Columbia rescue !

DISCLAIMER

The loss of Columbia and its crew is a tragic story set in the recent past, and as such, it is very delicate to write about it.


Thus, before writing this story, the following ground rules were fixed :
- absolute respect of the crew
- absolute respect of sensitive players even when they were criticized by the CAIB (see Linda Ham)
- no dumb/easy/outrageous critique of NASA (the kind of crapshit so common on the Internet, such as "they are irresponsible killers" or "the shuttle is a piece of junk")

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report is at the same time a ground-to-earth technical report and a formidable script for a sci-fi novel.

That last aspect was obviously never desired in the first place.


However, reading the CAIB Volume II, appendix D.13 (entitled STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment) one can't help but think of Apollo 13.

One has to read the CAIB descriptions of possible crew extravehicular sorties watching for the punctured leading edge or repair it.

One has to try and imagine Atlantis and Columbia flying back-to-back only dozens of feet apart as astronauts climb rope from one orbiter to the other.

What the report describes in 22 pages of unemotional, detached writing might have been the most formidable rescue mission in the history of the space program.

Consider this TL a "novelization" of the CAIB appendix. It is centered around the Columbia rescue and nothing else.






- - - -


Flight Day 1
January 16, 2003, 10:39 EST
Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 39, Florida

That cold day of January, the Space Shuttle Columbia was to fly a Spacehab, a class of missions the International Space Station would make extinct soon.


The old orbiter would be reduced to Hubble servicing every four years, but even these missions were nearing their end. Columbia in fact had only mission planned in the 21th century: that of retrieving Hubble. Of bringing it back to Earth, somewhere in the next decade. As for Columbia's three siblings, per lack of viable successor - the shuttle was so unique a design NASA had failed to replace it - a plan was seriously considered to extend the space shuttle lives to the year 2020.

The SSME lit first, and for seven seconds as they went full thrust they were thoroughly monitored.
Then the immense solid rocket motors awoke into life and for a fraction of second the shuttle tried to lift its launch pad through the huge power of its five engines. Big pins were blown explosively, freeing the space shuttle which literally jumped upwards, throwing flames in the direction of orbit.


Only ten minutes later and after an apparently nominal ascent, the tank was discarded, the engines shut down, and Columbia peacefully drifted into orbit.
What was to be a boring, last-of-its-kind, long delayed Spacehab mission, had begun.
The crew were all professionals deeply committed to their mission whatever the rest of the world, or NASA astronaut corp, could think about it. Half of the crew were rookies; and they come from all walks of life. Kalpana Chawla was born in India; guest cosmonaut Ilan Ramon was an Israeli pilot ; Michael Anderson was an afro-american and a veteran of the last flight to Mir four years before. Commander Rick Husband was a veteran of another Columbia / Spacehab mission years before. All others - William McCool, Laurel Clark and David Brown - were living the thrill of their first foray into orbit.
...
The NASA Space Shuttle had spent its whole career chasing elusive space stations. It was by itself the original sinner, since it had killed the space station it was to go in the very first place.
In 1970, after losing nuclear shuttles to the Moon and Mars NASA pinned all hopes into a balanced package - the winged shuttle would fly to a space station. Even that package, however, was impossible to fund, and soon a choice had to be made - station or shuttle ?
The reasoning at the time was that the shuttle would be the truck to build the station, so the truck had to come first, and the station was pushed back for a decade. The soviets, for their part, picked up the opposite path - station first, shuttle... someday. In the end, Buran would only fly once.

Because it had no destinations to go to - no Moon, no Mars, not even a space station - the shuttle had to seek an interim job to fill its first decade of existence. It ultimately earned a life launching satellites, all of them - military, science, and commercial satellites. By a bizarre twist of fate, a federal agency like NASA found itself competing with private companies, notably Arianespace.
In 1973 the shuttle was given all American satellites on a silver plate but the price to pay was that it was to earn money, and to achieve that it had to fly no less than 60 times a year - once a week ! Unfortunately, experience would prove the vehicle could fly at best 8 times a year (in 1996).
Early in the 80s NASA only partially acknowledged that reality by cutting the shuttle "ideal" flight rate to 24 a year, still three times more than what the shuttle could endure.
From 1984 onwards the space agency had its back against a wall - 24 flights a year or lose face against Congress and the World.
In 1985 the shuttle flew 10 times with two more flights cancelled. Still half the nominal target, yet the agency was already on its heels, scrapping everything it had for money and personal.
In 1986 it was to fly 16 times, but as of mid-January repeated delays with the last 1985 flight had already ruined the schedule. Not only was the flight schedule gruelling, it was also constrained by fixed planetary launch windows - the Halley comet and planet Jupiter would not suffer any delay. The robotic probes would not wait !
Since December, Shuttle flights had been pretty nightmarish. Columbia's early December mission had lifted off in early January; and from then, things got worse. Delays on January 22; technical glitches on January 24 and January 27; and, last but not least, bad weather forecast all plotted to ruin the schedule. Enough was enough, for the aforementioned reasons the shuttle had to fly. After a handful of stormy, controversial video conferences in the evening of January 27 the decision was made to launch on a day that had not only the coldest temperatures on the ground, but also very brutal jet streams at 30 000 ft.
That Tuesday, January 28 1986 the weather was definitively discouraging. Yet for the sake of impossible flight rates determining NASA credibility and unforgiving planetary launch windows, Space Shuttle Challenger was bound to go through these disastrous weather conditions.
It did not make it.
The night before the launch icy temperatures froze a join on a booster, the jet stream shook the frozen join; a tongue of flame then leaked from the damaged booster onto the external tank, piercing it. The tank violently disintegrated ... and the crewed orbiter above it was blown to pieces. The crew cabin retained a relative integrity but crashed into the ocean, killing all seven crew members including a school teacher that was to give a lesson from space. A major public relation hit for NASA now had very horribly and tragically backfired. Under Presidential inquiry the shuttle fleet was grounded for two and half years.
Meanwhile the space station case was no better. The shuttle kept missing rendezvous with possible orbital outposts. Old Skylab could no wait for the shuttle to overcome its delays, and burned into the atmosphere in 1979.
Afghanistan, Poland and the Reagan election ensured no shuttle ever docked to a Soviet Salyut operated between 1978 and 1985. Salyut was improved into Mir and that time the shuttle was present to the rendezvous. After 1995 and for three years the shuttle meet the now Russian space station. It was a wonderful piece of international cooperation.
However, what was still missing, was some big American space station, a return of the project postponed by a decade to build the shuttle. In 1984 Reagan did just that, giving NASA $8 billion to build the station of their dreams.
What no one foresaw at the time was that it would be fourteen years before the first module was launched, and that module was a Russian one, of Mir heritage !
At the turn of the century NASA at least was building its (international) space station; the shuttle had returned to its original job as imagined in 1969. It had taken the best part of three decades to reach that nirvana. The shuttle credibility, however, had been definitively ruined by the disastrous satellite business leading to the Challenger disaster.
As the shuttle missed a space station badly, and because that satellite job was not truly satisfying, early in the 70s an inexpensive ersatz of space station had been imagined. Europe's Spacelab (and later its private incarnation Spacehab space shuttle Columbia carried that January 16, 2003) were space station without wings. They would fly into orbit within the shuttle payload bay but, in order to save money they would draw their life from the shuttle itself, meaning they could not be released to live a space station life. Instead they would stuck aboard the shuttle and get down with it at the end of the mission. Bluntly, Spacelab flew for brief 15 days missions instead of Mir's continuous 15 years. The ISS, of course, would change that; but it had been delayed again and again and again.


Circa 1997 and waiting for the never-coming ISS, Congress encouraged NASA flying Spacehab in a couple of missions. The space agency, however, did not give a rat: energy and money instead flowed into the ISS. The shore mission was delayed by two full years and ultimately fell on the oldest of the shuttle, veteran Columbia.
It had once been the member of a troika that included the now defunct Challenger and the mostly forgotten Enterprise. The last two, unlike Columbia, were mock-ups; and one of the two mock-up was to be turned into a fully fledged shuttle to fly along Columbia itself. Early on the honour belonged to Enterprise; but Challenger was found to be easier to modify, and Enterprise never flew into orbit. With Challenger dead and Enterprise stuck in a museum old Columbia found itself isolated; it become a relic the other three shuttles - Discovery, Atlantis and Challenger successor Endeavour - looked with disdain.

Columbia was considered a relic in the sense that, built ten years before Discovery its structure was somewhat heavier and its payload was lower. It happened the ISS was in a Russian-friendly orbit, and that orbit induced severe penalties for all shuttles - but Columbia higher mass made the penalties even more cumbersome.

In 1996 NASA decided old Columbia would not build the ISS; it instead entered into a semi-retirement, doing every single non-ISS missions, although there were not many of them. As a result Columbia became intimate with the Hubble space telescope... and Spacehab.






- - - -


Flight Day 2
January 17, 2003
Marshall Spaceflight Center, Huntsville, Alabama

The Intercenter Photo Working Group (IPWG) was tasked with reviewing films and videos from the launch tracking cameras scattered for dozen of miles all around the shuttle launch pads. These cameras scrutinized every shuttle launch from every possible angle; nothing was supposed to escape their watchful eyes.
Within a couple of hours after Columbia launch all the films and videos had been collected, rushed down to a lab in Miami, developed and sent back overnight with copies going to the three IPWG engineering review teams at Kennedy, Marshall, and Houston.
Launch tracking cameras were of uttermost importance - and NASA had learned that lesson in blood.
The moment Challenger launched (but only seen after the accident) a close-up camera caught puffs of black smoke - the booster join blown to dust.
Two and half year later in September 1988 Discovery did a nominal return to flight, but the next mission, STS-27, was another near miss.
During Atlantis ascent the tip of the solid rocket somewhat collapsed and crippled the orbiter in a shower of debris that severely impacted the fragile underbelly tiles.
Once in orbit an alarmed crew used the robotic arm for an inspection that frightened them. The orbiter usually black underside was pockmarked with white stains corresponding to damaged tiles, plenty of them.
The crew transmitted their video to the ground, and there they hit a major snag.
Because Atlantis STS-27 was a military, classified mission communications with the ground were encrypted and that just killed the pictures resolution. As received on the ground, the alarming video was blurred just enough not to look very worrying. Against the crew will the ground ordered them to return as if nothing happened; and Atlantis made it safely to California Edwards Air Force Base. Yet when the orbiter come to wheel-stop everybody paled at the devastation.
By pure luck whatever tiles that were damaged were in non critical locations, except for one that was totally missing, and in a pretty critical location. The shuttle hold and the crew escaped an horrible death only because below the missing tile was some heavy metal plate that acted as a surrogate tile - and paid a high price for that. It was melted as if it had been made of chocolate.
The lesson had been hard learned and the year after more powerful cameras were planted for miles and miles around the shuttle launch site.
Within the next decade however NASA budget was cut by 20% and every corner of the agency, including launch tracking cameras at the Cape, suffered as a result.
That January 16, 2003 images from Columbia ascent revealed that a large piece of debris from the left bipod area of the External Tank had struck the Orbiter's left wing. Because the resulting shower of post-impact fragments could not be seen passing over the top of the wing, analysts concluded that the debris had apparently impacted the left wing below the leading edge. Intercenter Photo Working Group members were concerned about the size of the object and the apparent momentum of the strike.
They frantically searching for better views but soon they realized that only two cameras provided a higher-quality view of the impact and the potential damage to the Orbiter.
A dozen ground-based sites were used to obtain images of the ascent for engineering analyses, each of which has film and video cameras.
Five were designed to track the Shuttle from liftoff until it is out of view. Due to expected angle of view and atmospheric limitations, two sites did not capture the debris event, leaving three cameras. One of the three remaining cameras lost track of Columbia on ascent.
Of the two, one captured only a view of the upper side of Columbia's left wing - and the impact had happened below.
"As for the last camera site..." the film started to unravel.
"What site and what cameras ?" Armando Oliu asked.
"ET-208 and E-208."
"Those located in Cocoa beach ?"
"They are no longer there (1). That real estate boom happened in Cocoa over the last decade - all those massive condominiums built there gradually blocked the -208 camera's view. They have been moved to Patrick AFB three years ago. I vaguely remember one of the two was found to be defective at the time - NASA made a little fuss, blasting the company and the Air Force."
"We should have blamed budget cuts instead." Oliu groaned. "Let's review ET-208 first."
As its name implied ET-208 had focused on the large external tank; yet the impact the film showed, even in low resolution, was worrisome.
The companion E-208, for its part had the same angle of view but a much sharper resolution.
"Let's see...”
By comparison with ET-208 it was like watching Columbia ascent under a magnifying lens. The level of detail was pretty good.
"Excel..." the engineer did not ended his sentence. Armando Oliu face paled. "Look at this. Impact - wham ! straight on the underside wing leading edge reinforced carbon panel."
"And out of view of every other cameras." Oliu colleague lamented.
"I have never, ever seen such a large piece of debris strike the Orbiter so late in ascent." Oliu said. "82 seconds into the flight" he noted, "and how big and fast was that ? This is frightening."
For long minutes, the two men watched the E-208 video again and again, tracking the exact location of the impact on Columbia. The foam had been blown into a little white cloud that went away in a fraction of a second. The crux of the problem was the post-impact state of Columbia, and the video was not reassuring. "This smells bad" Oliu said. "Make sure the Marshall and Johnson Intercenter Photo Working Group members see this."
Oliu's colleague couldn't refrain from the obvious question.
"Should we ask for ground based imagery ? I mean, should the military try to image the shuttle wing in orbit ?"
"At this point I don't know, and can't decide about that issue. What matters most so far is that the E-208 video by itself speaks volumes. You see, things would be different if we had to prove the exact impact location on the orbiter via military ground imagery."
Oliu started ringing the alarm bell. Within the next couple of hours, he distributed a report and digitized clips of the strike via e-mail throughout the NASA and contractor communities. This report provided an initial view of the foam strike and would serve as the basis for subsequent decisions and actions.
Within an hour Oliu's boss and chairman of the Intercenter Photo Working Group - Robert Page - contacted Wayne Hale, the Shuttle Program Manager for Launch Integration at Kennedy Space Center, and Lambert Austin, the head of the Space Shuttle Systems Integration at Johnson Space Center.
Page informed them that Boeing was performing an analysis to determine trajectories, velocities, angles, and energies for the debris impact; they had a dedicated software for that, born of the STS-27 1988 near-miss, and dubbed Crater. Crater was a database made of every foam impact that happened since 1981 and the first shuttle flight. From that database, one could make computer simulations of impacts.
However, in Bob Page's opinion, Crater was not enough. He needed direct proof: He needed more photos. He wanted to see Columbia. As such Page also asked Wayne Hale to request imagery of Columbia's left wing on-orbit. Hale, who agreed to explore the possibility, held a Top Secret clearance and was familiar with the process for requesting military imaging from his experience as a Mission Control Flight Director.
Shortly thereafter, Wayne Hale telephoned his superiors - Linda Ham, chairman of the Mission Management Team, and Ron Dittermore, Space Shuttle Program Manager, to pass along information about the debris strike and let them know that a formal report would be issued by the end of the day.
Meanwhile, John Disler, another member of the Intercenter Photo Working Group and a photo lab engineer at Johnson Space Center (not Kennedy) also called to report a debris hit on the vehicle. Disler's alarm of the strike and the approximate debris size ultimately reached Rodney Rocha, NASA's designated chief engineer for the Thermal Protection System.
It was Rocha's responsibility to coordinate NASA engineering resources and work with contract engineers at United Space Alliance, who together would form a Debris Assessment Team that would be co-chaired by United Space Alliance (USA, the joint Boeing-Lockheed private company managing the shuttle since 1996) engineering manager Pam Madera.
Madera signalled that the debris strike was to be classified as "out-of-family" and therefore of greater concern than previous debris strikes. As noted by Armando Oliu at the Cape, the strike had happened rather late in the ascent; as a result it was mostly out of Crater database, plus the debris was faster and thus more lethal. To make matters worse, the debris was also pretty big, the size of a suitcase !
At about the same time, Oliu Intercenter Photo Working Group's report, containing both video clips and still images of the debris strike, was e-mailed to engineers and technical managers both inside and outside of NASA.
That morning, all across the United States engineers watched Columbia's ascent, playing and re-playing the video. Many pairs of eyes stared at video monitors, trying to guess the exact impact location and what damage it had made. Worried e-mails were exchanged.
...
Later that day, Linda Ham had an extremely difficult decision to take, perhaps the hardest in her life.
After a very ordinary lift-off, it appeared STS-107 was off to a good start.
Things were going well.
There was little interest in a mission Congress had rammed into NASA's throat many years before. Yet if something went bad with STS-107, it would impact every shuttle mission to follow in the pipeline, notably STS-120, to be flown a year later. According to NASA planning, STS-120 was to fly the next year, February 2004. NASA numbering shuttle mission system had big holes. It was a mess. STS-107 had been delayed for four years, no less.
That mission was to carry the so-called Node 2, a crucial piece in the International Space Station puzzle. With all the delays and cost overruns that happened in the ISS program, it was better for STS-120 not to slip.
Unfortunately, for some hours now, Linda Ham was hearing much alarm about a big foam loss from the tank impacting the underside of the shuttle wing. Serious damage would obviously mean the end of the mission and a major emergency. And further delays to STS-120, obviously, if the shuttle had to be grounded once again, as happened too many times since 2000.
Linda Ham had exactly four diverse sources of information to make her decision.
First there was that video taken from tracking camera E-208 in Patrick AFB.
She could also ask for the opinions of thermal protection experts in Houston - they were Calvin Schomburg for the silica tiles on the orbiter belly, and Don Curry for the tough carbon panels protecting the wing leading edge.
There was also the Crater software for impact simulation.
Lastly, she could ask for the military to image the shuttle in flight - they had some incredibly powerful systems on the ground and in orbit.
So the issue was not a lack of possible solutions; instead, it was the priority in which to exercise them. According to the priority given, some might be eliminated.
Where to start ?
Ham dug out a sheet of paper and started listing the sources, examining how they worked - or not - together, and the pros and cons.
The video clearly had an edge; but what next ?
Military imaging of the shuttle was the tricky part. It was a complex, cumbersome process to set up, with all that classified stuff, and the very tight security clearances born of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Linda Ham felt that the Crater analysis, plus advice from the two well respected experts, should be enough.
But... she couldn't get the still picture of the impact out of her head. That, and her phone call to Wayne Hale earlier in the day.
"Bob Page is an excitable guy" she had told him.
"Sure, he is excited." Hale replied. "But today I felt his excitement is justified. You should have seen his face - one can't downplay his concerns. He really pressed me to discuss options on how to get more data about possible damage to the wing; he is clearly upset. He makes a convincing case."
Linda Ham had made her decision.
Crater results and Don Curry's and Schomburg's advice would all be taken into consideration, but further imagery of that left wing was also necessary. She realized that, if the military imagery even remotely matched that of the Cape video, then they would face an emergency.
She phoned Wayne Hale and told him to order an expedited request for national assets to inspect Columbia.


(1) [FONT=Verdana, serif]T[/FONT]hisisthe point of divergence. In STS-107 tragic history that tracking camera remained in Cocoa Beach until after the disaster, and was moved to Patrick AFB in 2004. Much more importantly it was found to have defective lenses. On February 16 2003 that resulted in a film so blurred that, despite NASA best efforts to make it better (and they did tried everything that was technically feasible) it ultimately proved to be unusable.
Yet only that E-208 camera had the right angle and was close enough to show the exact location of the foam impact on Columbia underside.

Without it, the next best thing was military imaging of Columbia from the ground.
Unfortunately it is a process that is so cumbersome and uncertain that Linda Ham dismissed it in favour of others means of investigation that unfortunately were not adapted. The gravity of the situation literally slipped between Crater results and Schomburg / Don Curry past experience with the shuttle thermal protection system.
The CAIB inquiry showed that the Crater logiciel had never seen such impact before; as for experts Don Curry and Calvin Schomburg, they were sincerely convinced foam couldn't break very though carbon panels.
Bottom line: only better imagery from the launch tracking cameras (and the exact location of the impact on Columbia) could have turned the tide. Military imaging from the ground couldn't do it.


- - - -Flight Day 3
January 18, 2003
Aboard Columbia
(music: Duran Duran, Ordinary world)
"Can you repeat ?" David Brown was surprised "Yes, me and Mike filmed the external tank after separation. Yesterday I already downlinked 35 seconds of video... you want more ? I have a minute or so, and Mike has even more." (1)
He downlinked the videos. An hour later commander Rick Husband received an apparently insignificant answer. But...
"There is one item that I would like to make you aware of. This item is not even worth mentioning other than wanting to make sure that you are not surprised by it in a question from a reporter during future media links with the ground." By the tone of the message, the crew already knew at once that this could only mean trouble.
"During ascent at approximately 80 seconds, photo analysis shows that some debris from the area of the -Y external tank Bipod Attach Point came loose and subsequently impacted the orbiter left wing, in the area of transition from Chine to Main Wing, creating a shower of smaller particles. The impact appears to be totally on the lower surface and no particles are seen to traverse over the upper surface of the wing. Experts are currently reviewing the high speed photography on possible concern for RCC or tile damage.
Rick, we want you to show your left wing to the Air Force sensors. We want you to carefully maneuver Columbia to make that left wing visible for imaging. Unfortunately, science experiments will have to stop while the imagery is taken.
That is all for now. It's a pleasure working with you every day."
Columbia crew members exchanged doubtful glances. There were times when ground control showed a curious insensitivity and lack of tact. If their thermal protection system was really breached, the truth was they would burn during reentry. There was no other way to put things.
...


