only about four months prior to Columbia’s last flight, cameras observed an object departing from the external tank's left bipod ramp (the same location of the foam debris that brought down Columbia) hitting the Solid Rocket Booster/External Tank Attachment Ring (significant foam debris apparently did not strike the orbiter itself on this mission) and producing a crater that was four inches across and three inches deep.

Photography of the external tank taken by the Atlantis crew when the external tank was jettisoned indicated that the foam debris in question had a volume of 240 cubic inches (compared to the 1,200 cubic inch block that struck Columbia). The Mission Evaluation Room logs and Mission Management Team minutes for this Atlantis mission do not reflect any discussion of the impact of the foam debris.

According to the Board, "NASA came to view foam strikes, not as a safety of flight issue, but rather a simple maintenance, or 'turnaround' issue." After the Atlantis mission, the Intercenter Photo Working group again recommended that the foam impact on that mission be classified as an "In-Flight Anomaly," the same relatively serious safety classification previously assigned to all known bipod foam-shedding events.

However, it is clear that NASA had not corrected the longstanding foam-shedding problem, despite having classified (as far back as 1983) all previous known bipod foam-shedding events as "In Flight Anomalies."

Nonetheless, for the first time, the late 2002 Atlantis foam strike was relegated to classification as a mere "Action" that called for lower priority analysis and correction. In other words, foam strikes were no longer to be considered a Safety of Flight issue or a Flight Readiness issue, merely relatively minor maintenance problem that might delay preparations for the next launch of a particular orbiter.

In any event, NASA flew two shuttle missions after the Atlantis mission without bothering to address the Atlantis mission foam-shedding "action" item, at least in part, according to the Board, due to a desire to prevent the construction schedule of the International Space Station from slipping further (Shuttles lift ISS components to the space station). Columbia was lost on that second shuttle mission.

According to the Board report:

With no engineering analysis, Shuttle managers used past success as a justification for future flights, and made no change to the External Tank configurations planned for STS-113, and subsequently, STS-107 [the mission on which Columbia was lost]. . . The foam-loss issue was considered so insignificant by some Shuttle Program engineers and managers that the STS-107 Flight Readiness Review documents include no discussion of the still unresolved STS-112 [Atlantis] foam loss. [Despite the mission numbers used by NASA, the STS-107 mission flew after STS-112.]

On a previous Atlantis mission (STS-27R), that orbiter suffered a strike by the largest debris prior to the loss of Columbia, resulting in 707 hits on the thermal protection tiles, of which 298 were greater than one inch in one dimension.

The debris had completely knocked off a thermal insulation tile, a tile that happened to be at the location of a thick aluminum plate covering an L-band navigation antenna, thereby exposing the skin of Atlantis to the heat of reentry. Were it not for this thick aluminum plate (aluminum rapidly conducts heat, helping to cool the surface being heated), a burn-through might have occurred on reentry, according to a statement made by the Atlantis mission commander to the Board.

When Atlantis suffered damage during the launch of the STS-27R mission, NASA ordered the crew to visually inspect the damage immediately after the damage was detected on Day Two of that mission (when the launch video was reviewed). This was in stark contrast to NASA's actions on the fatal Columbia mission (from the Board report):

When a debris strike was discovered on Flight Day Two of STS-107 [Columbia's fatal mission], Shuttle program management declined to have the crew inspect the orbiter for damage, declined to request on-orbit imaging, and ultimately discounted the possibility [emphasis added] of a burn-through. . . [This failure] . . . supports the Board's claim. . . that NASA is not functioning as a learning organization.

Based on pre-existing analyses of the RCC that covers the leading edge of the shuttles wings, NASA knew, long before Columbia launched, that any hole in RCC panels 8, 9, or 10 larger than one-quarter inch would mean that the Columbia could not survive the heat of re-entry.

In the words of the Board, when a foam block of the correct size and weight was later fired at the proper speed from a nitrogen gas gun aimed at an actual RCC Panel Eight (an RCC Panel Eight taken from the wing of orbiter Atlantis), ”The impact created a hole roughly 16 inches by 17 inches, which was within the range consistent with all the findings of the investigation."

Prior Warnings Re Shuttle Safety and NASA Management Practices

The Rogers Commission report after the loss of Challenger in January 1986 took NASA to task for a number of institutional failures that the Columbia Board found were still thriving 17 years later (NASA had ignored warnings from several engineers the day before launch that the O-rings in Challenger's Solid Rocket Boosters could fail to seal if Challenger were launched in the cold temperatures that were anticipated to exist the morning of that launch).

The Columbia Board pointed out that NASA had been warned several times after the Rogers Commission report about the space shuttle and the implications of its own management practices:

NASA has not been sufficiently responsive to valid criticism and the need for change. . .

Shuttle is also a complex system that has yet to demonstrate and ability to adhere to a fixed schedule. . .

And although it is a subject that meets with reluctance to open discussion, and has therefore too often been relegated to silence, the statistical evidence indicates that we are likely to lose another Space Shuttle in the next several years. . . probably before the planned Space Station is completely established in orbit. This would seem to be the weak link of the civil space program – unpleasant to recognize, involving all the uncertainties of statistics, and difficult to resolve.

– Report of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program (1990)

Shuttle reliability is uncertain, but has been estimated to range between 97 and 99 percent. If the Shuttle reliability is 98 percent, there would be a 50-50 chance of losing an Orbiter within 34 flights… The probability of maintaining at least three Orbiters in the Shuttle fleet declines to less than 50 percent after flight 113.

– The Office of Technology Assessment (1989)

[Columbia was lost on the 113th flight of the Space Shuttle.]

NASA & The Mainstream Media: No Rescue Mission Was Possible

NASA's statements about the impossibility of rescue went unchallenged throughout the mainstream media and also were dutifully echoed by at least one professional publication in the days following the loss of Columbia.

Here are a couple of examples (the quote from the New York Times appeared in my February 5 NewsMax.com article; the quote from Aviation Week & Space Technology appeared in an 11 February letter from me to that publication)

According to the New York Times (4 February 2003, National Edition, Page A27):

Another shuttle, Atlantis, was scheduled for launching on March 1 to carry supplies and a new crew to the space station, and it is possible to imagine a Hollywood-type series of events in which NASA rushed Atlantis to the launching pad, sent it up with a minimal crew of two, had it rendezvous with Columbia in space and brought everyone down safely.

But Atlantis is still in its hangar, and to rush it to launching would have required NASA to circumvent most of its safety measures. "It takes about three weeks, at our best effort to prepare the shuttle for launch once we're at the pad," Mr. Buckingham [A NASA spokesperson] said, "and we're not even at the pad." Further, Columbia had enough oxygen, supplies, and fuel (for its thrusters only) to remain in orbit for only five more days [beyond the 1 February planned return date], said Patrick Ryan, a spokesman for the Johnson Space Center here.

According to Aviation Week & Space Technology Magazine (10 February 2003, Page 26):

No matter what the investigations show, there are no apparent credible crew survival options for the failure Columbia experienced. With the ISS [International Space Station] out of reach in a far different orbit, there were no credible rescue options even if wing damage had been apparent before re-entry – which it was not.

We will below see just how incorrect these published statements (and many others like them) were.

I wrote in my 5 February 2003 NewsMax.com article:

Had NASA ordered Atlantis to be prepared with all reasonable speed for a possible rescue mission on January 17, the same day that NASA first became aware that the "foam insulation" impact . . . MIGHT be a problem, the space agency would have had a very significant amount of time to launch Atlantis before Columbia ran out of consumables. . .

Taking precautions before determining for certain the dimensions of potential problems often makes sense, especially if the time needed to implement precautionary actions is large compared to the time it take to determine with some certainty whether the potential problem in question in fact exists. . .

I would have expected NASA (while gathering and analyzing the degree of damage, including the ways described above) to have ordered Columbia, on January 17th, to go into a full power-down mode, at least for a day or two, while the potential tile damage was assessed through all available means and analyzed (within and outside NASA). What was the downside in doing so? . . .

What would have been the cost of powering down until the best reasonable information on possible tile damage could have been gathered and analyzed? Two or three days of in-orbit science experiments, work that could have been done with only moderate risk (should NASA have later decided to run that particular risk) by extending the mission a couple of days into the extra five-day minimum extension period to which the NASA spokesman referred (Shuttles have often had longer landing delays due to weather without adverse result).

I would guess (and I would be delighted to hear the actual figures from NASA and independent experts) that a full human and mechanical "powering-down" like the one I describe above would have turned the putative extra five day extension period that NASA provided to the New York Times into at least an additional week or so in orbit. An extra twelve days (five plus seven) from the actual February 1 return date gets us to February 13th.

Is NASA saying that it would have been not worthwhile, as of January 17th, to create and at least temporarily maintain the possibility of launching Atlantis, likely with a minimal two- or three-person crew, to rescue the Columbia crew via a launch around February 13th (or a few days after February 13th if my estimate of an additional week’s endurance, if powered down starting January 17, turns out to be on the low side)?