Johnson Spaceflight Center, Houston, Texas
(music: U2, Still haven't found what I'm looking for)

"We had a big foam loss like this on STS-50, and it impacted the silica tiles; yet only one was damaged, and that was it." Calvin Schomburg said
"As for the reinforced leading edge panels, they are made of carbon and extremely tough." Don Curry completed.
The two men were top experts on the shuttle thermal protection system. They had decades of experience with it; they knew its weaknesses, but also how resilient it could be. STS-27 had been proof of this.
Wayne Hale could see how the expert's opinion weighed on Linda Ham. There was nothing shocking with that - if one can't rely on experts, then what ?
Anyway, Ham was restraining her decision until more information would come. The military was in the process of imaging Columbia. They used some extremely powerful cameras they had near Hawaii, and also a vast array of varied sensors, including spy satellites and ground radars.
The afternoon and evening of that day were hectic. Schomburg and Don Curry voiced their opinions once again. Linda Ham also had results from Boeing Crater tests which were quite reassuring. The software was known to be conservative - read, pessimistic. General opinion was the results had to be somewhat "softened".
In the afternoon, Crater results told Linda Ham there might be damage, but not to what extent and whether it was life-threatening or not.
And then the military called back. Hale was told they had gathered some impressive imagery. And then...
"We found something else. Something unexpected."
"What ?"
"There is debris following Columbia in orbit." (2)
“Debris ?” Wayne Hale's mind raced to a conclusion. That 39 degree orbit was only seldom used, meaning very little debris. At the shuttle's low altitude, debris did not live for very long. Columbia was pretty much alone up there... the conclusion was obvious.
"If there is any debris along the shuttle, well, it came from it. They had no EVA planned, so it is not a lost tool. They launched nothing from the orbiter either. Whatever, is your imagery coming ?"
"It's coming right now."
Later in the day a high ranking meeting that included Ham, Dittermore, Hale and many others was held. The military sensors had done a superb job. The pictures were sharp; one could even see the Columbia lettering on the wing.


http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/shuttle...mos/index.html
(this is an OTL picture that was not requested by NASA; as such the shuttle commander did not maneuvered its orbiter to make the damage visible. How frustrating)


The photo sequence showed the orbiter rolling slowly, presenting its left wing to the camera. In the room many eyes focused on the greyish, ghost-like pictures.
When the wing appeared there were muffled cries of exclamation, of shock and surprise.
Wayne Hale had made an opinion. Surely there is something wrong with that leading edge.
Don Curry and Schomburg reaction, however, was definitively a mixed one.
"We admit there's something wrong there. The foam impacted, not the tiles, but the carbon leading edge panel." Don Curry said. Schomburg nodded his approval. The tiles were safe, so he had nothing more to say.
"I remain convinced, however, that these panels are extremely though. I can't see them being breached." for a second he paused before continuing "To be honest, even as a top expert, that photo doesn't allow me to be hundred percent sure whether the panel is intact or dented." Don Curry concluded cautiously.
Linda Ham was visibly torn. "I don't think the military can do better, however. In the end, only a direct inspection from the shuttle itself could give us a clear view. "
You all know, however, that STS-107 features no robotic arm; that the Manned Maneuvering Unit has been discarded after Challenger; and that not even a classic EVA was planned during that flight, although fortunately we have two crew members trained for that."
There was a brief moment of silence in the conference room. Wayne Hale knew that general opinion was that, if the the thermal protection system was really breached, there was nothing they could do. It was better not to think about it. Perhaps it would be better if the crew was blissfully ignorant of that reality, and carried their mission as usual until the very end ?
Except that (frightening) option was already gone, since they had told Rick Husband the truth - because he had to maneuver his orbiter to ease the military imaging operation. Hale also remembered STS-27 and the crew anger, notably that mouthful Hoot Gibson.
During the next twenty minutes a heated debate occurred in the room.
Two mindsets clashed head-on: the usual, reassuring mission routine gradually died, but the opinion that there was nothing that could be done was obviously engrained.

Yet another, different mindset was also present among people there. Wayne Hale could see many of them were frustrated not seeing that damn carbon panel clearly enough to say whether there was a hole in it - or not. He realized it was the same anguish and frustration Armando Oliu and his boss Bob Page felt, at Kennedy the days before.
Beyond that temporary frustration, however, laid something much bigger - the will to do something for the endangered crew. At worse they needed a clear picture of that panel; more ambitiously they could try filling it, or even rescue the crew, Marooned or Apollo 13 style.
The final decision, however, belonged to Linda Ham.
At this very moment she delivered the speech that would define the rest of the odyssey; a sentence of it was repeated as common wisdom by almost every senior manager over the next six weeks.
"Two days ago my feeling was - well if there was any real damage done to the wing, there is nothing we can do about it.
"Now I can't stand that idea.
"Even if there's nothing we can do to save the crew, I want them to know the truth. I really want to know whether there's a hole in that leading edge. This is paramount. As such we need a direct inspection by the shuttle crew. It's the only way to be sure. We need to know." Linda Ham said. "Well, if someone can imagine how to reach that damn leading edge panel underside without a robotic arm and without a MMU, please tell us." she concluded.
"The best placed to know are obviously the astronauts. We will see a lot of them. We should ask any veteran and volunteer, and I have no doubt we will find many of them.", Wayne Hale suggested.
As the meeting broke out, phone calls were made all over NASA and beyond.
That evening on January 18, 2003 marked the beginning of the most astounding rescue mission ever. What no one foresaw, however, was how long it would last. It was Apollo 13 all over again, closer to Earth, but quite paradoxically for a much longer period of time.

(1) Another missed opportunity OTL. Astronauts actually filmed the tank in orbit, but their videos transmitted to the ground did not included the missing foam area. In fact they had actually more video that included the missing foam area, but the ground failed to ask them for more video. (see here)

(2)The so-called Flight Day 2 object, also known as [FONT=Times, serif]2003-003B[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]was probably the 6-inch piece going away
The CAIB theory is that the foam had not only broke it,it also had pushed it more or less inside. Then on day two Columbia manoeuvered with its thrusters in orbit, shaking itself and disloding the bit of carbon that simply fell away. Worse thing is that Air Force radars tracked itbut lost the data until after the accident, when they checked everything in light of the inquiry.


Flight Day 4
January 19, 2003
Aboard Columbia
(music: The Verve, Lucky man)

Michael Anderson and David Brown had been specially EVA trained for the mission, even if not extra vehicular activities were planned. You never know - for example, the shuttle payload bay doors might decide not to close automatically; in this case it would fall to Anderson and Brown to don a space suit and close them manually. Nothing, however, could have prepared the two men for the plan transmitted by the ground. They have never heard anything like this before.
"Trapeze artists." Brown muttered.
"What ?" a smiling Kalpana Chawla was helping him donning his space suit.
"Trapeze artists. That's what we are." he said in a deadpan voice that made Chawla and Anderson laugh.
"But I'd prefer to practice trapeze under a circus tent than on a shuttle payload bay door. This is crazy." Anderson poked.
"Stop complaining" Chawla said. "Unlike trapeze artists, you don't have to bother with Earth gravity."
"That's fortunate." Brown added. "Mike, please forgive me. If I had known we would play trapeze in orbit; that I would someday hang to your ankle while in orbit, then I would have entered a diet before entering that shuttle." They all laughed loudly.
Brown and Anderson carefully donned their spacesuits and entered Columbia's airlock. It was built for only two astronauts, a number that fitted most of the EVAs (except for a memorable one, in 1992: in her first mission, Challenger successor Endeavour had been tasked with capturing and relaunching a stranded Intelsat satellite. When the robotic arm failed to catch the monster, a little army of three astronauts performed a truly epic extravehicular activity).
With the airlock depressurized they opened the hatch and floated outside the shuttle payload bay. It was filled with 43 000 pounds of diverse payloads; the Spacehab double module represented less than half of that mass.
The Freestar experiment represented most of the other half. A big truss known as the Multipurpose Equipment Support, Freestar carried a row of standardized containers called Hitchhickers and Get Away Specials. NASA loaned the containers to universities and science laboratories all across the United States, which in turned filled them with science experiments.
The containers weighed little, and they had little impact on the crew schedule. For example crew interaction with Get Away Specials resumed to flicking a switch and a little survey, and that was it. As secondary payloads, Hitchhickers and GAS cost very little and somewhat restored some lost promises the shuttle had never fulfilled; famously, that of making spaceflight cheap and popular.
Now Anderson and Brown crawled along the shuttle payload bay door, in the direction of the supposedly damaged wing. The show outside was stunningly beautiful: Columbia equipment racks shone under the Sun, and the huge Earth curvature hanged above their heads, a little menacing. Earth size overwhelmed the imagination.
Before the EVA David Brown space suit had been tweaked with two very unusual artefacts. First, he had an equipment tether (a rope usually not made for astronauts) strapped to his left ankle. As for his right foot – well, boot - he had towels strapped around it in order to avoid damaging Columbia’s fragile wing.
Now came the most amazing part of their adventure.
Brown first grasped the shuttle payload bay door with his gloved hands, and extended his legs downward - until he had his feet floating slightly above the wing curvature. The orbiter delta wing was not a perfect triangle; at the junction with the fuselage it curved into long chines that extended in the direction of the cockpit.
Anderson then used Brown as a human ladder; hanging to his fellow ankle, he was now looking at the upper side of the wing. He reported no visible damage to the ground, which was hardly surprising. Brown then carefully set his towelled right foot on the shuttle wing, allowing his comrade to float below Columbia’s wing. Anderson was now peering at the underside of an in-flight orbiter, something never done before.
Because there was no EVA planned on the flight, not only had they no tools, they had no camera able to withstand the emptiness of space to film outside. The future of the mission, of Columbia and the crew - and perhaps of NASA itself - hinged on Anderson’s verbal assessment.
As he looked at the leading edge underside, for a fraction of a second, Michael Phillip Anderson’s blood froze in place.
He was looking at a gaping hole there.


He looked again and again before reporting to the ground.
"Houston, there's one big chunk of that leading edge missing. That's unbelievable. (1) The hole must be 6 inches wide - I can't make a better estimate. No damage to the tiles as far as I can see - but that RCC panel is a mess. So much for super-strength carbon fiber !"
A true professional, Anderson spent long seconds burning the picture of the hole and leading edge into his mind. He may have had no camera, but he still had an excellent visual memory he would put to good use.
"We copied that. Good work, folks."
"Returning to the airlock now"
"Copied."
As soon as he exited his space suit, Anderson requested a pen and a sheet of paper and from memory, he started to carefully draw what he had seen. The six other crew members gathered around him with worried faces.
Anderson’s sketch was scanned and immediately beamed to the ground, then the crew had another idea.
"We should try and turn that sketch into Computer Generated Imagery NASA is more familiar with these days. Anyone gifted with photoshop here?" Commander Husband asked with good humour. A poll was held among the crew. That work on one of the onboard laptop computers was done under Mike Anderson’s watchful supervision, since he was the only one who had seen the real thing.
For long hours, the two astronauts laboured on the computer. The end result was worth the pain, however. Working from Anderson memory, they created an impressive multidimensional shot of the damaged shuttle underside; one could enlarge or reduce or turn the wing in every direction. It was a neat piece of computing imagery. Even then however Anderson hand-made sketch remained important; it was the primordial, raw expression of his visual memory, something computer imagery could not catch.
Down in Houston the astronauts paint and computing jobs immediately found their way into the hands of an army of experts. Much later their would go into history along Jim Lovell shots of the eviscerated Apollo 13 service module.
(1) This an adaptation of Jim Lovell's words describing the state of the Apollo 13 service module. I couldn't resist.


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight Day 6 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 21, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Johnson Spaceflight Center, Houston[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Coldplay[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]In my place[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]) [/FONT]
Linda Ham was presenting the results of two days of intensive and sometimes heated brainstormings. She was visibly exhausted, but at the same time the oldest veterans in the room felt some Gene Kranz "failure is not option" vibe going through the air.
"I will be blunt and direct. As of today only two countries have manned spaceships in the world - us, and the Russians. The Russians are out because Baikonur is not compatible with Columbia orbit. That mean that whatever happens Columbia can only save itself or be rescued by another of our shuttles.
"We have three orbiters left, but Discovery is out for long term maintenance, leaving only Endeavour or Atlantis.
Because Endeavour has just returned from STS-113 it is currently being prepared for a flight in May - way too late.
"That leave Atlantis, which was to take off on March 1 for the STS-114 flight to the International Space Station. This date is close enough we may compress the schedule by two or three weeks and reach the February 15 deadline if we hurry up from today.
"But sending Atlantis to rescue Columbia creates a huge morale issue. We do know that recent modifications brought to the external tank foam made it more brittle as shown by both STS-112 in October and the current emergency. STS-113 is not help since it lifted off by night and we couldn't see anything.
"We may change the tank to an older model with more resilient foam, such as ET-94 stored in Louisiana. Atlantis, however, already has its boosters strapped to the tank; destacking is tedious and time consuming, and we have no time.
"So if we ever mount a rescue mission Atlantis crew will fly with some big sword of Damocles hanging above their heads. Although I'm sure we would be no short of volunteers... "
The faces of the many astronauts presents instantly told Ham she was right. She eyed Norm Thagard, a veteran of the Mir flights; his facial expression alone screamed I will fly that mission.
"Sending Atlantis will be plan A, and the work of White Team."
"Or the crew could try and repair Columbia in orbit - this is plan B for the Black Team."
"Black Team will be divided into two groups.
"Black Team One is tasked with assessing a possible wing repair.
"Black Team Two, for his part, will work on making the orbiter as light as possible. If we make Columbia fluffy - like a feather - reentry will be accordingly less harsher to the damaged thermal protection system.
"Without offending Black Team, we consider the wing repair / light orbiter much less likely to succeed. Yet their work is equally important because unlike White Team studies it actively involves Columbia crew. Repairing the wing and throwing things overboard will keep them busy and active. Plus there might some big glitch pushing Atlantis flight behind February 15... and forcing the crew to return on their damaged ship. That last hypothesis has to be taken into account, even if it is frightening.
"I also want to mention that a third, Blue Team has also been created to review every possible scenario outside the main two options - even the wildest concepts. Since we declared emergency we are literally flooded with internal and external calls. We have very serious people coming with all sort of hare-brained concepts and ideas. Although most of them fell short of the February 15 deadline, among the lot there might be some clever ideas that need to be reviewed. Anything will help." Ham concluded.




[FONT=Times, serif]Flight Day 7 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 22, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Abord Columbia [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]REM[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Everybody hurts[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif])
[/FONT]The orbiter interior was cold and dark, but the disciplined crew maintained hope. Meanwhile in Houston, NASA was mobilizing, Apollo 13 style. Once again, failure wasn't to be an option. Veteran engineers, managers and astronauts rushed to help - and they were welcome.


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight Day 8[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 23, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Johnson Spaceflight Center, Houston [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Scorpions[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Wind of change[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif])
[/FONT]That day, Blue Team received yet another unexpected proposal for aid. It came from the other side of the Atlantic, from Europe.
Old Europe, according to the words of a certain secretary of defence.
Blue Team had absolutely zero interest in politics, but when their chairman heard the proposal, he realized, how at times, emergencies resulted in bizarre twists made to history.
The proposal came from the French Space Agency, the CNES - and from the German ministry of research, the DLR. It was only vaguely related to ESA; it was the usual mess of national versus supranational conflict of interests that plagued old Europe.
Blue Team was in the process of a broad review of every rocket to be launched within the next three weeks and even beyond. And indeed on February 15, an Ariane 4 was to launch from French Guyana with an Intelsat satellite aboard. It was the very last of its kind; the first generation of Ariane born on December 24 1979 would become extinct afterwards. However, the issue with Ariane was the same as with every other expendable rocket in the world: Although it could easily launch to Columbia’s orbit, the payload would lack a navigation, control and guidance system to reach the Shuttle. Only a Soyuz or Progress had that capacity, but of course, Baikonur was out of reach. The Blue Team chairman sighed and prepared to class the European report on the large pile of "dead end" solutions, when something caught his eye.
That report definitively had something more to offer.
"Eureka !", he aptly shouted. With the report under his arm, he rushed in the direction of his superior’s office.



[FONT=Times, serif]Flight Day 9 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 24, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Aboard Columbia
[/FONT]The Columbia crew had gathered once again. Rick Husband passed his fellow crew members copies of the ground instructions. Although the astronauts were professionals, this time there were muffled exclamations and expletives.
"And I felt playing the trapeze artist on the orbiter payload bay door was crazy. Perhaps I should reconsider that opinion." Anderson said dryly.
"We are going to be busy," Husband said, "and it is as well like that."
"Sure, we have enough work in those checklists for a month or so." Kalpana Chawla added.
"Dare I say - they are taking no risk." McCool declared.
"Take into consideration this is only a draft. They are still refining a lot of things - this is only a logical follow-up to the power-down." Husband said.
"Most of that work is Extra Vehicular Activity, and we are only two with two spacesuits. The airlock, by the way, can only handle two persons." Anderson and Brown felt a heavy weight fall on their shoulders.


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight Day 10 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 25, 2003 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Kourou, French Guyana
[/FONT]It was the end of an era. Within three weeks Ariane 4 and her launch complex would die together. ELA-2 would be demolished and Ariane 5 would rule - provided it overcame a turbulent youth marred by four failures in the first six years, some of them truly disturbing.
Ariane 4, by contrast, remained a reliable workhorse, but it nonetheless had to go, as Europe had no money to run such different launchers in parallel. So far the 144th and last of the first generation Arianes remained at the assembly stand. It was essentially complete, minus the top.
Elsewhere in Kourou was a clean room with the payload, an Intelsat communication satellite. The satellite would be prepared and sealed into the payload fairing before a transfer to the launch pad. There it would meet the Ariane itself (which looked somewhat beheaded) for the final integration, and launch.
If all went well, the rocket would reach the pad on January 30, and the fairing / satellite would be integrated there on February 5 for a launch a week later.
Yet for a day now satellite integration had somewhat slowed down, if not stopped. By contrast, the launch vehicle checkout and buildup was being accelerated. Ariane had lost its payload but prepared for a more exciting future. It had been said the first generation of Ariane would not end their prolific career on a boring satellite launch.




[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 11[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 26, 2003 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Aboard Columbia [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]([/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]music:[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Texas[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], In demand)
[/FONT]"That's one small step to the middeck, but...a giant leap for a ladder." someone poked.
The space shuttle orbiter, like a Boeing 747 or a big ship, actually had decks - two of them. The seven astronauts did not sit all at the same level. There were four seats amid the windowed cockpit; but the other three, less fortunate passengers, sat in the middeck - somewhat a cave without any view of the outside. That configuration explained by itself why the shuttle, even after Challenger, still had no ejection seats. Where would the middeck seats have fired ? There was no way four astronauts would eject from a crippled orbiter while three of them died stranded there.
On the pad, the crew entered the orbiter by a lateral door that led into the middeck. There were three removable seats, the living area (including a toilet), big lockers and a couple of hatches - one to the airlock, the other to a ladder leading to the four man upper deck and cockpit. It was that ladder the crew was removing for a grandiose mission.
And it was only a beginning.
As Kalpana Chawla and David Brown struggled with the ladder, armed with a hammer, Laurel Clark was scavenging the orbiter crew cabin in a quest for small bits of titanium. The damn material was extremely resistant to heat and, if they ever were to try and fill their wing hole with something, the best choice by far was titanium.
William McCool, for his part, had a shopping list of items to collect. The checklist, as beamed from the ground, read:
Required hardware
1. 2-3 empty CWCs
2. 2 empty jettison stowage bags
3. Jettison stowage bag filled with various metal parts
4. Hose/valve/nozzle assembly attached to water port on Airlock panel

Mike Anderson, for his part, was once again in the airlock for an extravehicular sortie that, by comparison with past and present space activities, was like a walk in the park. He was to collect a so-called mini-workstation, essentially a bell on the pressure suits that was used to carry tools.
...
Two hours later, Columbia seven crew members gathered all the items they had collected in every corner of their spaceship. It made for a bizarre collection of objects: Laurel Clark’s precious bits of titanium, Chawla’s and Brown’s ladder, McCool’s diverse bags and hoses. They were meticulously examined, photos were made to be sent to the ground, after what the packaged items were placed into the airlock. Anderson retrieved the items, he added the mini-workstation to the lot and placed all the items into the Provisions Stowage Assembly - a corner of Columbia payload bay where emergency EVA tools were also stowed. That way everything he and David Brown needed was in the same place and readily accessible.

Kennedy Space Center, Florida
Space shuttle Atlantis was being towed out of its comfortable Orbiter Processing Facility. It was there that between missions, space shuttle orbiters were taken care of by ground teams – their big engines installed, their avionics verified in a myriad of meticulous tests that lasted days and weeks of time.


The orbiter was an impressive, somewhat beautiful machine, a space airliner with an immense payload bay and truly unique capabilities. Very ironically, it was those same capabilities that made it so hard to replace. The shuttle was just like Concorde. It had unique capabilities, yet it was a technological dead-end; it would have no direct successor.
Atlantis’ destination was the Vehicle Assembly Building, the mammoth building constructed in the days of the Apollo program. There, the solid rocket motors mated to the external tank stood vertically like an arch. They had been waiting for the orbiter since January 7. Atlantis was already three days in advance; according to the original STS-114 schedule, the orbiter was to exit OPF-1 only on January 29. The payload bay for its part remained empty, and that would help with cutting a lot of time from the schedule.
In another reality, Atlantis would have lifted off on March 1, carrying Expedition 7 to the burgeoning International Space Station. There would have been a pair of Russians aboard. Needless to say, STS-114 had been washed away by events.
OPF workers watched Atlantis roll out in silence, although many of them saluted the departing orbiter. Since the beginning of the alert on January 20, they had been working full time, 24 hours of every day of the week.
Within the Vehicle Assembly Building, more workers rolled their sleeves and prepared for the orbiter arrival. Atlantis would be hauled vertically by a giant crane hanging to the roof, mated to the external tank, and checked all over. If all went well, thanks to the accelerated Schedule, it would lift off on February 10, instead of the original March 1. As impressive as NASA efforts were, only five days would be left before the Columbia crew died of asphyxiation. The accelerated schedule, by the way, made Atlantis more vulnerable to the usual glitches grounding a shuttle for hours or even days. Many times, such glitches happened as late as only five or two seconds before launch. There was no way to be sure.


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 12[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 27, 2003 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Travis[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Writting to reach you[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif])
[/FONT][FONT=TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT, 'Times, serif]A patchwork plan for space rescue[/FONT]
[FONT=TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT, 'Times, serif]Daring scenario may employs unguided payloads and second shuttle for survival[/FONT]

[FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif]By James Oberg [/FONT][FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif](1)[/FONT][FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif]HOUSTON, Jan. 27, 2003 [/FONT][FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif]— [/FONT]

Human eyes all over the world rise to the heavens at a level not seen in a generation or more.
They look at space shuttle Columbia, which is visible from Earth everyday at dawn and dusk as a bright, fast-moving star.
Mike Anderson’s dramatic sketches and CGI of space shuttle Columbia’s damaged leading edge have sparked new interest in a nagging question: Can NASA save the astronauts ?
A week ago, horrified NASA officials revealed that visioning of launch tracking cameras led to an early realization that the shuttle’s thermal protection system had been mortally wounded. Program managers were alarmed by the debris impacts noted after Columbia’s launch on Jan. 16 and they wanted more information. Extended damage was ultimately identified by military telescopes, spy satellites and a daring spacewalk by two crew members.
And now what?
If a landing looks suicidal, and refuge at the international space station is out of reach because of incompatible orbits, how can the crew be rescued before their limited stock of supplies runs out?
Before January 17, 2003, the general consensus at NASA was akin to “there’s nothing that we can do about tile damage once we get to orbit”. NASA has not yet figured out a way to perform repairs on damaged or missing tiles in space.
But that doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless, NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe insisted on Friday. “To suggest that we will do nothing is fallacious,” O’Keefe said in a meeting with reporters. “Since there had been a clear indication of problems, there will be no end to the efforts.

Cruel calculus

In all the current speculations about possible rescue missions, there always remains an unbridgeable chasm between how long the crew members can stretch their life support systems, and how long it would take to get a rescue shuttle mission to reach them. The cruel calculus of this spaceflight crisis may lead some to an unhappy, premature, pessimistic conclusion: The astronauts will die, probably of carbon dioxide poisoning, before a rescue mission involving a second shuttle can be mounted.
NASA answered that issue by configuring Columbia for “slumber”, with many systems (such as the aft-end thrusters) turned off forever to save power. The fuel cells, one after the other, idle at minimum for an extended period. Navigation and even communications gear was shut down. Heaters are probably off, and the cabin certainly dropped to near freezing.
Meanwhile amateurs and retired space workers are frantically developing at least one miracle maneuver to bridge that gap. For days now, the full-powered brainstormers from Mission Control and throughout the space industry have been developing workable rescue plans — or ideas even better !