The Conclusions of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board Regarding Rescue

In mid-May, the Board asked NASA to determine whether safe options for return of Columbia’s crew existed. Could the crew survive in orbit long enough for Atlantis to be launched on a rescue mission? Could the Columbia crew repair the damage in orbit and return to Earth safely without launching a rescue mission?

NASA determined (properly, in my opinion) that any repair attempt that the Columbia crew could attempt on its own in orbit had less of a chance of success than a rescue mission.

NASA assumed in its rescue scenario that imagery taken of the shuttle was inadequate to determine the degree of damage (whether this imagery was assumed to have been taken from the ground or from an orbiting reconnaissance satellite is unclear from Volume I of the Board report). When it was learned that imagery of the shuttle was not conclusive as to the degree of damage, a spacewalk was performed on Day 5 that revealed "potentially catastrophic damage" to the RCC on the leading edge of the left wing.

Only at the end of Day Five did the NASA scenario contemplate 1) Powering down Columbia and her crew to maximize the time the crew could remain in orbit alive and 2) Accelerating preparations to launch Atlantis on a rescue mission. As described above, I believe delaying these actions was a serious logical error. They should have been initiated on Day Two, if only on a contingent basis (and continued only if subsequent data indicated that it was not safe for Columbia to attempt re-entry).

NASA determined in mid-May that "a spacewalk to inspect the left wing could be easily accomplished" with the equipment actually onboard Columbia. If NASA knew this in mid-May it also knew this (or could have determined this) on Day Two of the Columbia mission (17 February). Why was no "easily accomplished" spacewalk ordered on Day Two?

Some sort of spacewalk was necessary for the crew to physically inspect the damage since the Columbia was not equipped with a robot arm whose cameras could have photographed the left wing. Indeed, the damaged portion of the leading edge of the left wing could not be seen from inside the shuttle.

Neither the lack of a robot arm or spacesuit maneuvering units would have prevented a safe spacewalk, however; indeed the astronauts aboard who would have carried out the spacewalk had previously trained to do so under these conditions and planned how the spacewalk would be accomplished.

In fact, Columbia was the only remaining orbiter with an internal airlock on the mid-deck (as opposed having an airlock in the cargo bay). Thus, even though the SPACEHAB Research Double Module, the FREESTAR payload, the Orbital Acceleration Research Experiment, and an Extended Duration Orbiter Pallet filled Columbia’s cargo bay, its mid-deck airlock could have been used to allow the spacewalkers to enter and exit the shuttle with minimum loss of breathable cabin atmosphere to space (a potentially important factor when maximum conservation of breathable air is important).

NASA determined in mid-May that the crew could survive in orbit until Day 30 (the morning of 15 February) if crew and shuttle had been placed in a fully powered down mode as of the end of Day 5. In my February article, I estimated that the crew could survive at least until 13 February if powerdown took place on Day 2, so my back-of-the-envelope calculation turned out to be conservative than NASA's in the sense that I estimated the astronauts had some what less time to live in orbit.

One curiosity: As reported by the Board, in mid-May NASA informed the Board that the "limiting consumable" (the critical item that would run out first) aboard Columbia was lithium hydroxide, the chemical that removes carbon dioxide (CO2) from the shuttle's breathing atmosphere. Depletion of CO2 scrubbing capacity, NASA indicated, was the reason the crew's endurance was limited to Day 30. NASA indicated that the crew had oxygen for an additional day of survival beyond the time the CO2 scrubbing capacity ran out (through Day 31).

Leaving aside the possibilities (?) of increasing the CO2 effective on-board scrubbing capacity by agitating the lithium hydroxide or changing its temperature, I have to question whether CO2 scrubbing capacity was, in fact, the limiting consumable, given NASA also informed the Board that, after the CO2 scrubbing capacity was gone, sufficient oxygen remained on board to allow an additional day of life.

Why couldn't the crew (probably resting quietly in their spacesuits, most of them likely sedated, and breathing through their systems rather than breathing the cabin atmosphere), after the CO2 scrubbing capacity was exhausted still go on to consume the extra day's supply of oxygen? True, that oxygen supply could not be scrubbed of CO2, but couldn't that additional oxygen supply, circulating through the crew's pressure suits, simply be vented or otherwise purged from the lines as necessary and be replaced as needed with CO2-free oxygen?

Replacement would take place when the CO2 levels in the breathing lines approached dangerous levels. I believe the pressure suits aboard come with small "pony bottles" of breathable air that could be used temporarily to bridge the gap if purging the CO2-laden atmosphere was inadvertently postponed beyond safe limits a time or two.