On-orbit delivery

One gimmick would be to launch an emergency supply payload into orbit aboard an expendable launch vehicle. Several such packages would have to be prepared in parallel, because mission success of any one of them might have been 50-50 or even less. But with enough attempts, one of them may likely work.
The ideal package would weigh at least half a ton, maybe a lot more, and would contain all the materials needed to extend the crew’s survival for several more weeks. Most critically, it would carry the airscrubbing chemical packs to keep exhaled carbon dioxide below harmful levels. There would be food and water, waste management bags, batteries, and blankets — it would get cold really fast on this orbital campout. There would be medications, including drugs to reduce the astronauts’ metabolism rates as low as possible to conserve air.
But the most precious cargo aboard such a payload would be hope, both for the stranded crew and for their loved ones and colleagues and everyone else back on Earth.
What kind of rockets are available for a sudden redirection? And how readily can they be reprogrammed?
First, we know which rockets are not available. No Russian rockets can help, because Russia’s launch sites are too far north to allow launches into the more southerly orbit followed by Columbia. [FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif](2)[/FONT]
But many others are available !
At the European launch site at Kourou in French Guyana, a powerful Ariane 4 booster actually is in its final days to countdown. Other expendable boosters are in various preparatory stages in India, China and Japan, and of course at U.S. launch sites, both governmental and commercial.
Lastly, among the Pentagon’s fleet of MX Peacekeeper and Trident military missiles are some already tagged with combat orbital missions, and they too could carry a ton or more of lifesaving equipment into orbit. [FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif](3)[/FONT]

The main issue is that the package would not be able to maneuver or navigate in the direction of the crippled shuttle.
As such it would need to be at the correct orbital inclination, to within a tenth of a degree, and it would have to blast off to within a second or less of the exact launch window that allowed compatible flight.
Rocket computers could be reprogrammed for these paths within a few days, but the risk of human error would be considerable. That’s why many attempts would have to be initiated. [FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif](4)[/FONT] Once any one of these packages reached a compatible orbit, Columbia could do the rest. Since its propulsion system is still functional, it will be able to chase down the package and perform a space rendezvous with it. This is a standard maneuver that all astronauts receive summary training for, although it was not part of the original STS-107 mission. So in the days while the rescue rockets are being prepared, Houston could fax up a set of reference books and charts to be used by the crew. They would even have time for several dry-run practice sessions. Exactly such an unplanned rendezvous — although only to save a payload, not the crew — was performed by an untrained shuttle crew in 1985, and it worked perfectly.
A minor caveat to Columbia maneuvering in chase of an unguided package is the quantity of propellant left into the OMS pods. A shuttle usually has 300 m/s of delta-V; yet according to the last data from Houston, Columbia is left with only 448 ft/s, which translates to 135 m/s. This begs the question of what to do with that limited amount of propellant - chase elusive packages across the sky or maneuver in the direction of Atlantis ? [FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif](5)[/FONT]
Once the shuttle had approached the supply package and had it floating over its payload bay, the next tricky part would begin. It would be tricky because the package would not be self-stabilized; experience with the 1992 STS-49 repairs of Intelsat 603 is not exactly encouraging. The two spacewalk-trained astronauts would be outside, ready to grab it by hand — and for that reason, lots of handholds would have been bolted all over it.
They then would snap their safety lines onto pre-installed attachment points, and tie the package down.
For however many cycles it took, they would load up the shuttle’s airlock with hand-carried packages, close the outer hatch, and let their companions inside unload the goodies. Then they too would come back inside.
As one can see, the main drawback of the expendable launch vehicle option is the fact the packages are unguided, which in turn would lead to high attrition rate and a difficult "last mile" approach by Columbia and recovery by the stranded crew.
Unfortunately most experience with self-navigating, self-stabilized spacecrafts lies with the Russian Soyuz or Progress, which are not available in that scenario.
However, a NASA official stated yesterday that "the agency is currently scrambling for every possible space platform or space system able to self navigate, maneuver, rendezvous and stabilize in the vicinity of a shuttle orbiter."
NASA DART (Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology) DARPA Orbital Express and the Air Force XS-11 are being built just for that mission; but they will fly only within the next couple of years. A frantic search is ongoing for any existing system that could be reconfigured fast enough to be sent to Columbia.

Support from Earth - what will the rescue mission be like

If a new shuttle is to be ready, it will be probably be Atlantis, as it was to lift off on March 1 for the STS-114 mission to the International Space Station. Of course, the accident that caused the mortal wound to Columbia will have to be prevented from happening again.
Then the day will finally come when a rescue mission blasts off. Its crew will be reduced to four, the bare minimum required to perform all necessary maneuvers.
After reaching the drifting Columbia, the rescuers could tie a line between them and set up a “gravity gradient” stationkeeping posture — a maneuver tested as far back as the Gemini program in 1966. Spacewalkers could go across with emergency suits (perhaps even the dusted-off “rescue balls” designed back in the late 1970s) and begin evacuating the stranded crew. Each of those activities would be composed of routine steps from scores of earlier shuttle missions, but strung together in a most non-routine pattern.
Seating for landing would be no problem. Astronauts could just deploy a mat on the floor of the middeck and tie the now-rescued astronauts down prone. They would ride back to Earth safely in that posture. [FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif](6)[/FONT][FONT=serif, 'Times New Roman', serif]
[/FONT]None of these steps is individually impossible, and in fact most have been performed piecemeal in the past. Everything needed to do it this way — or in any of a dozen better ways that the space teams could have devised — is already on hand.
NASA can do it - and we can be sure there will be no lack of astronaut volunteers to rescue their stranded mates."
(James Oberg, space analyst for NBC News, spent 22 years at the Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer.)

Bremen, Germany
Ulf Merbold had flown four times into space, and he knew the unmanned platform better than anyone else. He was quite sure it might do a good job, if only it would survive a ride on Ariane. After all, that spacecraft had been an offspring of the shuttle; it was literally born of its payload bay. Most importantly, the little platform knew how to navigate and maneuver alone for months at a time; as icing on the cake, it could carry as much as one ton of payload. At 10 000 pounds, it didn't even max Ariane’s 15 000 pound payload into low Earth orbit limit.
That would be a great première for the European launch vehicle - quite ironically on its very last flight ! For that rocket over its long career had essentially launched communication satellites into geosynchronous orbit... and nothing else or so. To be honest, there had been a handful of remote sensing satellites (Spot, Topex, the military Helios) that had gone into low polar orbit. That kind of mission was so rare, however, that Ariane never had a dedicated upper stage; it had to do with the expensive liquid hydrogen H-10, even if it was a total overkill.

(1)This is a straight adaptation of an OTL piece written by James Oberg late February 2003 that can easily found on the Internet. Together with the CAIB appendix 13 it is somewhat a glimpse of a Columbia rescue scenario - and a strong motivation for writting this TL.
This article is interesting in the sense it answers a lot of technical questions previously asked - see (2) (3) (4) (5)and (6)


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 13[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 28, 2003 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Aboard Columbia[/FONT]
The crew observed a brief moment of silence in memory of the Challenger seven. Columbia astronauts may have been depressed by a coincidence aggravated by another sad anniversary the previous day, of the Apollo 1 fire of 1967 and the death of Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom. But they were psychologically solid and way too busy to really think that their names might be added to NASA martyrdom. Their mood, shared by the ground, was they would fight until the very end. There was no question about that.
Mike Brown and David Anderson spent the day talking with the ground and rehearsing the next day’s extravehicular activity (EVA) - which promised to be the most extraordinary in the history of the space program.
Yet there had been no lack of extraordinary astronaut sorties in space before.
September 1985
Cosmonauts Dzhanibekov and Savinykh have been sent to Salyut 7 for a rather desperate mission. Months earlier, after a human mistake, the (inhabited) Salyut had been shut down and lost into the coldness of space. The two cosmonauts are to revive a dead station. They painfully dock their Soyuz and prepare for the worst, including gas masks. They don't know what lies behind the hatch.
They found a frozen space station littered with ice and icicles; Salyut 7 is reminiscent of an underground cave in Antarctica.
The cosmonauts can only guess by how much did the electrical systems and avionics suffer. Nothing worse than the Apollo 13 astronauts trying to revive their long dead Command Module (the only ship able to bring them through Earth re-entry) and finding it literally filled with water.
After tremendous efforts, Dzhanibekov and Savinykh manage to return the space station to life, only for the next mission to leave unfinished work aboard Salyut 7, courtesy of a medical emergency. The next year, in May 1986, another Soyuz accomplishes the first interorbital flight. Soyuz T-15 departs Mir to Salyut 7 for a fifty days stay there before returning to Mir - an orbital mechanics masterpiece.

May 1973
Skylab launches into orbit on a cloudy day that prevents Saturn V tracking during ascent. In the chaos of the launch, after a serious glitch, a solar array stupidly extends outside the rocket. It is immediately ripped apart by the tremendous aerodynamic forces, making the $2.5 billion Skylab a partial wreck. As for the other solar array, it is stuck by debris in a folded position.
Skylab’s electric power now hangs on thanks to the Apollo solar telescope arrays, not exactly built for that purpose.
The next month, a salvage mission led by moonwalker Alan Bean reaches the crippled station. There's no workaround: either the lone solar array gets deployed, or Skylab will be lost. However, without a shuttle payload bay or a robotic arm, Alan Bean has to be literally towed by the Apollo capsule in the direction of the stuck solar array. Once there, he grasps the array with his gloved hands and starts to pull it with all the strength his clumsy space suit allows him. Suddenly, wham ! The solar array unfolds without a warning, sending Bean tumbling into space. Only his line saved him from flying away. But Skylab is saved.




[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 14 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 29 2003 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Aboard Columbia [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]REM[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]E-bow the letter[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif])
[/FONT]"And... here we go again."
Brown and Anderson felt the orbiter airlock was rapidly becoming a second home (or a third, depending whether one counted Columbia’s decks and airlock separately). On the airlock panel was a water port - a space tap. The day before they had checked every corner of Columbia for hoses, valves and nozzles.
They progressed in the direction of the Provisions Stowage Assembly and carefully retrieved all the items. Anderson now had the ladder under his arm and Brown couldn't help smiling. He had plugged their makeshift hose into the airlock tap, and as such, they looked like space firemen ready to extinguish a fire.
One day payload bay trapeze artists, the other space firemen. This mission is definitively bizarre.
They would soon resume the familiar path along the orbiter payload bay door; however, before that, Brown had to harvest the orbiter again. He had to scavenge Columbia for some AFSRI - a barbaric acronym for what amounted to very ordinary insulation blankets. The material covered non-crucial parts of the orbiter, and there was plenty of it everywhere. Brown harvested several kilograms of the thing and tucked that into a plastic bag; then he joined Anderson and together they crawled along the payload bay door.
This time the space trapeze artists added the middeck ladder to their incredible show. Much like Anderson’s boot the first time, the ladder’s metal feet had been wrapped in towels, in order to avoid damaging Columbia’s wing even more.
Using ropes and tethers and strings, they solidly attached the ladder to the payload bay door. What had been once the top of a ladder emerging from the lower middeck into Columbia’s cockpit, now lay, feet wrapped in towels, on the shuttle wing’s upper leading edge.
Mike Anderson climbed down, Neil Armstrong style; once on the ladder's last step, he solidly tethered himself to it and literally dived under the leading edge, looking for the menacing hole they had to fill in order to survive. David Brown was now Anderson’s assistant, passing items to him. He had no time to realize the craziness of the situation; had he, perhaps he would have felt like Frank Poole trying to repair the damn AE-35 element on Discovery’s high gain antenna... no psychotic computer was waiting to kill them, fortunately.
An hour passed. Brown was not supposed to join Anderson below the wing leading edge, but events decided otherwise, and at some point he had an opportunity to go there. He couldn't resist and briefly glanced at the hole. The sight was instantly burned into his mind. The panel was really a mess, the hole gaping with sharp edges and twisted bits of carbons forced inward by the shock.
To think foam can do that - a piece of foam could have killed us all. He chased that feeling out of his mind and rapidly returned to his position of Anderson’s assistant, up there on the ladder.
Mike Anderson, for his part, was living the most important moment in his life.
He had first stuffed an empty stowage bag into the hole, pushing it into the gapping cavity after he tried to smoothen the sharp edges there.
He then placed Laurel Clark’s bits of cockpit titanium into the bag, forming a (hopefully) heat resistant barrier he pushed as far as he could into Columbia’s wing.
Next step was the thermal protection. He grabbed a flexible bag, pushed it into the hole, and fireman..., erm, astronaut David Brown sent water from the airlock. The bag inflated inside the wing and he gently pushed it deep inside, until it bumped into the titanium barrier. Over the next hour, he patiently repeated the process, filling bag after bag with water until the leading edge was filled to the brim. Droplets of waters had escaped and instantly turned into beautiful crystals that shone under the sun, then vanished into the deepness of space. It was an eerie, surrealistic sight.
Columbia now had its left wing edge filled with titanium and water, but the gaping hole remained.
Anderson's last duty on that memorable day was to stuff the thermal blankets he had previously harvested into the hole. He gently forced them between the hole edges and the water bags behind. The AFSRI stood absolutely no chance against the re-entry inferno; it would burn and melt like chocolate on a hot metal plate. Yet every fraction of a second the furious plasma would lose while burning the blanket, would have Columbia closer to Earth and a possible crew bailout.
He stuffed the last AFSRI blanket and then the job was over.
For a few seconds, Michael Philip Anderson, born on Christmas day 1959 in Plattsburgh, New York, looked at the repair that might save himself and the lives of his companions.
Despite his best efforts, the repair looked really crude. That thing doesn't stand a remote chance against the re-entry plasma’s fury. He shook his head, said a little prayer, and climbed back up the ladder in the direction of David Brown.


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 15 January 30 2003 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Bremen, Germany [/FONT]
"I never thought that thing would fly into space again. It has been ten years - a decade of frustrating efforts spent battling governments. I can't guarantee it will work. That thing has been built to fly on a space shuttle payload bay, not under an Ariane fairing. By the way, it is slightly too big for that fairing."
Ulf Merbold was sceptic.
"But it is the son of the Shuttle Pallet Satellite, and SPAS was modular, wasn't it ? And it may fly with a single solar array. It won't spend eleven months in space, not this time. Man, how ugly is that thing. "
"It may be ugly, but it gets you there." Ulf Merbold smiled at the reference to the famous Volkswagen advert featuring a Lunar Module, all those years before, in 1969...
"To think it flew only once", the Daimler engineer sighed. "There were two more missions planned at the time, but Columbus ate everything else - this thing, more Spacelab flights, Hermes, the Man-tended-Free-Flyer and the polar platform. That's how Europe manned spaceflight went down the drain. Daimler was so frustrated, that in January 1996, they took over the platform from ESA and sought private investors for further flights."
"At some point we nearly had the Arab Emirates on board, but they backed down when NASA gently told us they had no shuttle flight to carry this baby into orbit again. Which is hardly surprising: any mission unrelated to Hubble or the ISS stands little chance. Do you realize STS-107 was proposed as early as 1998, and was to be flown two years ago, in February... 2001 ? it says a lot. As for this thing, it's a big baby, you know - not the kind of secondary payload that can hitch a ride on a corner of a shuttle payload bay or on a little vacant space under a fairing..."
"Whatever, you at Daimler refused to let that platform die." Merbold said.
"Indeed. Four years ago, we proposed it to ESA again. The plan was to fly it as a free flyer to complement Columbus. Since the death of the MTFF, Europe's space laboratories are to be kept attached to the station, and delicate microgravity experiments hate that. Our platform would have been launched by an Ariane, it would have flown itself to the ISS and latched onto Columbus, for the crew to swap or recover experiments if needed. After that it would have detached for a year long flight, far from the space station – vibration and dirty environment – before returning to Columbus. Perhaps once it would have hitched an Earth return ride on a passing shuttle, but we didn't have much hope, so we did away with the shuttle."
"How far did you go ?"
"Farther than one may think. We modified our baby to fly on an Ariane; we made limited changes to the payload section, so that some elements could be swapped in space and not on the ground. Heck, we even have an engagement from Arianespace and ESA for an Ariane 4, perhaps the very last to roll out of the production line, made of the many spares they had accumulated over the years."
"And then nothing happened."
"Indeed. After 1999, NASA and the space station endured one crisis after another - Mars probes crashed, the ISS was hit by one big huge cost overrun, and administrator Dan Goldin was sacked after a record ten years at the head of the space agency. With Columbus postponed once again, our plan fell by the wayside, and the platform you see returned into storage. In fact, at the end of last year, my management was seriously considering turning it to some Swiss museum."
"And now that ungainly spaceship may be the unsung hero..."
Ulf Merbold smiled. He had no doubt the European Retrievable Carrier – Eureca – would do a good job.






[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 16 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]January 31 2003 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Kourou, French Guyana [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Alanis Morissette[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Ironic[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif])
[/FONT]
Ariane looked like a beheaded monster.
The booster was being transferred to the launch pad with neither the fairing or the payload. Intelsat 907 had been gently tossed aside and the ground teams were now frantically working on old Eureca. Intelsat had no interest in obstructing such an historic mission. The company had backup launchers and even a backup satelite anyway.
James Oberg had imagined 1-ton unguided packages launched (with a certain attrition rate) to Columbia orbit. When compared with them, Eureca had some built-in advantages. It had powerful propulsion and power systems, it was able to navigate alone for months. Most importantly, it was 3-axis stabilized and designed, from its inception, to fit in a Shuttle environment.
Yet, Eureca had not been designed to be launched by an Ariane - there was no existing interface between the two. Due to a lack of time, such interface was now being created in a very crude, minimalistic way. Eureca would essentially fly as some heavy ballast precariously attached to the Ariane’s satellite dispenser.
Truth be told, the platform was even slightly too wide (by 25 inch) to fit into that rocket fairing.
To solve that issue, American and European engineers dug out Eureca’s mother out of mothball. Dubbed SPAS (for Shuttle Pallet Satellite) it had flown a decade earlier and was cruder - unlike Eureca, it was unable to detach from its shuttle carrier. Yet SPAS remained useful in the sense that its structure was essentially half of an Eureca. If the latter had to be cut or shortened to fit into an Ariane fairing, it would be SPAS that would tell the engineers where and what to cut.
As such, the old Shuttle Pallet Satellite had literally been butchered, some of its structural elements eventually finding their way into Eureca. The resulting hybrid spaceship was rather ungainly, yet it would deliver 1 ton of survival gear to the stranded astronauts.
Meanwhile, other ESA teams in Kourou were assessing the present and future weather, with mixed feelings. There would be strong altitude winds soon, and Ariane hated that. The launch was planned for, well, as soon as possible - probably around February 8 or so.
Whatever would happen, that flight of the Ariane would remain known to history as epic.
The last Ariane of its kind would help in the rescue of the first Shuttle - and it would have to sacrifice an Intelsat satellite for that.
There was some bitter irony in all of this.
Three decades before, Ariane had essentially ruined the Shuttle’s career as a satellite launcher by sweeping away many Intelsat V and VI launch contracts. Not only had the shuttle been affected; the shuttle was supposed to kill the Delta and Atlas-Centaur that at the time launched early generations of Intelsats.
With perfect hindsight, in 1977 Atlas-Centaur could have strangled Ariane in its infancy, had it not been for the Shuttle !

A decade later, Challenger and its crew were lost in a pretty horrific disaster that marked the end of an era. On August 15 1986, President Reagan had a decree passed that forever banned the Shuttle from commercial satellite launches. Unfortunately, for a decade now, the Shuttle had literally wiped out the Atlas and Delta, whose production lines were being shut down. When they finally re-opened, it was too late. As of 1988, the early Arianes had been refined into the formidable Ariane 4 that swept the satellite launch business like never before.
Ariane’s success was bitterly felt on the other side of the Atlantic, and from 2002 onwards, mounting tensions over Iraq did not help at all.
In such a toxic context, Ariane’s immediate availability to a rescue mission had been a bonanza. There were rumours of very high-level political involvement in the Ariane/Eureca mission, with De Villepin, Chirac and Schröder talking to President Bush as early as January 20, the day NASA had disclosed the gravity of Columbia situation to the world.
February 15, 2003 promised to be a day for the history books.
If both Atlantis and Ariane failed to reach Columbia before that day, then the crew would die of asphyxia.
Ariane would have probably launched Intelsat that day on a routine mission, three days late, since strong altitude winds were predicted.
Lastly, that February 15, the flamboyant (and much maligned) French PM Dominique de Villepin was to give a speech at the ONU tribune on the subject of Iraq. Without any surprise, it would re-affirm his country’s intangible opposition to the war - although obviously that wouldn't prevent it from happening.
[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 17 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 1, 2003 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Aboard Columbia [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]The Rasmus[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], In the shadows)
[/FONT]
For a day now, the orbiter was flying with a wing pointed into the dark. It was hoped that in the absence of the sun, the wing would literally freeze – and, most importantly, all that water Anderson and Brown had taped into the bags would turn into a big iceberg.
Of uttermost importance was the wing spar, the solid bar of metal that held Columbia’s wing as a single piece. Made of aluminium and usually protected by the wing and thermal protection around it, the spar stood no chance if it was ever touched by the re-entry plasma. And if it ever broke, then the wing would be torn apart, resulting in a complete destruction of the orbiter and an horrific death for its crew.
The plan was not to stop the plasma – only an intact carbon panel could resist broken molecules of air nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. Instead, NASA and the astronauts would use every possible trick to make the plasma life more difficult.
Before it can reach the spar, the plasma would have to blast through the AFSRI, then it would have to melt all that frozen water. The last line of defence would be Laurel Clark’s bits of titanium, a very hard nut to crack even for a furious plasma. Unfortunately, the broken pieces of titanium only held together thanks to a plastic bag, and the plasma would show no mercy for it.
However, it was not the end of the line.
Not only would the destructive burn-through be delayed; NASA engineers also had a couple of tricks up their sleeves to weaken the plasma itself.
It was an unforgiving battle between a fragile mass of metal and aerodynamic heating trying to melt and destroy it. No side would show mercy !


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 18[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 2, 2003[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Johnson Spaceflight Center, Houston, Texas
[/FONT]LeRoy Cain could read doubt on the faces of the officials there.
“We are reaching a point where we have to seriously take into consideration the possibility that the Columbia crew may have to ride their crippled machine across the atmosphere. If that ever happens, we have to give them the best possible chance.” Cain started.
“You say that the wing repair may not be enough ?”
“Not exactly; rather, that there are a pair of tricks that may make the life of the plasma even more difficult.”
“Such as a lighter orbiter. But the weight reduction scenarios you are proposing here...” Linda Ham shook her head in disbelief.
“...are pretty extreme. I realize it. But we have to discuss them right now, because they are so difficult that the crew will have to start work soon.”
“We already have most of the crew sedated most of the day, because in their sleep they breathe less, saving precious oxygen, rejecting less carbon dioxide.”
“Are you seriously suggesting we only keep Brown and Anderson awake ?”
“Well, only they have been trained for extra-vehicular activities.”
“They are nearing exhaustion, though. The rate of the sorties is killing them. Is that massive weight saving worth it ?”
“Well, our calculations show 30 to 60 percent reduction in heat load and heat rates...” Leroy Cain started.
“But that’s only for an intact orbiter. God knows how a damaged machine would react. That, and the critical wing leading edge is spared of only seven percent of the usual temperatures.”
“Other options are lowering the perigee, and increasing the angle of attack during entry, to 45 degrees instead of the usual forty. Put together, they can help the orbiter through the worse of re-entry and - who knows ? - hold it together low and slow enough for the crew to bail out."
Aboard Columbia
Late in the evening, the Shuttle established a new endurance record, breaking its own record established in November 1996. That year, Columbia had spent 18 days in space. From this moment, every hour that passed carried the orbiter systems into the unknown – never before had they been asked to last so long in orbit.


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 19[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 3, 2003[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Aboard Columbia [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Moby[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], In my heart)[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif] [/FONT]
From that day on, Michael Anderson and David Brown’s lives took a bizarre turn. They were the only ones aboard Columbia trained for extra-vehicular activities. Most of what could be done to preserve the shuttle now required extra-vehicular activities – as such, the rest of the crew had to reduce their daily activities to save oxygen and reduce emission of carbon dioxide. That, and the repeated EVAs had taken a toll on the oxygen reserves.
From that day, Anderson and Brown felt isolated, much like 2001’s Frank Poole and David Bowman had been. They spent part of their days outside the orbiter, working on a new issue – making the orbiter lighter and lighter, to ease thermal constraints on the damaged heat shield during reentry, if there was ever a re-entry.
That day when they floated outside the airlock and into the lower cockpit, they entered a scene straight out of a science fiction movie. A light had been left on in the toilet and it dimly illuminated Columbia's sleeping crew. They were in their restraints, some pinned to the forward wall, others stretched horizontally across the mid-deck. In the relaxation of sleep, their arms floated chest high in front of them. It appeared as if they were in suspended animation, and in some way, they were. Despite the disciplined astronauts best efforts, life aboard Columbia became more and more difficult as the days passed.
Anderson and Brown were so exhausted, they had no time to think about their precarious situation or uncertain future. They had to perform the most difficult work first - before they were too exhausted and/or before the crew reserves were too much impacted by all their EVAs.


Flight Day 20
February 4, 2003
(music: The Jacksons, Can you feel it)
Anderson and Brown did a seven hour sortie outside that would remain in the history books. Once again, they pushed boundaries – of their bodies, of what the Shuttle and its payload could endure. That day, Mike Anderson and David Brown threw Spacehab out of the Columbia orbiter !
They crawled to the bottom of the payload bay and retrieved torque multiplier tools. With them, they opened the big latches that fixed the habitat to the orbiter that carried it into orbit.
They had a brief thought for all the NASA and Spacehab workers that had caretakered the module on a warm day in Florida - only a month before, in a past now so far away !
They grabbed cutters and started butchering a host of electrical and water lines through which Columbia had fed and nourished the module it carried. They felt like David Bowman butchering HAL’s brain on the way to Jupiter, although fortunately Spacehab did not talk to them.
Then the time came to cut the umbilical cord – the tunnel adapter that ran from Columbia’s airlock to the module. There was a flexible joint there, made of kevlar, cloth and wiring, and cutting that mess was not easy.
Even then, Spacehab refused to leave Columbia for a simple reason: It did not have little rocket thrusters to push itself away. It would be Columbia, under control of commander Rick Husband, that would literally back away, then flee out of the module’s reach.
Yet the module was so bulky that Anderson and Brown had to help it outside, much like a pair of nurses helping a pregnant woman with giving birth. Centimetre by centimetre, the two astronauts pushed the cumbersome module out of the payload bay. However, the process took so much time and they were so exhausted, with their reserves dwindling down, that in the end, the astronauts literally kicked the module with their boots.
It was an eerie sight: A pair of astronauts strapped inside a shuttle payload bay and furiously kicking the ass of a 18 000 pound module !
After minutes of exhausting efforts, Spacehab at least crossed the threshold of Columbia’s payload bay doors. With Anderson and Brown solidly tethered to the orbiter, commander Husband manoeuvred his crippled spacecraft away from the abandoned Spacehab.
The rest of the crew gathered around the cockpit windows to watch, incredulously, Spacehab drifting away. Much like the dead Frank Poole became the first man to Saturn, Spacehab's première would be a pyrrhic victory; soon the atmosphere would take its toll and it would tumble and burn - like the Russian space station Mir two years before.


Auf wiedersehen Spacehab !

(this is a picture I fabricated myself - I found a picture of Spacehab in the shuttle payload bay, then I literally "erased" the shuttle bay behind Spacehab using MS Paint. Tedious job !)
At that very moment, and in a stunning revenge against NASA and the shuttle's tortured history, Spacehab had become a space station on its own.



Flight Day 21
February 5, 2003
The next day, Anderson and Brown did another seven hour sortie outside. This time, they got rid of the 4400 pound heavy Freestar, the big truss where Get Away Specials and Hitchhickers were bolted. It was an easier task than throwing Spacehab overboard.
Once again, they gave a brief thought for all the labs and university students and researchers that had spent so much money, time and energy refining all the experiments now drifting away from Columbia to certain doom within Earth's atmosphere.
Meanwhile, down on the Columbia flight deck, Kalpana Chawla frantically snapped photos of the abandoned Freestar.
The day before, it had been Ilan Ramon that had taken pictures of the drifting Spacehab. Never, never in my life will I see something like this again, she thought.


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight Day 22[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 6, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Flashback to STS-49 - Endeavour first mission - May 1992[/FONT]
The billion-dollar Intelsat 603 satellite had been stupidly stranded in low Earth orbit for two years, courtesy of a Titan booster failure. NASA decided to send a Shuttle (Endeavour on its maiden flight) to rescue it.
The idea is to capture the satellite and replace the defective rocket motor with a working unit. Astronauts had rehearsed STS-49 for two years.
The main issue is how to capture the satellite in the first place. Intelsat obviously never thought its satellite would have to be captured by a shuttle robotic arm, so there's no grapple fixture on it. As such, astronaut Pierre Thuot is supposed to ride the robotic arm to the satellite and fix a purpose- build capture bar to its base; after what the robotic arm will be able to catch the bar fixture and the satellite that goes with it.
The first day Thuot spends three hours trying to latch the bar onto the satellite. Not only does the latches refuse to latch; Thuot finds that every time he tries to force his bar, the satellite internal propellant starts to slosh... and makes the 10 000 pounds Intelsat wobble, rotate and spin uncontrollably.
The second day has Thuot battling for five hours for a similar result - no latch and a wallowing satellite.
The third day is to be the last; Endeavour burned a lot of propellant the previous days, and the mission can't last forever. The astronauts decides to try a different trick.
Since Thuot alone can't at the same time hold the satellite steady and latch the bar, more hands are needed. Astronaut Hieb accompanied Thuot the day before, but a third man is needed, and thus Tom Akers join the party with the spare space suit. It is the first three man EVA in history, and truth be told, Endeavour airlock is a tight fit.
What follows is the most daring extravehicular activity in the space program history... at least until 2003.
Because the bar can't be be fixed to Intelsat for a capture by the arm, Thuot literally has to become a human bar, a bar with hands instead of latches ! And then another problem arise. Fixed to his robotic arm Thuot was supposed to handle the satellite alone. If a second man is to join him, he also has to be fixed to something, otherwise it might get lost into space. Unfortunately on the tip of the robotic arm there's only "room" for a single astronaut, so Hieb has to be fixed to something else... the shuttle itself. As such, orbiter pilot Dan Brandenstein has to carefully maneuver to bring the 100 tons Endeavour only two meters away from the balky, unpredictable satellite.
Once there, Hieb grapple the satellite and now Intelsat has two pair of human hands holding it steady. Unfortunately the satellite is in the wrong orientation for Hieb to retrieve and fix the damn capture bar (which remains useful, not to capture, but if only for the next round, read, to replace the rocket motor and re-launch that Intelsat beast into geostationnary orbit). For the next minutes the three astronauts slowly rotates the 10 000 pound cylindrical Intelsat by its base (!). This done, Hieb triumphantly latch the bar into place.
Alas, holding the satellite in one hand and the bar in another, Hieb finds he literally lacks a third hand to reach the switch at the bar center which definitively engage the latches.
Akers, for his part, hold his grip onto Intelsat, but can't do much more.
Thus it fells to Thuot, still riding his robotic arm, to sneak between the orbiter and the Hieb-hold bar to reach the switch and engage the latches definitively - and in the process he also tighten some bolts to be sure Intelsat never escape.
Now Intelsat has the bar solidly bolted and latched to his ass, and on that bar is a grapple fixture for the robotic arm to catch it. Except that the arm remain unable to catch the satellite since Thuot stands on its tip ! The astronaut thus clear the grapple fixture and now the arm definitively capture Intelsat 603.
NASA: 1, Intelsat: 0.
The Akers, Hieb and Thuot trio ends the day with EVA records; they respectively spent 8 hours and 29 minutes and 7 hours and 45 minutes into space !


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight Day 23[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 7, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Kennedy Space Center, Florida [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Coldplay[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif],[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Clocks[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]) [/FONT]

The 100 ton Atlantis had been brought from OPF-1 to the immense Vehicle Assembly Building. It had come there on its wheels, towed by a tractor, like a very ordinary airliner. Once in the immense building, it had been solidly bolted to a crane and hoisted vertically. The vision of the sleek orbiter hanging to the VAB crane was pretty surreal.
And then things had gone downhill.
“We are not going to make it.”
Mood at the Cape was at an all-time low. Atlantis had betrayed NASA; more exactly, one of its five General Purpose Computers – the orbiter brain – was to be replaced.
“That failure will take at least five days to repair. Add to that the time needed for on-orbit manoeuvring, and the Columbia crew will asphyxiate before we reach them. All those sorties Brown and Anderson did cut into the reserves, pushing the deadline to February 13 in the morning.”
“In this context there is only one hope left.”


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight Day 24[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 8, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Kourou, French Guyana [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Alain Bashung[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Osez Joséphine[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]) [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]Thunder rocked the jungle; the ground shook.
For the last time, an Ariane 4 left the equatorial launch base. Never in history had so much people gathered to see an European rocket liftoff.
The first two stages worked like Swiss clocks, but then came the most critical part of the mission. The HM-7 powering stage 3 had never been that reliable, although fortunately, its role in today mission was quite limited. After ten minutes of flight, it was cast-off, and the Eureca quietly sailed into Columbia 39 degree orbit.


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 25 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 9, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]
Aboard Columbia
Music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Coldplay[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], Whatif [/FONT]
The exhausted crew gathered once again near the cockpit windows to watch their savior’s arrival. The air aboard the Shuttle was becoming as thick as chicken soup; breathing was painful. It was Ilan Ramon who spotted a flash of light – Eureca’s lone solar array reflecting the sun. The ungainly space platform was carrying more than fresh air: It was carrying hope from all mankind.
Eureca had done her job pretty well, but once again the final word in the story belonged to Mike Anderson and David Brown. Over the last two days they had reviewed the peculiar STS-49 mission again and again; lessons learned from Intelsat 607’s epic capture.
They got out of the airlock into Columbia ravaged payload bay, where lose wires and latches floated desultorily. Down on the ground the join ESA / NASA team manoeuvred old Eureca within feet of Columbia’s payload bay, so that the two astronauts could catch the balky platform with their gloved hands, and tether it to their orbiter. What made matters more complex was the eventuality of getting rid of Eureca someday - provided Columbia had to close its payload bay doors to return Earth by itself.
Against all odds, Anderson and Brown managed to secure Eureca to Columbia. They immediately started unloading the platform vital cargo. It had been filled to the brim with LiOH CO2 scrubbers and oxygen. The Columbia crew, however, was also gratified by a special package. Inside were a lot of goodies – cookies, fresh vegetables, messages of hope and humour - everything Earth could think of to improve the astronauts morale.
Anderson and Brown filled the airlock with supplies the rest of the crew then unloaded inside. It was a cumbersome process that took a long time, but Columbia’s crew was in no hurry.
For the first time in three weeks, they faced a much brighter future.


Kennedy Space Center, Florida
NASA and contractors workers buzzing around Atlantis felt a heavy weight falling off their tired shoulders. The Eureca supply mission was also a breath of fresh air for them; it removed the unbearable pressure of a February 10 launch date that reminded many veterans of the days leading up to the Challenger disaster, when NASA was committed to an impossible schedule.
Kennedy top management acknowledged that pressure and the relief the workers felt. However, they were quick to remind them that only the first battle had been won in a continuing war. Atlantis still had to fly as soon as possible.




Flight day 26 February 10, 2003
“Around the world people are just beginning an evaluation of the consequences of the Columbia rescue. Although a secondary concern against the survival of the crew, it has to be noted the mission might lead to serious debris threat. Following the crippled orbiter in orbit are currently a derelict Spacehab, the Freestar truss with its disabled experiments, and of course the Ariane H-10 third stage. It should be noted that in 1986, the first Spot launch had the H-10 exploding into orbit; very ironically, ten years later, debris hit the French Cerise ELINT military satellite. The H-10, Freestar and Spacehab are going to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere soon and in a rather uncontrollable way...”


Flight day 27
February 11 2003
A discrete meeting of NASA top brass was held at the space agency Headquarters in Washington.
The mood around the table was definitively mixed.
Sean O'Keefe exposed a dismal situation.
"Surely, we have ensured survival of the astronauts, and that's paramount. Yet over the last hours more difficulties have been cropping up, notably around Atlantis. There are voices from all over the agency suggesting to relax Atlantis launch date if only because it will fly with Columbia foam issue unresolved. Space shuttle don't like rushed schedules - we learned that lesson in blood with the Challenger disaster. "We are also taking a lot of flak over debris issues, notably Spacehab and Freestar reentry. And that's only a beginning: sooner or later Eureca and the Columbia wreck will also reenter. Some say Atlantis should do something about it since it will carry a robotic arm. But Columbia astronauts will be extremely weakened by a month spend in terrible conditions in space, so Atlantis will have to bring them back as soon as possible. Could Atlantis spent one more day in orbit to try and clean some of that mess ? What to do with Eureca and Columbia ? I'm awaiting your suggestions."


Flight day 28
February 12 2003


"Valentine's day in space ?
Details of Atlantis rescue mission have been leaked by NASA. The launch date already slipped by some days after the failure of one of Atlantis five General Purpose Computers.
Latest news from the Columbia crew, however, are encouraging. Commander Rick Husband said he prefered Atlantis not to be rushed too much. "The risk of asphyxia is now definitively over and we never lacked any other form of supplies. In concertation with my crew we decided we can wait some more days, perhaps to the end of February if necessary. We are enjoying the view. David and Michael are trying to jury-rigg Eureca solar array and electrical system to provide us with more power."
It remains to be seen whether Columbia and Atlantis will spent Valentine day together in space..."


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 35 [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 19, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Aboard Columbia - and Atlantis ! [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Travis[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Driftwood[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]) [/FONT]
The crippled orbiter had previously climbed to a higher orbit, ahead of the rendezvous, to make her rescuer launch window better. The higher Columbia got, the slower it orbited Earth, making it easier for Atlantis to catch it.
Columbia had its open payload bay and cockpit facing Earth; it was somewhat flying upside down, (except in space there was no true up and down).
Atlantis was coming from below. In order for the rescue operation to work Eureca had previously been released and moved away from Columbia’s payload bay. The platform stint at Columbia had allowed the crew to save some reactant in the fuel cells.
Back in 1965 Gemini astronauts had learned how tricky on-orbit rendezvous were. Early on their aircraft experience played against them; spaceships were no aircrafts, and orbital mechanics were a totally different matter. As such aircraft-like interceptions failed miserably - all this because of Kepler laws. To catch up any target a spacecraft has to fly on a lower, faster orbit, overtake the target and then - only then - climb backward.
Even in close proximity, with Columbia above Atlantis, the two shuttles would not be at the exact same height above Earth. As such, Columbia would tend to orbit Earth slightly slower, and the small difference would be enough to gradually push the two orbiters away from each other. It was done on purpose: there would be no risk of collision.
In order for the astronauts being able to transfer from one shuttle to another, Atlantis and Columbia were to fly back to back, or more exactly payload-bay to payload-bay. A dumb issue was that of the orbiters’ large vertical tails; here the solution found had been to "clock" the two shuttles 90 degree apart. Atlantis nose would be at mid-day and its tail at midnight; while Columbia would have its nose at three o'clock and tail at nine o'clock. That way they could got closer than their respective tails height without issue.
Eileen Collins fired the Atlantis’ thrusters and the orbiter moved upward at a snail’s pace. Flying upside down, Columbia did not move a feather; Atlantis, for its part, carefully went closer and closer, until only 20 feet separated the two spacecrafts payload bays. They would have to stay like that for nine hours, the time needed for the astronauts to transfer, two at a time because of airlock limitations.
That had never been atempted before in the sense that no solid hardware kept the two shuttles together (or apart); there was no transfer tunnel, no docking ring and no hatch. Fate of the two orbiters hanged to a retro-reflector the Atlantis crew soon placed on Columbia cockpit roof. Atlantis had a Trajectory Control System, and that was all.
Through the shuttles’ cockpit windows, the two crews waved at each other. Soichi Noguchi and Stephen Robinson, for their part, were in the Atlantis airlock. With them was a pair of spacesuits; indeed with Clarke and Brown gone, there would be no suits left in Columbia.
For the very last time, Mike Anderson and David Brown donned their spacesuits and entered Columbia’s airlock. It had been decided they would go first, since they were trained for that, but also because of their daring, exhausting work.
Aboard Atlantis, commander Eileen Collins, assisted by James Kelly, kept a watchful eye on her orbiter‘s position.
Stephen Robinson locked his feet into a portable restraint set on Atlantis‘ payload bay door. He deployed a purpose-built telescopic boom in the direction of Columbia. Soichi Noguchi used the boom to transfer himself to the damaged orbiter's airlock where Anderson and Brown awaited him.
When the airlock opened, Noguchi had to help the weakened Anderson and Brown to exit.
For a fraction of a second, the three astronauts stood there, in the shadow of Columbia’s devastated payload bay, before Anderson exploded in laughter.
He and Brown shook Noguchi’s hand and hugged him. On both sides, there were exclamations, expectatives, and much rejoicing.
It was a memorable meeting in space, to be ranked along Apollo-Soyuz or STS-71, the first Shuttle-Mir docking. It was as bizarre as Stanley asking "Doctor Livingstone, I presume ?" to the man he had searched so long for in the remote confines of Africa.
The meeting was broadcasted to Houston, where Mission Control literally exploded in cheering.
"It was crazy, a return to the heydays of Apollo splashdowns," veteran Jerry Griffin later remembered. "We had guys puffing and chomping cigars, something not seen since the 70s, but for once, the no-smoking rule was broken."
Within minutes the information spreaded all over Earth.
Meanwhile the three astronauts placed the spare space suits into the airlock, and headed in the direction of the boom. Minutes later Mike Anderson and David Brown were safely tucked into Atlantis’ airlock. Aboard Columbia, the crew opened its own airlock and pulled out the space suits.
Over the next nine hours the operation was repeated three times: Laurel Clark and William McCool, Kalpana Chawla and Ilan Ramon successfully transfered to the safety, warmth and cleanliness of the Atlantis flight deck. Each pair that exited the airlock was greeted with hugs, flowers and a big box of chocolates.
NASA couldn't resist broadcasting the rescue live, and as such, down on the big planet Earth rolling below the two shuttles, millions of people whooped, shed tears and cheered.
Meanwhile Commander Rick Husband, like a faithful capitain, was the last to exit his ship. For the last time he looked at the orbiter interior, his little home for five weeks. Columbia had kept them alive all this time, bleeding itself to death in the process; never would it fly into space again.
However, it was not over, not yet.
Rick Husband watched Steve Robinson exit Columbia’s airlock. Together they had a last, controversial bit of work to achieve before leaving Columbia forever.
"I suppose your presence here means they have taken the decision."
"They did." Robinson said. "I was there, and I can tell you the debate was heated, and it raged for a long time."
"This is hardly surprising. This has only one chance in a hundred to work."
"Oh, they are taking little risk. You are all safe, ready to return to Earth with us: Atlantis slipped across foam losses and reached orbit intact, and that’s what matters. Everything past that point is a bonus."
"A bonus - that's the word. So let's do this, and then get out of here."
Husband sat on his commander seat, and Robinson on his right. They could see Earth rolling past Columbia's windows, and a large chunk of Atlantis' nose and payload bay. So close, Husband felt he could touch it with his hand.
They started removing a handful of panels - F6, F6A3, C3A5, R2. Robinson then carefully plugged the connectors. Together they floated downwards, into the obscure, smelly middeck. There they had another panel removed. They accessed the orbiter avionic bay 3A, and Robinson plugged a black box into it. Husband caught the 6 pound cable that sneaked out of Columbia's cockpit and connected it to Robinson's GCIL box. They then unloaded instructions uplinked from Houston into Columbia's electronic brain - its five General Purpose Computers.
That work done, Rick Husband said a moving goodbye to his ship and, with the help of Robinson, went along the harrowing path to Atlantis safety - Columbia's airlock, the wrecked payload bay that had his heart pinch (where's my Spacehab ?), climb roping on the telescopic boom and Noguchi himself, more crawling, and finally Atlantis' airlock.
With Noguchi's return, the rescue mission was essentially over; Atlantis backed down, leaving Columbia alone. The eleven astronauts aboard all had a pinch of heart at the sight of the abandoned orbiter drifting away in the distance. Columbia had been left on her own.
Before returning to Earth, Atlantis had one last job to accomplish. After Columbia vanished in the distance, Commander Eileen Collins maneuvered her orbiter to their next target, the heroic Eureca. Its lone solar array had been folded so that Noguchi could capture the platform and delicately depose it into Atlantis' payload bay. All of a sudden, the European Space Agency had had a renewed interest (and budget) for the brave little ship that had worked so well. As such it would be returned to Earth, refurbished and reflown.
Aboard Atlantis, the crew enjoyed a hot, delicious meal - Columbia's galley had been shut down as part of the power-down, and needless to say, the food aboard had been pretty much atrocious (although Eureca's arrival had improved things: French cooks had jumped on the occasion and provided the stranded crew with the finest meal compatible with cold water and zero gravity).
There were obviously heart-shattering telecons with the families, all the wives, husbands, children, brothers, sisters, parents and grandparents that for a month had been devoured by anguish.
The NASA astronaut corps official band Max-Q, led by Hoot Gibson, did its part by engaging in a remake of the famous 1985 charity single We Are The World.


- - - -


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 36[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 20, 2003[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Aboard Atlantis[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]U2[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif],[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Beautiful day[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif])[/FONT]

At the end of an unventful reentry, the orbiter glided to a perfect landing at Cape Canaveral.
The unfortunate crew and their saviors were acclaimed by thousands of people. The President himself was there, the NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe and all the unsung heroes of the odyssey - thousands of Cape Canaveral, Houston and Marshall workers and managers, veterans and active astronauts, celebrities by the dozens.
For a few days, America forgot about the tensions with Europe, the military buildup against Iraq, the 9/11 aftershocks. The country had eleven heroes to worship.
Columbia waited in orbit for its part, while NASA decided of its ultimate fate. However, time was running out, and so did the reactant in the fuel cells.