This cycle of venting the CO2-laden atmosphere and replacing it in the suit lines with CO2-free atmosphere would be repeated as necessary until all the oxygen onboard was consumed (including any oxygen in the fuel cells that was not needed to supply power and any oxygen elsewhere that could be scavenged), thereby providing (using NASA's minimum number) an extra day of survival in orbit.

Whether this sort of thing could have been done as described above depends on the details of Columbia’s "plumbing" that are beyond my ken, but the NASA statement that the crew would have died of CO2 poisoning when there was a day's supply of pure oxygen remaining aboard appears erroneous on its face to me.

Additional endurance in orbit is potentially extremely valuable since the extra time would allow for a safer, though still accelerated, launch preparation of Atlantis, a greater cushion for any launch delays, extra time to rendezvous with Columbia, more time to transfer Columbia’s crew to Atlantis, and so on.

Indeed, it probably was also feasible for Atlantis to bring equipment and materials to Columbia that would have allowed astronauts to repair the damage to Columbia and (with a small crew of volunteers) return the shuttle herself safely to earth around the time Atlantis herself de-orbited. Failing that, the Board notes that Columbia could have been boosted into a higher orbit that would have permitted a repair shuttle to rendezvous with Columbia weeks or months later, repair the damage wing, and supply a small volunteer to attempt to return this multi-billion dollar piece of hardware safely to Earth.

NASA calculated in mid-May that Atlantis could have been readied for launch, with no necessary testing procedures having been skipped, by 10 February. In my 11 February letter to Aviation Week & Space Technology, I conservatively estimated that Atlantis could have launched not later than 16 February: in mid-May NASA estimated it could safely launch Atlantis five days sooner.

NASA allowed five days between the date Atlantis launched for rendezvous with Columbia and transfer of Columbia’s crew (I suggested to Aviation Week that this would take no more than two days).

The only published interview with a Board member that I have seen after the release of the Board report on 26 August was with G. Scott Hubbard, Director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, the only NASA employee on the Board and reinforces the idea that a rescue was feasible and summarizes NASA's errors succinctly.

Hubbard told the San Francisco Chronicle (in the words of the Friday 29 February article):

NASA managers had made critically incorrect assumptions. Based on prior experience with numerous smaller foam strikes, they assumed the latest one was no more dangerous. NASA mangers also told reporters repeatedly after the accident that, had they known about the damage, there was nothing that could be done about it. That assumption was also wrong, he said. . . "Decisions were made in the hallways, without sufficient data," Hubbard said.

A spacewalk to inspect for damage would have been "relatively simple," he said. Had it been completed before the fourth day of flight, according to the report, there would have been time to speed-up the preparations to launch the space shuttle Atlantis, which was only 41 days from its own launch date.

The scenario laid out by the investigation board concludes that Atlantis could have been readied for a rescue mission by February 10 - five days before Columbia’s air cleaning systems would begin failing.

"Not enough hard questions were asked by the right people."

Even though the NASA study in mid-May determined that 1) Columbia’s crew could survive in orbit two days longer than I estimated, 2) Atlantis could be safely launched six days sooner than I estimated (despite its estimate that somehow a full Five Days (not two) were needed for rendezvous and rescue of Columbia’s crew), NASA was apparently unable to consider (as I immediately did when I first viewed the launch video of the foam impact) the possibility of initiating a rescue mission when NASA management first viewed the foam impact in the launch video on 17 February. Why not?

The Board faulted the "culture" of NASA, a culture that does not live up to its proclaimed primary concern for the safety of flight crews.

Was one (less publicized) aspect of that culture a personnel policy that places managers without training in engineering in positions that require them to understand the engineers who report to them and the ability evaluate engineering concerns intelligently? This may be one of the issues considered in the upcoming congressional hearings.

I also continue to stand by the concluding paragraphs of my 5 February NewsMax.com article:

A proper and uplifting mourning of our dead, as I witnessed on Tuesday, can be healing and spiritually uplifting. However, a great nation is not measured merely by its ability to mourn its dead.

How much more inspiring would a successful rescue of man, and possibly machine, have been for all of us, despite the small chunk of NASA's annual budget a rescue would have consumed? But what if the rescue was attempted and failed? I submit that we would be better off than we are today, perhaps even if additional lives had been lost.

I have not met that many astronauts, but I have little doubt, if "the numbers" looked halfway reasonable that, NASA's management's routine day-to-day launch and operational safety procedures notwithstanding, there would have been plenty of volunteers to take Atlantis into orbit to try to save the crew of Columbia.

© Hugh H. Sprunt, September 2003, All Rights Reserved

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Shuttle Disaster