- - - -


[FONT=Times, serif]Flight day 40[/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]February 24, 2003[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif][/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif]Vandenberg Air Force Base, California [/FONT]
[FONT=Times, serif](music: [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Keane[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif], [/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]Everybody's changing[/FONT][FONT=Times, serif]) [/FONT]
The OMS pods fired one last time; the orbiter flip-flopped, tail-first, then it returned to a nose-first attitude before hitting the upper atmosphere at an angle of 45 degrees.
Within the empty cockpit, the fiery show outside shed some light on the instrument panels and empty seats.
Just like the mechanical pianos seen in old movies, Columbia's controls moved without any human intervention, under ghost-like remote control. Never in history had an American orbiter been treated that way - like an ordinary Soviet Buran !
The AFSRI had long been turned to dust and blown into the atmosphere. The big load of ice stuck in the wing was doing its best, but the plasma was melting it fast. Columbia vibrated, growled. The orbiter suffered like hell.The shuttle was bleeding speed away, banking high over the Pacific in immense S-turns... left, right, left, right... every second had the plasma closer to the wing spar; every second also had Columbia closer to her home planet. If it burned through, the orbiter would meet an immediate, ungainly death; it would burn like a comet and its debris would sink into the Pacific, joining space station Mir in its wet, dark grave.
However, Brown's and Anderson's makeshift repair busted the NASA engineers' wildest dreams.
It held.
High above the California coastline, a battered, burned, sooted Columbia turned from a spaceship into an aircraft for the last time. Under Houston control, the pitot tube sprouted out of the fuselage. However, no one knew how the undercarriage tires would fare after so much time in space; the prognosis was pretty bad.
Suddendly, out of nowhere, a bunch of T-38s thundered in the Californian sky: a trio of the sleek jets carefully closed on the fast descending orbiter. Aboard the fleet of T-38s were NASA astronauts paying a tribute to the crippled shuttle.
With the '38s buzzing around it, Columbia aligned itself with Vandenberg main runaway. There would be no second chance; it was land or bust. The orbiter flared, bleeding speed one last time; it now approached the runway in a nose high attitude at two hundred miles per hour. The main undercarriage touched first and a couple of tires immediately blew up. By some miracle they were on different legs; Columbia was now hurtling on the runway with, from left to right, one tire gone, one holding, one gone, one holding. The orbiter gradually lowered its nose until the front wheels touched - and then both tires blew. Columbia's nosewheel rim scorched the runway in a fiery show of smoke and sparks.
The crowd of NASA officials, astronauts, and anonymous people held their breaths, certain they were assisting in the beginning of the end for Columbia (as imagined by a bitter Stephen Baxter in his arguably worst novel, Titan, in 1997).
As Columbia slowed down to less than a hundred miles per hour, the nosewheel finally gave up and the orbiter ended on its nose. The undercarriage doors flew away into the distance or were destroyed. Ceramic tiles were ripped away and smashed to bits.
But in the end, Columbia's massive nose provided a huge brake that stopped the orbiter faster than if it had stood on its wheels. Two decades before, not too far away (in Downey), Rockwell workers had built an orbiter cockpit as strong as a fortress, and in this extreme case it paid off... in a different way.
It's nose smoking, but the rear undercarriage still standing, poor Columbia finally came to a stop near the edge of Vandenberg runway, putting an end to the most scary landing in shuttle history - and, incidentally, to the most amazing rescue mission ever.
Fire trucks rushed to the crash site; Columbia's OMS pods and RCS were retard bombs, courtesy of the dirty storable propellants they used. Before the crowd could approach the wrecked orbiter, that mess had to be cleaned up first.
At the end of a memorable day, the battered Columbia was hauled to a hangar at Vandenberg. In a final, biting irony, the hangar had been built two decades before, near the SLC-6 - the Air Force rocket pad of the base, where military space shuttles were to be flown from into polar orbit.
Mission STS-62A (6_A for the first 1986 mission out of -2 : Vandenberg launch complex, -1 being The Cape) had never happened, since Challenger blew up only six months before the SLC-6’s Initial Operating Capability. The billion dollar pad ended in mothball for a decade before enduring a costly reconversion for the Delta IV classic rocket.
Columbia stood there, in Vandenberg hangar, with an immense crowd gathering around it. The military base obviously could not allow a major invasion by the public, so a solution had to be found rapidly.
After crude repairs a few days later, Columbia was hauled on the back of a 747 carrier. The massive airliner carried the crippled orbiter to Edwards AFB, specifically to the NASA Dryden Center located there.
Columbia was to go through a lenghthy, painstaking disassembly process. At Dryden, the old orbiter somewhat ironically met its failed successors - a couple of X-34s were stored there, along with the stripped X-33 hull.


- - - -


EPILOGUE

December 17, 2004
National Air and Space Museum
Washington DC

The 747 SCA roared above the capital. It was the end of a long farewell tour; with Columbia on its back, the NASA Jumbo Jet had toured the United States, a glowing tribute to the heroic rescue mission.
Columbia had found a natural home in the NASM's new Udvar-Hazy annexe, where it would be displayed alongside the Apollo 13 capsule. There had never been any question about scrapping Columbia or sending it elsewhere. Even without the epic rescue, Columbia had been the first reusable ship ever, worthy of a place in the world's best aviation and space museum - alongside her sister Enterprise that had never been transformed into a true shuttle. The two orbiters were placed nose to nose before Columbia was nested into her final home. Some scars had been left in place, a testimony to the most epic rescue mission in human history.


THE END...


With a twist !

Glad to see my TL on the "finished TL" section. I had posted it six months ago but I didn't watched since then. Unfortunately I lack the time and patience to remove all the FONTS things and bring back the pictures. I post a link toward the original story thread.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/columbia-rescue-save-the-space-shuttle.270106/

Ok; I've managed to delete all the FONT / TIMES siliness, but I can't change the first post because my story has 120 000 signs and the forum doesn't want anything bigger than 100 000 (RAGe AGAINST THE MACHINE)
So I'll post the "cleaned up" story in two parts
- January 2003
- February 2003

Hopefully January 2003 is smaller than 100 000

I wasn't that difficult to delete all the crap. I pasted the whole text into word pad, and then did a search-and-replace function, replacing the FONT with... nothing.

DISCLAIMER



The loss of Columbia and its crew is a tragic story set in the recent past, and as such, it is very delicate to write about it.





Thus, before writing this story, the following ground rules were fixed :

- absolute respect of the crew

- absolute respect of sensitive players even when they were criticized by the CAIB (see Linda Ham)

- no dumb/easy/outrageous critique of NASA (the kind of crapshit so common on the Internet, such as "they are irresponsible killers" or "the shuttle is a piece of junk")



The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report is at the same time a ground-to-earth technical report and a formidable script for a sci-fi novel.



That last aspect was obviously never desired in the first place.





However, reading the CAIB Volume II, appendix D.13 (entitled STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment) one can't help but think of Apollo 13.



One has to read the CAIB descriptions of possible crew extravehicular sorties watching for the punctured leading edge or repair it.



One has to try and imagine Atlantis and Columbia flying back-to-back only dozens of feet apart as astronauts climb rope from one orbiter to the other.



What the report describes in 22 pages of unemotional, detached writing might have been the most formidable rescue mission in the history of the space program.



Consider this TL a "novelization" of the CAIB appendix. It is centered around the Columbia rescue and nothing else.













- - - -





Flight Day 1

January 16, 2003, 10:39 EST

Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 39, Florida



That cold day of January, the Space Shuttle Columbia was to fly a Spacehab, a class of missions the International Space Station would make extinct soon.





The old orbiter would be reduced to Hubble servicing every four years, but even these missions were nearing their end. Columbia in fact had only mission planned in the 21th century: that of retrieving Hubble. Of bringing it back to Earth, somewhere in the next decade. As for Columbia's three siblings, per lack of viable successor - the shuttle was so unique a design NASA had failed to replace it - a plan was seriously considered to extend the space shuttle lives to the year 2020.



The SSME lit first, and for seven seconds as they went full thrust they were thoroughly monitored.

Then the immense solid rocket motors awoke into life and for a fraction of second the shuttle tried to lift its launch pad through the huge power of its five engines. Big pins were blown explosively, freeing the space shuttle which literally jumped upwards, throwing flames in the direction of orbit.





Only ten minutes later and after an apparently nominal ascent, the tank was discarded, the engines shut down, and Columbia peacefully drifted into orbit.

What was to be a boring, last-of-its-kind, long delayed Spacehab mission, had begun.

The crew were all professionals deeply committed to their mission whatever the rest of the world, or NASA astronaut corp, could think about it. Half of the crew were rookies; and they come from all walks of life. Kalpana Chawla was born in India; guest cosmonaut Ilan Ramon was an Israeli pilot ; Michael Anderson was an afro-american and a veteran of the last flight to Mir four years before. Commander Rick Husband was a veteran of another Columbia / Spacehab mission years before. All others - William McCool, Laurel Clark and David Brown - were living the thrill of their first foray into orbit.

...

The NASA Space Shuttle had spent its whole career chasing elusive space stations. It was by itself the original sinner, since it had killed the space station it was to go in the very first place.

In 1970, after losing nuclear shuttles to the Moon and Mars NASA pinned all hopes into a balanced package - the winged shuttle would fly to a space station. Even that package, however, was impossible to fund, and soon a choice had to be made - station or shuttle ?

The reasoning at the time was that the shuttle would be the truck to build the station, so the truck had to come first, and the station was pushed back for a decade. The soviets, for their part, picked up the opposite path - station first, shuttle... someday. In the end, Buran would only fly once.



Because it had no destinations to go to - no Moon, no Mars, not even a space station - the shuttle had to seek an interim job to fill its first decade of existence. It ultimately earned a life launching satellites, all of them - military, science, and commercial satellites. By a bizarre twist of fate, a federal agency like NASA found itself competing with private companies, notably Arianespace.

In 1973 the shuttle was given all American satellites on a silver plate but the price to pay was that it was to earn money, and to achieve that it had to fly no less than 60 a year - once a week ! Unfortunately, experience would prove the vehicle could fly at best 8 a year (in 1996).

Early in the 80s NASA only partially acknowledged that reality by cutting the shuttle "ideal" flight rate to 24 a year, still three more than what the shuttle could endure.

From 1984 onwards the space agency had its back against a wall - 24 flights a year or lose face against Congress and the World.

In 1985 the shuttle flew 10 with two more flights cancelled. Still half the nominal target, yet the agency was already on its heels, scrapping everything it had for money and personal.

In 1986 it was to fly 16 , but as of mid-January repeated delays with the last 1985 flight had already ruined the schedule. Not only was the flight schedule gruelling, it was also constrained by fixed planetary launch windows - the Halley comet and planet Jupiter would not suffer any delay. The robotic probes would not wait !

Since December, Shuttle flights had been pretty nightmarish. Columbia's early December mission had lifted off in early January; and from then, things got worse. Delays on January 22; technical glitches on January 24 and January 27; and, last but not least, bad weather forecast all plotted to ruin the schedule. Enough was enough, for the aforementioned reasons the shuttle had to fly. After a handful of stormy, controversial video conferences in the evening of January 27 the decision was made to launch on a day that had not only the coldest temperatures on the ground, but also very brutal jet streams at 30 000 ft.

That Tuesday, January 28 1986 the weather was definitively discouraging. Yet for the sake of impossible flight rates determining NASA credibility and unforgiving planetary launch windows, Space Shuttle Challenger was bound to go through these disastrous weather conditions.

It did not make it.

The night before the launch icy temperatures froze a join on a booster, the jet stream shook the frozen join; a tongue of flame then leaked from the damaged booster onto the external tank, piercing it. The tank violently disintegrated ... and the crewed orbiter above it was blown to pieces. The crew cabin retained a relative integrity but crashed into the ocean, killing all seven crew members including a school teacher that was to give a lesson from space. A major public relation hit for NASA now had very horribly and tragically backfired. Under Presidential inquiry the shuttle fleet was grounded for two and half years.

Meanwhile the space station case was no better. The shuttle kept missing rendezvous with possible orbital outposts. Old Skylab could no wait for the shuttle to overcome its delays, and burned into the atmosphere in 1979.

Afghanistan, Poland and the Reagan election ensured no shuttle ever docked to a Soviet Salyut operated between 1978 and 1985. Salyut was improved into Mir and that time the shuttle was present to the rendezvous. After 1995 and for three years the shuttle meet the now Russian space station. It was a wonderful piece of international cooperation.

However, what was still missing, was some big American space station, a return of the project postponed by a decade to build the shuttle. In 1984 Reagan did just that, giving NASA $8 billion to build the station of their dreams.

What no one foresaw at the time was that it would be fourteen years before the first module was launched, and that module was a Russian one, of Mir heritage !

At the turn of the century NASA at least was building its (international) space station; the shuttle had returned to its original job as imagined in 1969. It had taken the best part of three decades to reach that nirvana. The shuttle credibility, however, had been definitively ruined by the disastrous satellite business leading to the Challenger disaster.

As the shuttle missed a space station badly, and because that satellite job was not truly satisfying, early in the 70s an inexpensive ersatz of space station had been imagined. Europe's Spacelab (and later its private incarnation Spacehab space shuttle Columbia carried that January 16, 2003) were space station without wings. They would fly into orbit within the shuttle payload bay but, in order to save money they would draw their life from the shuttle itself, meaning they could not be released to live a space station life. Instead they would stuck aboard the shuttle and get down with it at the end of the mission. Bluntly, Spacelab flew for brief 15 days missions instead of Mir's continuous 15 years. The ISS, of course, would change that; but it had been delayed again and again and again.





Circa 1997 and waiting for the never-coming ISS, Congress encouraged NASA flying Spacehab in a couple of missions. The space agency, however, did not give a rat: energy and money instead flowed into the ISS. The shore mission was delayed by two full years and ultimately fell on the oldest of the shuttle, veteran Columbia.

It had once been the member of a troika that included the now defunct Challenger and the mostly forgotten Enterprise. The last two, unlike Columbia, were mock-ups; and one of the two mock-up was to be turned into a fully fledged shuttle to fly along Columbia itself. Early on the honour belonged to Enterprise; but Challenger was found to be easier to modify, and Enterprise never flew into orbit. With Challenger dead and Enterprise stuck in a museum old Columbia found itself isolated; it become a relic the other three shuttles - Discovery, Atlantis and Challenger successor Endeavour - looked with disdain.



Columbia was considered a relic in the sense that, built ten years before Discovery its structure was somewhat heavier and its payload was lower. It happened the ISS was in a Russian-friendly orbit, and that orbit induced severe penalties for all shuttles - but Columbia higher mass made the penalties even more cumbersome.



In 1996 NASA decided old Columbia would not build the ISS; it instead entered into a semi-retirement, doing every single non-ISS missions, although there were not many of them. As a result Columbia became intimate with the Hubble space telescope... and Spacehab.













- - - -





Flight Day 2

January 17, 2003

Marshall Spaceflight Center, Huntsville, Alabama



The Intercenter Photo Working Group (IPWG) was tasked with reviewing films and videos from the launch tracking cameras scattered for dozen of miles all around the shuttle launch pads. These cameras scrutinized every shuttle launch from every possible angle; nothing was supposed to escape their watchful eyes.

Within a couple of hours after Columbia launch all the films and videos had been collected, rushed down to a lab in Miami, developed and sent back overnight with copies going to the three IPWG engineering review teams at Kennedy, Marshall, and Houston.

Launch tracking cameras were of uttermost importance - and NASA had learned that lesson in blood.

The moment Challenger launched (but only seen after the accident) a close-up camera caught puffs of black smoke - the booster join blown to dust.

Two and half year later in September 1988 Discovery did a nominal return to flight, but the next mission, STS-27, was another near miss.

During Atlantis ascent the tip of the solid rocket somewhat collapsed and crippled the orbiter in a shower of debris that severely impacted the fragile underbelly tiles.

Once in orbit an alarmed crew used the robotic arm for an inspection that frightened them. The orbiter usually black underside was pockmarked with white stains corresponding to damaged tiles, plenty of them.

The crew transmitted their video to the ground, and there they hit a major snag.

Because Atlantis STS-27 was a military, classified mission communications with the ground were encrypted and that just killed the pictures resolution. As received on the ground, the alarming video was blurred just enough not to look very worrying. Against the crew will the ground ordered them to return as if nothing happened; and Atlantis made it safely to California Edwards Air Force Base. Yet when the orbiter come to wheel-stop everybody paled at the devastation.

By pure luck whatever tiles that were damaged were in non critical locations, except for one that was totally missing, and in a pretty critical location. The shuttle hold and the crew escaped an horrible death only because below the missing tile was some heavy metal plate that acted as a surrogate tile - and paid a high price for that. It was melted as if it had been made of chocolate.

The lesson had been hard learned and the year after more powerful cameras were planted for miles and miles around the shuttle launch site.

Within the next decade however NASA budget was cut by 20% and every corner of the agency, including launch tracking cameras at the Cape, suffered as a result.

That January 16, 2003 images from Columbia ascent revealed that a large piece of debris from the left bipod area of the External Tank had struck the Orbiter's left wing. Because the resulting shower of post-impact fragments could not be seen passing over the top of the wing, analysts concluded that the debris had apparently impacted the left wing below the leading edge. Intercenter Photo Working Group members were concerned about the size of the object and the apparent momentum of the strike.

They frantically searching for better views but soon they realized that only two cameras provided a higher-quality view of the impact and the potential damage to the Orbiter.

A dozen ground-based sites were used to obtain images of the ascent for engineering analyses, each of which has film and video cameras.

Five were designed to track the Shuttle from liftoff until it is out of view. Due to expected angle of view and atmospheric limitations, two sites did not capture the debris event, leaving three cameras. One of the three remaining cameras lost track of Columbia on ascent.

Of the two, one captured only a view of the upper side of Columbia's left wing - and the impact had happened below.

"As for the last camera site..." the film started to unravel.

"What site and what cameras ?" Armando Oliu asked.

"ET-208 and E-208."

"Those located in Cocoa beach ?"

"They are no longer there (1). That real estate boom happened in Cocoa over the last decade - all those massive condominiums built there gradually blocked the -208 camera's view. They have been moved to Patrick AFB three years ago. I vaguely remember one of the two was found to be defective at the time - NASA made a little fuss, blasting the company and the Air Force."

"We should have blamed budget cuts instead." Oliu groaned. "Let's review ET-208 first."

As its name implied ET-208 had focused on the large external tank; yet the impact the film showed, even in low resolution, was worrisome.

The companion E-208, for its part had the same angle of view but a much sharper resolution.

"Let's see...”

By comparison with ET-208 it was like watching Columbia ascent under a magnifying lens. The level of detail was pretty good.

"Excel..." the engineer did not ended his sentence. Armando Oliu face paled. "Look at this. Impact - wham ! straight on the underside wing leading edge reinforced carbon panel."

"And out of view of every other cameras." Oliu colleague lamented.

"I have never, ever seen such a large piece of debris strike the Orbiter so late in ascent." Oliu said. "82 seconds into the flight" he noted, "and how big and fast was that ? This is frightening."

For long minutes, the two men watched the E-208 video again and again, tracking the exact location of the impact on Columbia. The foam had been blown into a little white cloud that went away in a fraction of a second. The crux of the problem was the post-impact state of Columbia, and the video was not reassuring. "This smells bad" Oliu said. "Make sure the Marshall and Johnson Intercenter Photo Working Group members see this."

Oliu's colleague couldn't refrain from the obvious question.

"Should we ask for ground based imagery ? I mean, should the military try to image the shuttle wing in orbit ?"

"At this point I don't know, and can't decide about that issue. What matters most so far is that the E-208 video by itself speaks volumes. You see, things would be different if we had to prove the exact impact location on the orbiter via military ground imagery."

Oliu started ringing the alarm bell. Within the next couple of hours, he distributed a report and digitized clips of the strike via e-mail throughout the NASA and contractor communities. This report provided an initial view of the foam strike and would serve as the basis for subsequent decisions and actions.

Within an hour Oliu's boss and chairman of the Intercenter Photo Working Group - Robert Page - contacted Wayne Hale, the Shuttle Program Manager for Launch Integration at Kennedy Space Center, and Lambert Austin, the head of the Space Shuttle Systems Integration at Johnson Space Center.

Page informed them that Boeing was performing an analysis to determine trajectories, velocities, angles, and energies for the debris impact; they had a dedicated software for that, born of the STS-27 1988 near-miss, and dubbed Crater. Crater was a database made of every foam impact that happened since 1981 and the first shuttle flight. From that database, one could make computer simulations of impacts.

However, in Bob Page's opinion, Crater was not enough. He needed direct proof: He needed more photos. He wanted to see Columbia. As such Page also asked Wayne Hale to request imagery of Columbia's left wing on-orbit. Hale, who agreed to explore the possibility, held a Top Secret clearance and was familiar with the process for requesting military imaging from his experience as a Mission Control Flight Director.

Shortly thereafter, Wayne Hale telephoned his superiors - Linda Ham, chairman of the Mission Management Team, and Ron Dittermore, Space Shuttle Program Manager, to pass along information about the debris strike and let them know that a formal report would be issued by the end of the day.

Meanwhile, John Disler, another member of the Intercenter Photo Working Group and a photo lab engineer at Johnson Space Center (not Kennedy) also called to report a debris hit on the vehicle. Disler's alarm of the strike and the approximate debris size ultimately reached Rodney Rocha, NASA's designated chief engineer for the Thermal Protection System.

It was Rocha's responsibility to coordinate NASA engineering resources and work with contract engineers at United Space Alliance, who together would form a Debris Assessment Team that would be co-chaired by United Space Alliance (USA, the joint Boeing-Lockheed private company managing the shuttle since 1996) engineering manager Pam Madera.

Madera signalled that the debris strike was to be classified as "out-of-family" and therefore of greater concern than previous debris strikes. As noted by Armando Oliu at the Cape, the strike had happened rather late in the ascent; as a result it was mostly out of Crater database, plus the debris was faster and thus more lethal. To make matters worse, the debris was also pretty big, the size of a suitcase !

At about the same time, Oliu Intercenter Photo Working Group's report, containing both video clips and still images of the debris strike, was e-mailed to engineers and technical managers both inside and outside of NASA.

That morning, all across the United States engineers watched Columbia's ascent, playing and re-playing the video. Many pairs of eyes stared at video monitors, trying to guess the exact impact location and what damage it had made. Worried e-mails were exchanged.

...

Later that day, Linda Ham had an extremely difficult decision to take, perhaps the hardest in her life.

After a very ordinary lift-off, it appeared STS-107 was off to a good start.

Things were going well.

There was little interest in a mission Congress had rammed into NASA's throat many years before. Yet if something went bad with STS-107, it would impact every shuttle mission to follow in the pipeline, notably STS-120, to be flown a year later. According to NASA planning, STS-120 was to fly the next year, February 2004. NASA numbering shuttle mission system had big holes. It was a mess. STS-107 had been delayed for four years, no less.

That mission was to carry the so-called Node 2, a crucial piece in the International Space Station puzzle. With all the delays and cost overruns that happened in the ISS program, it was better for STS-120 not to slip.

Unfortunately, for some hours now, Linda Ham was hearing much alarm about a big foam loss from the tank impacting the underside of the shuttle wing. Serious damage would obviously mean the end of the mission and a major emergency. And further delays to STS-120, obviously, if the shuttle had to be grounded once again, as happened too many since 2000.

Linda Ham had exactly four diverse sources of information to make her decision.

First there was that video taken from tracking camera E-208 in Patrick AFB.

She could also ask for the opinions of thermal protection experts in Houston - they were Calvin Schomburg for the silica tiles on the orbiter belly, and Don Curry for the tough carbon panels protecting the wing leading edge.

There was also the Crater software for impact simulation.

Lastly, she could ask for the military to image the shuttle in flight - they had some incredibly powerful systems on the ground and in orbit.

So the issue was not a lack of possible solutions; instead, it was the priority in which to exercise them. According to the priority given, some might be eliminated.

Where to start ?

Ham dug out a sheet of paper and started listing the sources, examining how they worked - or not - together, and the pros and cons.

The video clearly had an edge; but what next ?

Military imaging of the shuttle was the tricky part. It was a complex, cumbersome process to set up, with all that classified stuff, and the very tight security clearances born of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Linda Ham felt that the Crater analysis, plus advice from the two well respected experts, should be enough.

But... she couldn't get the still picture of the impact out of her head. That, and her phone call to Wayne Hale earlier in the day.

"Bob Page is an excitable guy" she had told him.

"Sure, he is excited." Hale replied. "But today I felt his excitement is justified. You should have seen his face - one can't downplay his concerns. He really pressed me to discuss options on how to get more data about possible damage to the wing; he is clearly upset. He makes a convincing case."

Linda Ham had made her decision.

Crater results and Don Curry's and Schomburg's advice would all be taken into consideration, but further imagery of that left wing was also necessary. She realized that, if the military imagery even remotely matched that of the Cape video, then they would face an emergency.

She phoned Wayne Hale and told him to order an expedited request for national assets to inspect Columbia.





(1) This isthe point of divergence. In STS-107 tragic history that tracking camera remained in Cocoa Beach until after the disaster, and was moved to Patrick AFB in 2004. Much more importantly it was found to have defective lenses. On February 16 2003 that resulted in a film so blurred that, despite NASA best efforts to make it better (and they did tried everything that was technically feasible) it ultimately proved to be unusable.

Yet only that E-208 camera had the right angle and was close enough to show the exact location of the foam impact on Columbia underside.



Without it, the next best thing was military imaging of Columbia from the ground.

Unfortunately it is a process that is so cumbersome and uncertain that Linda Ham dismissed it in favour of others means of investigation that unfortunately were not adapted. The gravity of the situation literally slipped between Crater results and Schomburg / Don Curry past experience with the shuttle thermal protection system.

The CAIB inquiry showed that the Crater logiciel had never seen such impact before; as for experts Don Curry and Calvin Schomburg, they were sincerely convinced foam couldn't break very though carbon panels.

Bottom line: only better imagery from the launch tracking cameras (and the exact location of the impact on Columbia) could have turned the tide. Military imaging from the ground couldn't do it.





- - - -Flight Day 3

January 18, 2003

Aboard Columbia

(music: Duran Duran, Ordinary world)

"Can you repeat ?" David Brown was surprised "Yes, me and Mike filmed the external tank after separation. Yesterday I already downlinked 35 seconds of video... you want more ? I have a minute or so, and Mike has even more." (1)

He downlinked the videos. An hour later commander Rick Husband received an apparently insignificant answer. But...

"There is one item that I would like to make you aware of. This item is not even worth mentioning other than wanting to make sure that you are not surprised by it in a question from a reporter during future media links with the ground." By the tone of the message, the crew already knew at once that this could only mean trouble.

"During ascent at approximately 80 seconds, photo analysis shows that some debris from the area of the -Y external tank Bipod Attach Point came loose and subsequently impacted the orbiter left wing, in the area of transition from Chine to Main Wing, creating a shower of smaller particles. The impact appears to be totally on the lower surface and no particles are seen to traverse over the upper surface of the wing. Experts are currently reviewing the high speed photography on possible concern for RCC or tile damage.

Rick, we want you to show your left wing to the Air Force sensors. We want you to carefully maneuver Columbia to make that left wing visible for imaging. Unfortunately, science experiments will have to stop while the imagery is taken.

That is all for now. It's a pleasure working with you every day."

Columbia crew members exchanged doubtful glances. There were when ground control showed a curious insensitivity and lack of tact. If their thermal protection system was really breached, the truth was they would burn during reentry. There was no other way to put things.

...





Johnson Spaceflight Center, Houston, Texas

(music: U2, Still haven't found what I'm looking for)



"We had a big foam loss like this on STS-50, and it impacted the silica tiles; yet only one was damaged, and that was it." Calvin Schomburg said

"As for the reinforced leading edge panels, they are made of carbon and extremely tough." Don Curry completed.

The two men were top experts on the shuttle thermal protection system. They had decades of experience with it; they knew its weaknesses, but also how resilient it could be. STS-27 had been proof of this.

Wayne Hale could see how the expert's opinion weighed on Linda Ham. There was nothing shocking with that - if one can't rely on experts, then what ?

Anyway, Ham was restraining her decision until more information would come. The military was in the process of imaging Columbia. They used some extremely powerful cameras they had near Hawaii, and also a vast array of varied sensors, including spy satellites and ground radars.

The afternoon and evening of that day were hectic. Schomburg and Don Curry voiced their opinions once again. Linda Ham also had results from Boeing Crater tests which were quite reassuring. The software was known to be conservative - read, pessimistic. General opinion was the results had to be somewhat "softened".

In the afternoon, Crater results told Linda Ham there might be damage, but not to what extent and whether it was life-threatening or not.

And then the military called back. Hale was told they had gathered some impressive imagery. And then...

"We found something else. Something unexpected."

"What ?"

"There is debris following Columbia in orbit." (2)

“Debris ?” Wayne Hale's mind raced to a conclusion. That 39 degree orbit was only seldom used, meaning very little debris. At the shuttle's low altitude, debris did not live for very long. Columbia was pretty much alone up there... the conclusion was obvious.

"If there is any debris along the shuttle, well, it came from it. They had no EVA planned, so it is not a lost tool. They launched nothing from the orbiter either. Whatever, is your imagery coming ?"

"It's coming right now."

Later in the day a high ranking meeting that included Ham, Dittermore, Hale and many others was held. The military sensors had done a superb job. The pictures were sharp; one could even see the Columbia lettering on the wing.





http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/shuttle...mos/index.html

(this is an OTL picture that was not requested by NASA; as such the shuttle commander did not maneuvered its orbiter to make the damage visible. How frustrating)





The photo sequence showed the orbiter rolling slowly, presenting its left wing to the camera. In the room many eyes focused on the greyish, ghost-like pictures.

When the wing appeared there were muffled cries of exclamation, of shock and surprise.

Wayne Hale had made an opinion. Surely there is something wrong with that leading edge.

Don Curry and Schomburg reaction, however, was definitively a mixed one.

"We admit there's something wrong there. The foam impacted, not the tiles, but the carbon leading edge panel." Don Curry said. Schomburg nodded his approval. The tiles were safe, so he had nothing more to say.

"I remain convinced, however, that these panels are extremely though. I can't see them being breached." for a second he paused before continuing "To be honest, even as a top expert, that photo doesn't allow me to be hundred percent sure whether the panel is intact or dented." Don Curry concluded cautiously.

Linda Ham was visibly torn. "I don't think the military can do better, however. In the end, only a direct inspection from the shuttle itself could give us a clear view. "

You all know, however, that STS-107 features no robotic arm; that the Manned Maneuvering Unit has been discarded after Challenger; and that not even a classic EVA was planned during that flight, although fortunately we have two crew members trained for that."

There was a brief moment of silence in the conference room. Wayne Hale knew that general opinion was that, if the the thermal protection system was really breached, there was nothing they could do. It was better not to think about it. Perhaps it would be better if the crew was blissfully ignorant of that reality, and carried their mission as usual until the very end ?

Except that (frightening) option was already gone, since they had told Rick Husband the truth - because he had to maneuver his orbiter to ease the military imaging operation. Hale also remembered STS-27 and the crew anger, notably that mouthful Hoot Gibson.

During the next twenty minutes a heated debate occurred in the room.

Two mindsets clashed head-on: the usual, reassuring mission routine gradually died, but the opinion that there was nothing that could be done was obviously engrained.



Yet another, different mindset was also present among people there. Wayne Hale could see many of them were frustrated not seeing that damn carbon panel clearly enough to say whether there was a hole in it - or not. He realized it was the same anguish and frustration Armando Oliu and his boss Bob Page felt, at Kennedy the days before.

Beyond that temporary frustration, however, laid something much bigger - the will to do something for the endangered crew. At worse they needed a clear picture of that panel; more ambitiously they could try filling it, or even rescue the crew, Marooned or Apollo 13 style.

The final decision, however, belonged to Linda Ham.

At this very moment she delivered the speech that would define the rest of the odyssey; a sentence of it was repeated as common wisdom by almost every senior manager over the next six weeks.

"Two days ago my feeling was - well if there was any real damage done to the wing, there is nothing we can do about it.

"Now I can't stand that idea.

"Even if there's nothing we can do to save the crew, I want them to know the truth. I really want to know whether there's a hole in that leading edge. This is paramount. As such we need a direct inspection by the shuttle crew. It's the only way to be sure. We need to know." Linda Ham said. "Well, if someone can imagine how to reach that damn leading edge panel underside without a robotic arm and without a MMU, please tell us." she concluded.

"The best placed to know are obviously the astronauts. We will see a lot of them. We should ask any veteran and volunteer, and I have no doubt we will find many of them.", Wayne Hale suggested.

As the meeting broke out, phone calls were made all over NASA and beyond.

That evening on January 18, 2003 marked the beginning of the most astounding rescue mission ever. What no one foresaw, however, was how long it would last. It was Apollo 13 all over again, closer to Earth, but quite paradoxically for a much longer period of time.



(1) Another missed opportunity OTL. Astronauts actually filmed the tank in orbit, but their videos transmitted to the ground did not included the missing foam area. In fact they had actually more video that included the missing foam area, but the ground failed to ask them for more video. (see here)



(2)The so-called Flight Day 2 object, also known as 2003-003B was probably the 6-inch piece going away

The CAIB theory is that the foam had not only broke it,it also had pushed it more or less inside. Then on day two Columbia manoeuvered with its thrusters in orbit, shaking itself and disloding the bit of carbon that simply fell away. Worse thing is that Air Force radars tracked itbut lost the data until after the accident, when they checked everything in light of the inquiry.





Flight Day 4

January 19, 2003

Aboard Columbia

(music: The Verve, Lucky man)



Michael Anderson and David Brown had been specially EVA trained for the mission, even if not extra vehicular activities were planned. You never know - for example, the shuttle payload bay doors might decide not to close automatically; in this case it would fall to Anderson and Brown to don a space suit and close them manually. Nothing, however, could have prepared the two men for the plan transmitted by the ground. They have never heard anything like this before.

"Trapeze artists." Brown muttered.

"What ?" a smiling Kalpana Chawla was helping him donning his space suit.

"Trapeze artists. That's what we are." he said in a deadpan voice that made Chawla and Anderson laugh.

"But I'd prefer to practice trapeze under a circus tent than on a shuttle payload bay door. This is crazy." Anderson poked.

"Stop complaining" Chawla said. "Unlike trapeze artists, you don't have to bother with Earth gravity."

"That's fortunate." Brown added. "Mike, please forgive me. If I had known we would play trapeze in orbit; that I would someday hang to your ankle while in orbit, then I would have entered a diet before entering that shuttle." They all laughed loudly.

Brown and Anderson carefully donned their spacesuits and entered Columbia's airlock. It was built for only two astronauts, a number that fitted most of the EVAs (except for a memorable one, in 1992: in her first mission, Challenger successor Endeavour had been tasked with capturing and relaunching a stranded Intelsat satellite. When the robotic arm failed to catch the monster, a little army of three astronauts performed a truly epic extravehicular activity).

With the airlock depressurized they opened the hatch and floated outside the shuttle payload bay. It was filled with 43 000 pounds of diverse payloads; the Spacehab double module represented less than half of that mass.

The Freestar experiment represented most of the other half. A big truss known as the Multipurpose Equipment Support, Freestar carried a row of standardized containers called Hitchhickers and Get Away Specials. NASA loaned the containers to universities and science laboratories all across the United States, which in turned filled them with science experiments.

The containers weighed little, and they had little impact on the crew schedule. For example crew interaction with Get Away Specials resumed to flicking a switch and a little survey, and that was it. As secondary payloads, Hitchhickers and GAS cost very little and somewhat restored some lost promises the shuttle had never fulfilled; famously, that of making spaceflight cheap and popular.

Now Anderson and Brown crawled along the shuttle payload bay door, in the direction of the supposedly damaged wing. The show outside was stunningly beautiful: Columbia equipment racks shone under the Sun, and the huge Earth curvature hanged above their heads, a little menacing. Earth size overwhelmed the imagination.

Before the EVA David Brown space suit had been tweaked with two very unusual artefacts. First, he had an equipment tether (a rope usually not made for astronauts) strapped to his left ankle. As for his right foot – well, boot - he had towels strapped around it in order to avoid damaging Columbia’s fragile wing.

Now came the most amazing part of their adventure.

Brown first grasped the shuttle payload bay door with his gloved hands, and extended his legs downward - until he had his feet floating slightly above the wing curvature. The orbiter delta wing was not a perfect triangle; at the junction with the fuselage it curved into long chines that extended in the direction of the cockpit.

Anderson then used Brown as a human ladder; hanging to his fellow ankle, he was now looking at the upper side of the wing. He reported no visible damage to the ground, which was hardly surprising. Brown then carefully set his towelled right foot on the shuttle wing, allowing his comrade to float below Columbia’s wing. Anderson was now peering at the underside of an in-flight orbiter, something never done before.

Because there was no EVA planned on the flight, not only had they no tools, they had no camera able to withstand the emptiness of space to film outside. The future of the mission, of Columbia and the crew - and perhaps of NASA itself - hinged on Anderson’s verbal assessment.

As he looked at the leading edge underside, for a fraction of a second, Michael Phillip Anderson’s blood froze in place.

He was looking at a gaping hole there.





He looked again and again before reporting to the ground.

"Houston, there's one big chunk of that leading edge missing. That's unbelievable. (1) The hole must be 6 inches wide - I can't make a better estimate. No damage to the tiles as far as I can see - but that RCC panel is a mess. So much for super-strength carbon fiber !"

A true professional, Anderson spent long seconds burning the picture of the hole and leading edge into his mind. He may have had no camera, but he still had an excellent visual memory he would put to good use.

"We copied that. Good work, folks."

"Returning to the airlock now"

"Copied."

As soon as he exited his space suit, Anderson requested a pen and a sheet of paper and from memory, he started to carefully draw what he had seen. The six other crew members gathered around him with worried faces.

Anderson’s sketch was scanned and immediately beamed to the ground, then the crew had another idea.

"We should try and turn that sketch into Computer Generated Imagery NASA is more familiar with these days. Anyone gifted with photoshop here?" Commander Husband asked with good humour. A poll was held among the crew. That work on one of the onboard laptop computers was done under Mike Anderson’s watchful supervision, since he was the only one who had seen the real thing.

For long hours, the two astronauts laboured on the computer. The end result was worth the pain, however. Working from Anderson memory, they created an impressive multidimensional shot of the damaged shuttle underside; one could enlarge or reduce or turn the wing in every direction. It was a neat piece of computing imagery. Even then however Anderson hand-made sketch remained important; it was the primordial, raw expression of his visual memory, something computer imagery could not catch.

Down in Houston the astronauts paint and computing jobs immediately found their way into the hands of an army of experts. Much later their would go into history along Jim Lovell shots of the eviscerated Apollo 13 service module.

(1) This an adaptation of Jim Lovell's words describing the state of the Apollo 13 service module. I couldn't resist.





Flight Day 6

January 21, 2003

Johnson Spaceflight Center, Houston

(music: Coldplay , In my place )

Linda Ham was presenting the results of two days of intensive and some heated brainstormings. She was visibly exhausted, but at the same time the oldest veterans in the room felt some Gene Kranz "failure is not option" vibe going through the air.

"I will be blunt and direct. As of today only two countries have manned spaceships in the world - us, and the Russians. The Russians are out because Baikonur is not compatible with Columbia orbit. That mean that whatever happens Columbia can only save itself or be rescued by another of our shuttles.

"We have three orbiters left, but Discovery is out for long term maintenance, leaving only Endeavour or Atlantis.

Because Endeavour has just returned from STS-113 it is currently being prepared for a flight in May - way too late.

"That leave Atlantis, which was to take off on March 1 for the STS-114 flight to the International Space Station. This date is close enough we may compress the schedule by two or three weeks and reach the February 15 deadline if we hurry up from today.

"But sending Atlantis to rescue Columbia creates a huge morale issue. We do know that recent modifications brought to the external tank foam made it more brittle as shown by both STS-112 in October and the current emergency. STS-113 is not help since it lifted off by night and we couldn't see anything.

"We may change the tank to an older model with more resilient foam, such as ET-94 stored in Louisiana. Atlantis, however, already has its boosters strapped to the tank; destacking is tedious and time consuming, and we have no time.

"So if we ever mount a rescue mission Atlantis crew will fly with some big sword of Damocles hanging above their heads. Although I'm sure we would be no short of volunteers... "

The faces of the many astronauts presents instantly told Ham she was right. She eyed Norm Thagard, a veteran of the Mir flights; his facial expression alone screamed I will fly that mission.

"Sending Atlantis will be plan A, and the work of White Team."

"Or the crew could try and repair Columbia in orbit - this is plan B for the Black Team."

"Black Team will be divided into two groups.

"Black Team One is tasked with assessing a possible wing repair.

"Black Team Two, for his part, will work on making the orbiter as light as possible. If we make Columbia fluffy - like a feather - reentry will be accordingly less harsher to the damaged thermal protection system.

"Without offending Black Team, we consider the wing repair / light orbiter much less likely to succeed. Yet their work is equally important because unlike White Team studies it actively involves Columbia crew. Repairing the wing and throwing things overboard will keep them busy and active. Plus there might some big glitch pushing Atlantis flight behind February 15... and forcing the crew to return on their damaged ship. That last hypothesis has to be taken into account, even if it is frightening.

"I also want to mention that a third, Blue Team has also been created to review every possible scenario outside the main two options - even the wildest concepts. Since we declared emergency we are literally flooded with internal and external calls. We have very serious people coming with all sort of hare-brained concepts and ideas. Although most of them fell short of the February 15 deadline, among the lot there might be some clever ideas that need to be reviewed. Anything will help." Ham concluded.









Flight Day 7

January 22, 2003

Abord Columbia

(music: REM , Everybody hurts )

The orbiter interior was cold and dark, but the disciplined crew maintained hope. Meanwhile in Houston, NASA was mobilizing, Apollo 13 style. Once again, failure wasn't to be an option. Veteran engineers, managers and astronauts rushed to help - and they were welcome.





Flight Day 8

January 23, 2003

Johnson Spaceflight Center, Houston

(music: Scorpions , Wind of change )

That day, Blue Team received yet another unexpected proposal for aid. It came from the other side of the Atlantic, from Europe.

Old Europe, according to the words of a certain secretary of defence.

Blue Team had absolutely zero interest in politics, but when their chairman heard the proposal, he realized, how at , emergencies resulted in bizarre twists made to history.

The proposal came from the French Space Agency, the CNES - and from the German ministry of research, the DLR. It was only vaguely related to ESA; it was the usual mess of national versus supranational conflict of interests that plagued old Europe.

Blue Team was in the process of a broad review of every rocket to be launched within the next three weeks and even beyond. And indeed on February 15, an Ariane 4 was to launch from French Guyana with an Intelsat satellite aboard. It was the very last of its kind; the first generation of Ariane born on December 24 1979 would become extinct afterwards. However, the issue with Ariane was the same as with every other expendable rocket in the world: Although it could easily launch to Columbia’s orbit, the payload would lack a navigation, control and guidance system to reach the Shuttle. Only a Soyuz or Progress had that capacity, but of course, Baikonur was out of reach. The Blue Team chairman sighed and prepared to class the European report on the large pile of "dead end" solutions, when something caught his eye.

That report definitively had something more to offer.

"Eureka !", he aptly shouted. With the report under his arm, he rushed in the direction of his superior’s office.







Flight Day 9

January 24, 2003

Aboard Columbia

The Columbia crew had gathered once again. Rick Husband passed his fellow crew members copies of the ground instructions. Although the astronauts were professionals, this time there were muffled exclamations and expletives.

"And I felt playing the trapeze artist on the orbiter payload bay door was crazy. Perhaps I should reconsider that opinion." Anderson said dryly.

"We are going to be busy," Husband said, "and it is as well like that."

"Sure, we have enough work in those checklists for a month or so." Kalpana Chawla added.

"Dare I say - they are taking no risk." McCool declared.

"Take into consideration this is only a draft. They are still refining a lot of things - this is only a logical follow-up to the power-down." Husband said.

"Most of that work is Extra Vehicular Activity, and we are only two with two spacesuits. The airlock, by the way, can only handle two persons." Anderson and Brown felt a heavy weight fall on their shoulders.





Flight Day 10

January 25, 2003

Kourou, French Guyana

It was the end of an era. Within three weeks Ariane 4 and her launch complex would die together. ELA-2 would be demolished and Ariane 5 would rule - provided it overcame a turbulent youth marred by four failures in the first six years, some of them truly disturbing.

Ariane 4, by contrast, remained a reliable workhorse, but it nonetheless had to go, as Europe had no money to run such different launchers in parallel. So far the 144th and last of the first generation Arianes remained at the assembly stand. It was essentially complete, minus the top.

Elsewhere in Kourou was a clean room with the payload, an Intelsat communication satellite. The satellite would be prepared and sealed into the payload fairing before a transfer to the launch pad. There it would meet the Ariane itself (which looked somewhat beheaded) for the final integration, and launch.

If all went well, the rocket would reach the pad on January 30, and the fairing / satellite would be integrated there on February 5 for a launch a week later.

Yet for a day now satellite integration had somewhat slowed down, if not stopped. By contrast, the launch vehicle checkout and buildup was being accelerated. Ariane had lost its payload but prepared for a more exciting future. It had been said the first generation of Ariane would not end their prolific career on a boring satellite launch.









Flight day 11

January 26, 2003

Aboard Columbia

( music: Texas , In demand)

"That's one small step to the middeck, but...a giant leap for a ladder." someone poked.

The space shuttle orbiter, like a Boeing 747 or a big ship, actually had decks - two of them. The seven astronauts did not sit all at the same level. There were four seats amid the windowed cockpit; but the other three, less fortunate passengers, sat in the middeck - somewhat a cave without any view of the outside. That configuration explained by itself why the shuttle, even after Challenger, still had no ejection seats. Where would the middeck seats have fired ? There was no way four astronauts would eject from a crippled orbiter while three of them died stranded there.

On the pad, the crew entered the orbiter by a lateral door that led into the middeck. There were three removable seats, the living area (including a toilet), big lockers and a couple of hatches - one to the airlock, the other to a ladder leading to the four man upper deck and cockpit. It was that ladder the crew was removing for a grandiose mission.

And it was only a beginning.

As Kalpana Chawla and David Brown struggled with the ladder, armed with a hammer, Laurel Clark was scavenging the orbiter crew cabin in a quest for small bits of titanium. The damn material was extremely resistant to heat and, if they ever were to try and fill their wing hole with something, the best choice by far was titanium.

William McCool, for his part, had a shopping list of items to collect. The checklist, as beamed from the ground, read:

Required hardware

1. 2-3 empty CWCs

2. 2 empty jettison stowage bags

3. Jettison stowage bag filled with various metal parts

4. Hose/valve/nozzle assembly attached to water port on Airlock panel



Mike Anderson, for his part, was once again in the airlock for an extravehicular sortie that, by comparison with past and present space activities, was like a walk in the park. He was to collect a so-called mini-workstation, essentially a bell on the pressure suits that was used to carry tools.

...

Two hours later, Columbia seven crew members gathered all the items they had collected in every corner of their spaceship. It made for a bizarre collection of objects: Laurel Clark’s precious bits of titanium, Chawla’s and Brown’s ladder, McCool’s diverse bags and hoses. They were meticulously examined, photos were made to be sent to the ground, after what the packaged items were placed into the airlock. Anderson retrieved the items, he added the mini-workstation to the lot and placed all the items into the Provisions Stowage Assembly - a corner of Columbia payload bay where emergency EVA tools were also stowed. That way everything he and David Brown needed was in the same place and readily accessible.



Kennedy Space Center, Florida

Space shuttle Atlantis was being towed out of its comfortable Orbiter Processing Facility. It was there that between missions, space shuttle orbiters were taken care of by ground teams – their big engines installed, their avionics verified in a myriad of meticulous tests that lasted days and weeks of time.





The orbiter was an impressive, somewhat beautiful machine, a space airliner with an immense payload bay and truly unique capabilities. Very ironically, it was those same capabilities that made it so hard to replace. The shuttle was just like Concorde. It had unique capabilities, yet it was a technological dead-end; it would have no direct successor.

Atlantis’ destination was the Vehicle Assembly Building, the mammoth building constructed in the days of the Apollo program. There, the solid rocket motors mated to the external tank stood vertically like an arch. They had been waiting for the orbiter since January 7. Atlantis was already three days in advance; according to the original STS-114 schedule, the orbiter was to exit OPF-1 only on January 29. The payload bay for its part remained empty, and that would help with cutting a lot of time from the schedule.

In another reality, Atlantis would have lifted off on March 1, carrying Expedition 7 to the burgeoning International Space Station. There would have been a pair of Russians aboard. Needless to say, STS-114 had been washed away by events.

OPF workers watched Atlantis roll out in silence, although many of them saluted the departing orbiter. Since the beginning of the alert on January 20, they had been working full time, 24 hours of every day of the week.

Within the Vehicle Assembly Building, more workers rolled their sleeves and prepared for the orbiter arrival. Atlantis would be hauled vertically by a giant crane hanging to the roof, mated to the external tank, and checked all over. If all went well, thanks to the accelerated Schedule, it would lift off on February 10, instead of the original March 1. As impressive as NASA efforts were, only five days would be left before the Columbia crew died of asphyxiation. The accelerated schedule, by the way, made Atlantis more vulnerable to the usual glitches grounding a shuttle for hours or even days. Many , such glitches happened as late as only five or two seconds before launch. There was no way to be sure.





Flight day 12

January 27, 2003

(music: Travis , Writting to reach you )

A patchwork plan for space rescue

Daring scenario may employs unguided payloads and second shuttle for survival

By James Oberg (1)



HOUSTON, Jan. 27, 2003



Human eyes all over the world rise to the heavens at a level not seen in a generation or more.

They look at space shuttle Columbia, which is visible from Earth everyday at dawn and dusk as a bright, fast-moving star.

Mike Anderson’s dramatic sketches and CGI of space shuttle Columbia’s damaged leading edge have sparked new interest in a nagging question: Can NASA save the astronauts ?

A week ago, horrified NASA officials revealed that visioning of launch tracking cameras led to an early realization that the shuttle’s thermal protection system had been mortally wounded. Program managers were alarmed by the debris impacts noted after Columbia’s launch on Jan. 16 and they wanted more information. Extended damage was ultimately identified by military telescopes, spy satellites and a daring spacewalk by two crew members.

And now what?

If a landing looks suicidal, and refuge at the international space station is out of reach because of incompatible orbits, how can the crew be rescued before their limited stock of supplies runs out?

Before January 17, 2003, the general consensus at NASA was akin to “there’s nothing that we can do about tile damage once we get to orbit”. NASA has not yet figured out a way to perform repairs on damaged or missing tiles in space.

But that doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless, NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe insisted on Friday. “To suggest that we will do nothing is fallacious,” O’Keefe said in a meeting with reporters. “Since there had been a clear indication of problems, there will be no end to the efforts.



Cruel calculus



In all the current speculations about possible rescue missions, there always remains an unbridgeable chasm between how long the crew members can stretch their life support systems, and how long it would take to get a rescue shuttle mission to reach them. The cruel calculus of this spaceflight crisis may lead some to an unhappy, premature, pessimistic conclusion: The astronauts will die, probably of carbon dioxide poisoning, before a rescue mission involving a second shuttle can be mounted.

NASA answered that issue by configuring Columbia for “slumber”, with many systems (such as the aft-end thrusters) turned off forever to save power. The fuel cells, one after the other, idle at minimum for an extended period. Navigation and even communications gear was shut down. Heaters are probably off, and the cabin certainly dropped to near freezing.

Meanwhile amateurs and retired space workers are frantically developing at least one miracle maneuver to bridge that gap. For days now, the full-powered brainstormers from Mission Control and throughout the space industry have been developing workable rescue plans — or ideas even better !



On-orbit delivery



One gimmick would be to launch an emergency supply payload into orbit aboard an expendable launch vehicle. Several such packages would have to be prepared in parallel, because mission success of any one of them might have been 50-50 or even less. But with enough attempts, one of them may likely work.

The ideal package would weigh at least half a ton, maybe a lot more, and would contain all the materials needed to extend the crew’s survival for several more weeks. Most critically, it would carry the airscrubbing chemical packs to keep exhaled carbon dioxide below harmful levels. There would be food and water, waste management bags, batteries, and blankets — it would get cold really fast on this orbital campout. There would be medications, including drugs to reduce the astronauts’ metabolism rates as low as possible to conserve air.

But the most precious cargo aboard such a payload would be hope, both for the stranded crew and for their loved ones and colleagues and everyone else back on Earth.

What kind of rockets are available for a sudden redirection? And how readily can they be reprogrammed?

First, we know which rockets are not available. No Russian rockets can help, because Russia’s launch sites are too far north to allow launches into the more southerly orbit followed by Columbia. ' ', (2)

But many others are available !

At the European launch site at Kourou in French Guyana, a powerful Ariane 4 booster actually is in its final days to countdown. Other expendable boosters are in various preparatory stages in India, China and Japan, and of course at U.S. launch sites, both governmental and commercial.

Lastly, among the Pentagon’s fleet of MX Peacekeeper and Trident military missiles are some already tagged with combat orbital missions, and they too could carry a ton or more of lifesaving equipment into orbit. ' ', (3)



The main issue is that the package would not be able to maneuver or navigate in the direction of the crippled shuttle.

As such it would need to be at the correct orbital inclination, to within a tenth of a degree, and it would have to blast off to within a second or less of the exact launch window that allowed compatible flight.

Rocket computers could be reprogrammed for these paths within a few days, but the risk of human error would be considerable. That’s why many attempts would have to be initiated. ' ', (4) Once any one of these packages reached a compatible orbit, Columbia could do the rest. Since its propulsion system is still functional, it will be able to chase down the package and perform a space rendezvous with it. This is a standard maneuver that all astronauts receive summary training for, although it was not part of the original STS-107 mission. So in the days while the rescue rockets are being prepared, Houston could fax up a set of reference books and charts to be used by the crew. They would even have time for several dry-run practice sessions. Exactly such an unplanned rendezvous — although only to save a payload, not the crew — was performed by an untrained shuttle crew in 1985, and it worked perfectly.

A minor caveat to Columbia maneuvering in chase of an unguided package is the quantity of propellant left into the OMS pods. A shuttle usually has 300 m/s of delta-V; yet according to the last data from Houston, Columbia is left with only 448 ft/s, which translates to 135 m/s. This begs the question of what to do with that limited amount of propellant - chase elusive packages across the sky or maneuver in the direction of Atlantis ? ' ', (5)

Once the shuttle had approached the supply package and had it floating over its payload bay, the next tricky part would begin. It would be tricky because the package would not be self-stabilized; experience with the 1992 STS-49 repairs of Intelsat 603 is not exactly encouraging. The two spacewalk-trained astronauts would be outside, ready to grab it by hand — and for that reason, lots of handholds would have been bolted all over it.

They then would snap their safety lines onto pre-installed attachment points, and tie the package down.

For however many cycles it took, they would load up the shuttle’s airlock with hand-carried packages, close the outer hatch, and let their companions inside unload the goodies. Then they too would come back inside.

As one can see, the main drawback of the expendable launch vehicle option is the fact the packages are unguided, which in turn would lead to high attrition rate and a difficult "last mile" approach by Columbia and recovery by the stranded crew.

Unfortunately most experience with self-navigating, self-stabilized spacecrafts lies with the Russian Soyuz or Progress, which are not available in that scenario.

However, a NASA official stated yesterday that "the agency is currently scrambling for every possible space platform or space system able to self navigate, maneuver, rendezvous and stabilize in the vicinity of a shuttle orbiter."

NASA DART (Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology) DARPA Orbital Express and the Air Force XS-11 are being built just for that mission; but they will fly only within the next couple of years. A frantic search is ongoing for any existing system that could be reconfigured fast enough to be sent to Columbia.



Support from Earth - what will the rescue mission be like



If a new shuttle is to be ready, it will be probably be Atlantis, as it was to lift off on March 1 for the STS-114 mission to the International Space Station. Of course, the accident that caused the mortal wound to Columbia will have to be prevented from happening again.

Then the day will finally come when a rescue mission blasts off. Its crew will be reduced to four, the bare minimum required to perform all necessary maneuvers.

After reaching the drifting Columbia, the rescuers could tie a line between them and set up a “gravity gradient” stationkeeping posture — a maneuver tested as far back as the Gemini program in 1966. Spacewalkers could go across with emergency suits (perhaps even the dusted-off “rescue balls” designed back in the late 1970s) and begin evacuating the stranded crew. Each of those activities would be composed of routine steps from scores of earlier shuttle missions, but strung together in a most non-routine pattern.

Seating for landing would be no problem. Astronauts could just deploy a mat on the floor of the middeck and tie the now-rescued astronauts down prone. They would ride back to Earth safely in that posture. ' ', (6) ' ',

None of these steps is individually impossible, and in fact most have been performed piecemeal in the past. Everything needed to do it this way — or in any of a dozen better ways that the space teams could have devised — is already on hand.

NASA can do it - and we can be sure there will be no lack of astronaut volunteers to rescue their stranded mates."

(James Oberg, space analyst for NBC News, spent 22 years at the Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer.)



Bremen, Germany

Ulf Merbold had flown four into space, and he knew the unmanned platform better than anyone else. He was quite sure it might do a good job, if only it would survive a ride on Ariane. After all, that spacecraft had been an offspring of the shuttle; it was literally born of its payload bay. Most importantly, the little platform knew how to navigate and maneuver alone for months at a time; as icing on the cake, it could carry as much as one ton of payload. At 10 000 pounds, it didn't even max Ariane’s 15 000 pound payload into low Earth orbit limit.

That would be a great première for the European launch vehicle - quite ironically on its very last flight ! For that rocket over its long career had essentially launched communication satellites into geosynchronous orbit... and nothing else or so. To be honest, there had been a handful of remote sensing satellites (Spot, Topex, the military Helios) that had gone into low polar orbit. That kind of mission was so rare, however, that Ariane never had a dedicated upper stage; it had to do with the expensive liquid hydrogen H-10, even if it was a total overkill.



(1)This is a straight adaptation of an OTL piece written by James Oberg late February 2003 that can easily found on the Internet. Together with the CAIB appendix 13 it is somewhat a glimpse of a Columbia rescue scenario - and a strong motivation for writting this TL.

This article is interesting in the sense it answers a lot of technical questions previously asked - see (2) (3) (4) (5)and (6)





Flight day 13

January 28, 2003

Aboard Columbia

The crew observed a brief moment of silence in memory of the Challenger seven. Columbia astronauts may have been depressed by a coincidence aggravated by another sad anniversary the previous day, of the Apollo 1 fire of 1967 and the death of Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom. But they were psychologically solid and way too busy to really think that their names might be added to NASA martyrdom. Their mood, shared by the ground, was they would fight until the very end. There was no question about that.

Mike Brown and David Anderson spent the day talking with the ground and rehearsing the next day’s extravehicular activity (EVA) - which promised to be the most extraordinary in the history of the space program.

Yet there had been no lack of extraordinary astronaut sorties in space before.

September 1985

Cosmonauts Dzhanibekov and Savinykh have been sent to Salyut 7 for a rather desperate mission. Months earlier, after a human mistake, the (inhabited) Salyut had been shut down and lost into the coldness of space. The two cosmonauts are to revive a dead station. They painfully dock their Soyuz and prepare for the worst, including gas masks. They don't know what lies behind the hatch.

They found a frozen space station littered with ice and icicles; Salyut 7 is reminiscent of an underground cave in Antarctica.

The cosmonauts can only guess by how much did the electrical systems and avionics suffer. Nothing worse than the Apollo 13 astronauts trying to revive their long dead Command Module (the only ship able to bring them through Earth re-entry) and finding it literally filled with water.

After tremendous efforts, Dzhanibekov and Savinykh manage to return the space station to life, only for the next mission to leave unfinished work aboard Salyut 7, courtesy of a medical emergency. The next year, in May 1986, another Soyuz accomplishes the first interorbital flight. Soyuz T-15 departs Mir to Salyut 7 for a fifty days stay there before returning to Mir - an orbital mechanics masterpiece.



May 1973

Skylab launches into orbit on a cloudy day that prevents Saturn V tracking during ascent. In the chaos of the launch, after a serious glitch, a solar array stupidly extends outside the rocket. It is immediately ripped apart by the tremendous aerodynamic forces, making the $2.5 billion Skylab a partial wreck. As for the other solar array, it is stuck by debris in a folded position.

Skylab’s electric power now hangs on thanks to the Apollo solar telescope arrays, not exactly built for that purpose.

The next month, a salvage mission led by moonwalker Alan Bean reaches the crippled station. There's no workaround: either the lone solar array gets deployed, or Skylab will be lost. However, without a shuttle payload bay or a robotic arm, Alan Bean has to be literally towed by the Apollo capsule in the direction of the stuck solar array. Once there, he grasps the array with his gloved hands and starts to pull it with all the strength his clumsy space suit allows him. Suddenly, wham ! The solar array unfolds without a warning, sending Bean tumbling into space. Only his line saved him from flying away. But Skylab is saved.









Flight day 14

January 29 2003

Aboard Columbia

(music: REM , E-bow the letter )

"And... here we go again."

Brown and Anderson felt the orbiter airlock was rapidly becoming a second home (or a third, depending whether one counted Columbia’s decks and airlock separately). On the airlock panel was a water port - a space tap. The day before they had checked every corner of Columbia for hoses, valves and nozzles.

They progressed in the direction of the Provisions Stowage Assembly and carefully retrieved all the items. Anderson now had the ladder under his arm and Brown couldn't help smiling. He had plugged their makeshift hose into the airlock tap, and as such, they looked like space firemen ready to extinguish a fire.

One day payload bay trapeze artists, the other space firemen. This mission is definitively bizarre.

They would soon resume the familiar path along the orbiter payload bay door; however, before that, Brown had to harvest the orbiter again. He had to scavenge Columbia for some AFSRI - a barbaric acronym for what amounted to very ordinary insulation blankets. The material covered non-crucial parts of the orbiter, and there was plenty of it everywhere. Brown harvested several kilograms of the thing and tucked that into a plastic bag; then he joined Anderson and together they crawled along the payload bay door.

This time the space trapeze artists added the middeck ladder to their incredible show. Much like Anderson’s boot the first time, the ladder’s metal feet had been wrapped in towels, in order to avoid damaging Columbia’s wing even more.

Using ropes and tethers and strings, they solidly attached the ladder to the payload bay door. What had been once the top of a ladder emerging from the lower middeck into Columbia’s cockpit, now lay, feet wrapped in towels, on the shuttle wing’s upper leading edge.

Mike Anderson climbed down, Neil Armstrong style; once on the ladder's last step, he solidly tethered himself to it and literally dived under the leading edge, looking for the menacing hole they had to fill in order to survive. David Brown was now Anderson’s assistant, passing items to him. He had no time to realize the craziness of the situation; had he, perhaps he would have felt like Frank Poole trying to repair the damn AE-35 element on Discovery’s high gain antenna... no psychotic computer was waiting to kill them, fortunately.

An hour passed. Brown was not supposed to join Anderson below the wing leading edge, but events decided otherwise, and at some point he had an opportunity to go there. He couldn't resist and briefly glanced at the hole. The sight was instantly burned into his mind. The panel was really a mess, the hole gaping with sharp edges and twisted bits of carbons forced inward by the shock.

To think foam can do that - a piece of foam could have killed us all. He chased that feeling out of his mind and rapidly returned to his position of Anderson’s assistant, up there on the ladder.

Mike Anderson, for his part, was living the most important moment in his life.

He had first stuffed an empty stowage bag into the hole, pushing it into the gapping cavity after he tried to smoothen the sharp edges there.

He then placed Laurel Clark’s bits of cockpit titanium into the bag, forming a (hopefully) heat resistant barrier he pushed as far as he could into Columbia’s wing.

Next step was the thermal protection. He grabbed a flexible bag, pushed it into the hole, and fireman..., erm, astronaut David Brown sent water from the airlock. The bag inflated inside the wing and he gently pushed it deep inside, until it bumped into the titanium barrier. Over the next hour, he patiently repeated the process, filling bag after bag with water until the leading edge was filled to the brim. Droplets of waters had escaped and instantly turned into beautiful crystals that shone under the sun, then vanished into the deepness of space. It was an eerie, surrealistic sight.

Columbia now had its left wing edge filled with titanium and water, but the gaping hole remained.

Anderson's last duty on that memorable day was to stuff the thermal blankets he had previously harvested into the hole. He gently forced them between the hole edges and the water bags behind. The AFSRI stood absolutely no chance against the re-entry inferno; it would burn and melt like chocolate on a hot metal plate. Yet every fraction of a second the furious plasma would lose while burning the blanket, would have Columbia closer to Earth and a possible crew bailout.

He stuffed the last AFSRI blanket and then the job was over.

For a few seconds, Michael Philip Anderson, born on Christmas day 1959 in Plattsburgh, New York, looked at the repair that might save himself and the lives of his companions.

Despite his best efforts, the repair looked really crude. That thing doesn't stand a remote chance against the re-entry plasma’s fury. He shook his head, said a little prayer, and climbed back up the ladder in the direction of David Brown.





Flight day 15 January 30 2003

Bremen, Germany

"I never thought that thing would fly into space again. It has been ten years - a decade of frustrating efforts spent battling governments. I can't guarantee it will work. That thing has been built to fly on a space shuttle payload bay, not under an Ariane fairing. By the way, it is slightly too big for that fairing."

Ulf Merbold was sceptic.

"But it is the son of the Shuttle Pallet Satellite, and SPAS was modular, wasn't it ? And it may fly with a single solar array. It won't spend eleven months in space, not this time. Man, how ugly is that thing. "

"It may be ugly, but it gets you there." Ulf Merbold smiled at the reference to the famous Volkswagen advert featuring a Lunar Module, all those years before, in 1969...

"To think it flew only once", the Daimler engineer sighed. "There were two more missions planned at the time, but Columbus ate everything else - this thing, more Spacelab flights, Hermes, the Man-tended-Free-Flyer and the polar platform. That's how Europe manned spaceflight went down the drain. Daimler was so frustrated, that in January 1996, they took over the platform from ESA and sought private investors for further flights."

"At some point we nearly had the Arab Emirates on board, but they backed down when NASA gently told us they had no shuttle flight to carry this baby into orbit again. Which is hardly surprising: any mission unrelated to Hubble or the ISS stands little chance. Do you realize STS-107 was proposed as early as 1998, and was to be flown two years ago, in February... 2001 ? it says a lot. As for this thing, it's a big baby, you know - not the kind of secondary payload that can hitch a ride on a corner of a shuttle payload bay or on a little vacant space under a fairing..."

"Whatever, you at Daimler refused to let that platform die." Merbold said.

"Indeed. Four years ago, we proposed it to ESA again. The plan was to fly it as a free flyer to complement Columbus. Since the death of the MTFF, Europe's space laboratories are to be kept attached to the station, and delicate microgravity experiments hate that. Our platform would have been launched by an Ariane, it would have flown itself to the ISS and latched onto Columbus, for the crew to swap or recover experiments if needed. After that it would have detached for a year long flight, far from the space station – vibration and dirty environment – before returning to Columbus. Perhaps once it would have hitched an Earth return ride on a passing shuttle, but we didn't have much hope, so we did away with the shuttle."

"How far did you go ?"

"Farther than one may think. We modified our baby to fly on an Ariane; we made limited changes to the payload section, so that some elements could be swapped in space and not on the ground. Heck, we even have an engagement from Arianespace and ESA for an Ariane 4, perhaps the very last to roll out of the production line, made of the many spares they had accumulated over the years."

"And then nothing happened."

"Indeed. After 1999, NASA and the space station endured one crisis after another - Mars probes crashed, the ISS was hit by one big huge cost overrun, and administrator Dan Goldin was sacked after a record ten years at the head of the space agency. With Columbus postponed once again, our plan fell by the wayside, and the platform you see returned into storage. In fact, at the end of last year, my management was seriously considering turning it to some Swiss museum."

"And now that ungainly spaceship may be the unsung hero..."

Ulf Merbold smiled. He had no doubt the European Retrievable Carrier – Eureca – would do a good job.



Flight day 16

January 31 2003

Kourou, French Guyana

(music: Alanis Morissette , Ironic )



Ariane looked like a beheaded monster.

The booster was being transferred to the launch pad with neither the fairing or the payload. Intelsat 907 had been gently tossed aside and the ground teams were now frantically working on old Eureca. Intelsat had no interest in obstructing such an historic mission. The company had backup launchers and even a backup satelite anyway.

James Oberg had imagined 1-ton unguided packages launched (with a certain attrition rate) to Columbia orbit. When compared with them, Eureca had some built-in advantages. It had powerful propulsion and power systems, it was able to navigate alone for months. Most importantly, it was 3-axis stabilized and designed, from its inception, to fit in a Shuttle environment.

Yet, Eureca had not been designed to be launched by an Ariane - there was no existing interface between the two. Due to a lack of time, such interface was now being created in a very crude, minimalistic way. Eureca would essentially fly as some heavy ballast precariously attached to the Ariane’s satellite dispenser.

Truth be told, the platform was even slightly too wide (by 25 inch) to fit into that rocket fairing.

To solve that issue, American and European engineers dug out Eureca’s mother out of mothball. Dubbed SPAS (for Shuttle Pallet Satellite) it had flown a decade earlier and was cruder - unlike Eureca, it was unable to detach from its shuttle carrier. Yet SPAS remained useful in the sense that its structure was essentially half of an Eureca. If the latter had to be cut or shortened to fit into an Ariane fairing, it would be SPAS that would tell the engineers where and what to cut.

As such, the old Shuttle Pallet Satellite had literally been butchered, some of its structural elements eventually finding their way into Eureca. The resulting hybrid spaceship was rather ungainly, yet it would deliver 1 ton of survival gear to the stranded astronauts.

Meanwhile, other ESA teams in Kourou were assessing the present and future weather, with mixed feelings. There would be strong altitude winds soon, and Ariane hated that. The launch was planned for, well, as soon as possible - probably around February 8 or so.

Whatever would happen, that flight of the Ariane would remain known to history as epic.

The last Ariane of its kind would help in the rescue of the first Shuttle - and it would have to sacrifice an Intelsat satellite for that.

There was some bitter irony in all of this.

Three decades before, Ariane had essentially ruined the Shuttle’s career as a satellite launcher by sweeping away many Intelsat V and VI launch contracts. Not only had the shuttle been affected; the shuttle was supposed to kill the Delta and Atlas-Centaur that at the time launched early generations of Intelsats.

With perfect hindsight, in 1977 Atlas-Centaur could have strangled Ariane in its infancy, had it not been for the Shuttle !



A decade later, Challenger and its crew were lost in a pretty horrific disaster that marked the end of an era. On August 15 1986, President Reagan had a decree passed that forever banned the Shuttle from commercial satellite launches. Unfortunately, for a decade now, the Shuttle had literally wiped out the Atlas and Delta, whose production lines were being shut down. When they finally re-opened, it was too late. As of 1988, the early Arianes had been refined into the formidable Ariane 4 that swept the satellite launch business like never before.

Ariane’s success was bitterly felt on the other side of the Atlantic, and from 2002 onwards, mounting tensions over Iraq did not help at all.

In such a toxic context, Ariane’s immediate availability to a rescue mission had been a bonanza. There were rumours of very high-level political involvement in the Ariane/Eureca mission, with De Villepin, Chirac and Schröder talking to President Bush as early as January 20, the day NASA had disclosed the gravity of Columbia situation to the world.

February 15, 2003 promised to be a day for the history books.

If both Atlantis and Ariane failed to reach Columbia before that day, then the crew would die of asphyxia.

Ariane would have probably launched Intelsat that day on a routine mission, three days late, since strong altitude winds were predicted.

Lastly, that February 15, the flamboyant (and much maligned) French PM Dominique de Villepin was to give a speech at the ONU tribune on the subject of Iraq. Without any surprise, it would re-affirm his country’s intangible opposition to the war - although obviously that wouldn't prevent it from happening.

Flight day 17

February 1, 2003

Aboard Columbia

(music: The Rasmus , In the shadows)



For a day now, the orbiter was flying with a wing pointed into the dark. It was hoped that in the absence of the sun, the wing would literally freeze – and, most importantly, all that water Anderson and Brown had taped into the bags would turn into a big iceberg.

Of uttermost importance was the wing spar, the solid bar of metal that held Columbia’s wing as a single piece. Made of aluminium and usually protected by the wing and thermal protection around it, the spar stood no chance if it was ever touched by the re-entry plasma. And if it ever broke, then the wing would be torn apart, resulting in a complete destruction of the orbiter and an horrific death for its crew.

The plan was not to stop the plasma – only an intact carbon panel could resist broken molecules of air nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. Instead, NASA and the astronauts would use every possible trick to make the plasma life more difficult.

Before it can reach the spar, the plasma would have to blast through the AFSRI, then it would have to melt all that frozen water. The last line of defence would be Laurel Clark’s bits of titanium, a very hard nut to crack even for a furious plasma. Unfortunately, the broken pieces of titanium only held together thanks to a plastic bag, and the plasma would show no mercy for it.

However, it was not the end of the line.

Not only would the destructive burn-through be delayed; NASA engineers also had a couple of tricks up their sleeves to weaken the plasma itself.

It was an unforgiving battle between a fragile mass of metal and aerodynamic heating trying to melt and destroy it. No side would show mercy !





Flight day 18

February 2, 2003

Johnson Spaceflight Center, Houston, Texas

LeRoy Cain could read doubt on the faces of the officials there.

“We are reaching a point where we have to seriously take into consideration the possibility that the Columbia crew may have to ride their crippled machine across the atmosphere. If that ever happens, we have to give them the best possible chance.” Cain started.

“You say that the wing repair may not be enough ?”

“Not exactly; rather, that there are a pair of tricks that may make the life of the plasma even more difficult.”

“Such as a lighter orbiter. But the weight reduction scenarios you are proposing here...” Linda Ham shook her head in disbelief.

“...are pretty extreme. I realize it. But we have to discuss them right now, because they are so difficult that the crew will have to start work soon.”

“We already have most of the crew sedated most of the day, because in their sleep they breathe less, saving precious oxygen, rejecting less carbon dioxide.”

“Are you seriously suggesting we only keep Brown and Anderson awake ?”

“Well, only they have been trained for extra-vehicular activities.”

“They are nearing exhaustion, though. The rate of the sorties is killing them. Is that massive weight saving worth it ?”

“Well, our calculations show 30 to 60 percent reduction in heat load and heat rates...” Leroy Cain started.

“But that’s only for an intact orbiter. God knows how a damaged machine would react. That, and the critical wing leading edge is spared of only seven percent of the usual temperatures.”

“Other options are lowering the perigee, and increasing the angle of attack during entry, to 45 degrees instead of the usual forty. Put together, they can help the orbiter through the worse of re-entry and - who knows ? - hold it together low and slow enough for the crew to bail out."

Aboard Columbia

Late in the evening, the Shuttle established a new endurance record, breaking its own record established in November 1996. That year, Columbia had spent 18 days in space. From this moment, every hour that passed carried the orbiter systems into the unknown – never before had they been asked to last so long in orbit.





Flight day 19

February 3, 2003

Aboard Columbia

(music: Moby , In my heart)

From that day on, Michael Anderson and David Brown’s lives took a bizarre turn. They were the only ones aboard Columbia trained for extra-vehicular activities. Most of what could be done to preserve the shuttle now required extra-vehicular activities – as such, the rest of the crew had to reduce their daily activities to save oxygen and reduce emission of carbon dioxide. That, and the repeated EVAs had taken a toll on the oxygen reserves.

From that day, Anderson and Brown felt isolated, much like 2001’s Frank Poole and David Bowman had been. They spent part of their days outside the orbiter, working on a new issue – making the orbiter lighter and lighter, to ease thermal constraints on the damaged heat shield during reentry, if there was ever a re-entry.

That day when they floated outside the airlock and into the lower cockpit, they entered a scene straight out of a science fiction movie. A light had been left on in the toilet and it dimly illuminated Columbia's sleeping crew. They were in their restraints, some pinned to the forward wall, others stretched horizontally across the mid-deck. In the relaxation of sleep, their arms floated chest high in front of them. It appeared as if they were in suspended animation, and in some way, they were. Despite the disciplined astronauts best efforts, life aboard Columbia became more and more difficult as the days passed.

Anderson and Brown were so exhausted, they had no time to think about their precarious situation or uncertain future. They had to perform the most difficult work first - before they were too exhausted and/or before the crew reserves were too much impacted by all their EVAs.





Flight Day 20

February 4, 2003

(music: The Jacksons, Can you feel it)

Anderson and Brown did a seven hour sortie outside that would remain in the history books. Once again, they pushed boundaries – of their bodies, of what the Shuttle and its payload could endure. That day, Mike Anderson and David Brown threw Spacehab out of the Columbia orbiter !

They crawled to the bottom of the payload bay and retrieved torque multiplier tools. With them, they opened the big latches that fixed the habitat to the orbiter that carried it into orbit.

They had a brief thought for all the NASA and Spacehab workers that had caretakered the module on a warm day in Florida - only a month before, in a past now so far away !

They grabbed cutters and started butchering a host of electrical and water lines through which Columbia had fed and nourished the module it carried. They felt like David Bowman butchering HAL’s brain on the way to Jupiter, although fortunately Spacehab did not talk to them.

Then the time came to cut the umbilical cord – the tunnel adapter that ran from Columbia’s airlock to the module. There was a flexible joint there, made of kevlar, cloth and wiring, and cutting that mess was not easy.

Even then, Spacehab refused to leave Columbia for a simple reason: It did not have little rocket thrusters to push itself away. It would be Columbia, under control of commander Rick Husband, that would literally back away, then flee out of the module’s reach.

Yet the module was so bulky that Anderson and Brown had to help it outside, much like a pair of nurses helping a pregnant woman with giving birth. Centimetre by centimetre, the two astronauts pushed the cumbersome module out of the payload bay. However, the process took so much time and they were so exhausted, with their reserves dwindling down, that in the end, the astronauts literally kicked the module with their boots.

It was an eerie sight: A pair of astronauts strapped inside a shuttle payload bay and furiously kicking the ass of a 18 000 pound module !

After minutes of exhausting efforts, Spacehab at least crossed the threshold of Columbia’s payload bay doors. With Anderson and Brown solidly tethered to the orbiter, commander Husband manoeuvred his crippled spacecraft away from the abandoned Spacehab.

The rest of the crew gathered around the cockpit windows to watch, incredulously, Spacehab drifting away. Much like the dead Frank Poole became the first man to Saturn, Spacehab's première would be a pyrrhic victory; soon the atmosphere would take its toll and it would tumble and burn - like the Russian space station Mir two years before.





Auf wiedersehen Spacehab !



(this is a picture I fabricated myself - I found a picture of Spacehab in the shuttle payload bay, then I literally "erased" the shuttle bay behind Spacehab using MS Paint. Tedious job !)

At that very moment, and in a stunning revenge against NASA and the shuttle's tortured history, Spacehab had become a space station on its own.







Flight Day 21

February 5, 2003

The next day, Anderson and Brown did another seven hour sortie outside. This time, they got rid of the 4400 pound heavy Freestar, the big truss where Get Away Specials and Hitchhickers were bolted. It was an easier task than throwing Spacehab overboard.

Once again, they gave a brief thought for all the labs and university students and researchers that had spent so much money, time and energy refining all the experiments now drifting away from Columbia to certain doom within Earth's atmosphere.

Meanwhile, down on the Columbia flight deck, Kalpana Chawla frantically snapped photos of the abandoned Freestar.

The day before, it had been Ilan Ramon that had taken pictures of the drifting Spacehab. Never, never in my life will I see something like this again, she thought.





Flight Day 22

February 6, 2003

Flashback to STS-49 - Endeavour first mission - May 1992

The billion-dollar Intelsat 603 satellite had been stupidly stranded in low Earth orbit for two years, courtesy of a Titan booster failure. NASA decided to send a Shuttle (Endeavour on its maiden flight) to rescue it.

The idea is to capture the satellite and replace the defective rocket motor with a working unit. Astronauts had rehearsed STS-49 for two years.

The main issue is how to capture the satellite in the first place. Intelsat obviously never thought its satellite would have to be captured by a shuttle robotic arm, so there's no grapple fixture on it. As such, astronaut Pierre Thuot is supposed to ride the robotic arm to the satellite and fix a purpose- build capture bar to its base; after what the robotic arm will be able to catch the bar fixture and the satellite that goes with it.

The first day Thuot spends three hours trying to latch the bar onto the satellite. Not only does the latches refuse to latch; Thuot finds that every time he tries to force his bar, the satellite internal propellant starts to slosh... and makes the 10 000 pounds Intelsat wobble, rotate and spin uncontrollably.

The second day has Thuot battling for five hours for a similar result - no latch and a wallowing satellite.

The third day is to be the last; Endeavour burned a lot of propellant the previous days, and the mission can't last forever. The astronauts decides to try a different trick.

Since Thuot alone can't at the same time hold the satellite steady and latch the bar, more hands are needed. Astronaut Hieb accompanied Thuot the day before, but a third man is needed, and thus Tom Akers join the party with the spare space suit. It is the first three man EVA in history, and truth be told, Endeavour airlock is a tight fit.

What follows is the most daring extravehicular activity in the space program history... at least until 2003.

Because the bar can't be be fixed to Intelsat for a capture by the arm, Thuot literally has to become a human bar, a bar with hands instead of latches ! And then another problem arise. Fixed to his robotic arm Thuot was supposed to handle the satellite alone. If a second man is to join him, he also has to be fixed to something, otherwise it might get lost into space. Unfortunately on the tip of the robotic arm there's only "room" for a single astronaut, so Hieb has to be fixed to something else... the shuttle itself. As such, orbiter pilot Dan Brandenstein has to carefully maneuver to bring the 100 tons Endeavour only two meters away from the balky, unpredictable satellite.

Once there, Hieb grapple the satellite and now Intelsat has two pair of human hands holding it steady. Unfortunately the satellite is in the wrong orientation for Hieb to retrieve and fix the damn capture bar (which remains useful, not to capture, but if only for the next round, read, to replace the rocket motor and re-launch that Intelsat beast into geostationnary orbit). For the next minutes the three astronauts slowly rotates the 10 000 pound cylindrical Intelsat by its base (!). This done, Hieb triumphantly latch the bar into place.

Alas, holding the satellite in one hand and the bar in another, Hieb finds he literally lacks a third hand to reach the switch at the bar center which definitively engage the latches.

Akers, for his part, hold his grip onto Intelsat, but can't do much more.

Thus it fells to Thuot, still riding his robotic arm, to sneak between the orbiter and the Hieb-hold bar to reach the switch and engage the latches definitively - and in the process he also tighten some bolts to be sure Intelsat never escape.

Now Intelsat has the bar solidly bolted and latched to his ass, and on that bar is a grapple fixture for the robotic arm to catch it. Except that the arm remain unable to catch the satellite since Thuot stands on its tip ! The astronaut thus clear the grapple fixture and now the arm definitively capture Intelsat 603.

NASA: 1, Intelsat: 0.

The Akers, Hieb and Thuot trio ends the day with EVA records; they respectively spent 8 hours and 29 minutes and 7 hours and 45 minutes into space !





Flight Day 23

February 7, 2003

Kennedy Space Center, Florida

(music: Coldplay , Clocks )



The 100 ton Atlantis had been brought from OPF-1 to the immense Vehicle Assembly Building. It had come there on its wheels, towed by a tractor, like a very ordinary airliner. Once in the immense building, it had been solidly bolted to a crane and hoisted vertically. The vision of the sleek orbiter hanging to the VAB crane was pretty surreal.

And then things had gone downhill.

“We are not going to make it.”

Mood at the Cape was at an all-time low. Atlantis had betrayed NASA; more exactly, one of its five General Purpose Computers – the orbiter brain – was to be replaced.

“That failure will take at least five days to repair. Add to that the time needed for on-orbit manoeuvring, and the Columbia crew will asphyxiate before we reach them. All those sorties Brown and Anderson did cut into the reserves, pushing the deadline to February 13 in the morning.”

“In this context there is only one hope left.”





Flight Day 24

February 8, 2003

Kourou, French Guyana

(music: Alain Bashung , Osez Joséphine ) Thunder rocked the jungle; the ground shook.

For the last time, an Ariane 4 left the equatorial launch base. Never in history had so much people gathered to see an European rocket liftoff.

The first two stages worked like Swiss clocks, but then came the most critical part of the mission. The HM-7 powering stage 3 had never been that reliable, although fortunately, its role in today mission was quite limited. After ten minutes of flight, it was cast-off, and the Eureca quietly sailed into Columbia 39 degree orbit.





Flight day 25

February 9, 2003

Aboard Columbia

Music: Coldplay , Whatif

The exhausted crew gathered once again near the cockpit windows to watch their savior’s arrival. The air aboard the Shuttle was becoming as thick as chicken soup; breathing was painful. It was Ilan Ramon who spotted a flash of light – Eureca’s lone solar array reflecting the sun. The ungainly space platform was carrying more than fresh air: It was carrying hope from all mankind.

Eureca had done her job pretty well, but once again the final word in the story belonged to Mike Anderson and David Brown. Over the last two days they had reviewed the peculiar STS-49 mission again and again; lessons learned from Intelsat 607’s epic capture.

They got out of the airlock into Columbia ravaged payload bay, where lose wires and latches floated desultorily. Down on the ground the join ESA / NASA team manoeuvred old Eureca within feet of Columbia’s payload bay, so that the two astronauts could catch the balky platform with their gloved hands, and tether it to their orbiter. What made matters more complex was the eventuality of getting rid of Eureca someday - provided Columbia had to close its payload bay doors to return Earth by itself.

Against all odds, Anderson and Brown managed to secure Eureca to Columbia. They immediately started unloading the platform vital cargo. It had been filled to the brim with LiOH CO2 scrubbers and oxygen. The Columbia crew, however, was also gratified by a special package. Inside were a lot of goodies – cookies, fresh vegetables, messages of hope and humour - everything Earth could think of to improve the astronauts morale.

Anderson and Brown filled the airlock with supplies the rest of the crew then unloaded inside. It was a cumbersome process that took a long time, but Columbia’s crew was in no hurry.

For the first time in three weeks, they faced a much brighter future.





Kennedy Space Center, Florida

NASA and contractors workers buzzing around Atlantis felt a heavy weight falling off their tired shoulders. The Eureca supply mission was also a breath of fresh air for them; it removed the unbearable pressure of a February 10 launch date that reminded many veterans of the days leading up to the Challenger disaster, when NASA was committed to an impossible schedule.

Kennedy top management acknowledged that pressure and the relief the workers felt. However, they were quick to remind them that only the first battle had been won in a continuing war. Atlantis still had to fly as soon as possible.









Flight day 26 February 10, 2003

“Around the world people are just beginning an evaluation of the consequences of the Columbia rescue. Although a secondary concern against the survival of the crew, it has to be noted the mission might lead to serious debris threat. Following the crippled orbiter in orbit are currently a derelict Spacehab, the Freestar truss with its disabled experiments, and of course the Ariane H-10 third stage. It should be noted that in 1986, the first Spot launch had the H-10 exploding into orbit; very ironically, ten years later, debris hit the French Cerise ELINT military satellite. The H-10, Freestar and Spacehab are going to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere soon and in a rather uncontrollable way...”





Flight day 27

February 11 2003

A discrete meeting of NASA top brass was held at the space agency Headquarters in Washington.

The mood around the table was definitively mixed.

Sean O'Keefe exposed a dismal situation.

"Surely, we have ensured survival of the astronauts, and that's paramount. Yet over the last hours more difficulties have been cropping up, notably around Atlantis. There are voices from all over the agency suggesting to relax Atlantis launch date if only because it will fly with Columbia foam issue unresolved. Space shuttle don't like rushed schedules - we learned that lesson in blood with the Challenger disaster. "We are also taking a lot of flak over debris issues, notably Spacehab and Freestar reentry. And that's only a beginning: sooner or later Eureca and the Columbia wreck will also reenter. Some say Atlantis should do something about it since it will carry a robotic arm. But Columbia astronauts will be extremely weakened by a month spend in terrible conditions in space, so Atlantis will have to bring them back as soon as possible. Could Atlantis spent one more day in orbit to try and clean some of that mess ? What to do with Eureca and Columbia ? I'm awaiting your suggestions."





Flight day 28

February 12 2003





"Valentine's day in space ?

Details of Atlantis rescue mission have been leaked by NASA. The launch date already slipped by some days after the failure of one of Atlantis five General Purpose Computers.

Latest news from the Columbia crew, however, are encouraging. Commander Rick Husband said he prefered Atlantis not to be rushed too much. "The risk of asphyxia is now definitively over and we never lacked any other form of supplies. In concertation with my crew we decided we can wait some more days, perhaps to the end of February if necessary. We are enjoying the view. David and Michael are trying to jury-rigg Eureca solar array and electrical system to provide us with more power."

It remains to be seen whether Columbia and Atlantis will spent Valentine day together in space..."





Flight day 35

February 19, 2003

Aboard Columbia - and Atlantis !

(music: Travis , Driftwood )

The crippled orbiter had previously climbed to a higher orbit, ahead of the rendezvous, to make her rescuer launch window better. The higher Columbia got, the slower it orbited Earth, making it easier for Atlantis to catch it.

Columbia had its open payload bay and cockpit facing Earth; it was somewhat flying upside down, (except in space there was no true up and down).

Atlantis was coming from below. In order for the rescue operation to work Eureca had previously been released and moved away from Columbia’s payload bay. The platform stint at Columbia had allowed the crew to save some reactant in the fuel cells.

Back in 1965 Gemini astronauts had learned how tricky on-orbit rendezvous were. Early on their aircraft experience played against them; spaceships were no aircrafts, and orbital mechanics were a totally different matter. As such aircraft-like interceptions failed miserably - all this because of Kepler laws. To catch up any target a spacecraft has to fly on a lower, faster orbit, overtake the target and then - only then - climb backward.

Even in close proximity, with Columbia above Atlantis, the two shuttles would not be at the exact same height above Earth. As such, Columbia would tend to orbit Earth slightly slower, and the small difference would be enough to gradually push the two orbiters away from each other. It was done on purpose: there would be no risk of collision.

In order for the astronauts being able to transfer from one shuttle to another, Atlantis and Columbia were to fly back to back, or more exactly payload-bay to payload-bay. A dumb issue was that of the orbiters’ large vertical tails; here the solution found had been to "clock" the two shuttles 90 degree apart. Atlantis nose would be at mid-day and its tail at midnight; while Columbia would have its nose at three o'clock and tail at nine o'clock. That way they could got closer than their respective tails height without issue.

Eileen Collins fired the Atlantis’ thrusters and the orbiter moved upward at a snail’s pace. Flying upside down, Columbia did not move a feather; Atlantis, for its part, carefully went closer and closer, until only 20 feet separated the two spacecrafts payload bays. They would have to stay like that for nine hours, the time needed for the astronauts to transfer, two at a time because of airlock limitations.

That had never been atempted before in the sense that no solid hardware kept the two shuttles together (or apart); there was no transfer tunnel, no docking ring and no hatch. Fate of the two orbiters hanged to a retro-reflector the Atlantis crew soon placed on Columbia cockpit roof. Atlantis had a Trajectory Control System, and that was all.

Through the shuttles’ cockpit windows, the two crews waved at each other. Soichi Noguchi and Stephen Robinson, for their part, were in the Atlantis airlock. With them was a pair of spacesuits; indeed with Clarke and Brown gone, there would be no suits left in Columbia.

For the very last time, Mike Anderson and David Brown donned their spacesuits and entered Columbia’s airlock. It had been decided they would go first, since they were trained for that, but also because of their daring, exhausting work.

Aboard Atlantis, commander Eileen Collins, assisted by James Kelly, kept a watchful eye on her orbiter‘s position.

Stephen Robinson locked his feet into a portable restraint set on Atlantis‘ payload bay door. He deployed a purpose-built telescopic boom in the direction of Columbia. Soichi Noguchi used the boom to transfer himself to the damaged orbiter's airlock where Anderson and Brown awaited him.

When the airlock opened, Noguchi had to help the weakened Anderson and Brown to exit.

For a fraction of a second, the three astronauts stood there, in the shadow of Columbia’s devastated payload bay, before Anderson exploded in laughter.

He and Brown shook Noguchi’s hand and hugged him. On both sides, there were exclamations, expectatives, and much rejoicing.

It was a memorable meeting in space, to be ranked along Apollo-Soyuz or STS-71, the first Shuttle-Mir docking. It was as bizarre as Stanley asking "Doctor Livingstone, I presume ?" to the man he had searched so long for in the remote confines of Africa.

The meeting was broadcasted to Houston, where Mission Control literally exploded in cheering.

"It was crazy, a return to the heydays of Apollo splashdowns," veteran Jerry Griffin later remembered. "We had guys puffing and chomping cigars, something not seen since the 70s, but for once, the no-smoking rule was broken."

Within minutes the information spreaded all over Earth.

Meanwhile the three astronauts placed the spare space suits into the airlock, and headed in the direction of the boom. Minutes later Mike Anderson and David Brown were safely tucked into Atlantis’ airlock. Aboard Columbia, the crew opened its own airlock and pulled out the space suits.

Over the next nine hours the operation was repeated three : Laurel Clark and William McCool, Kalpana Chawla and Ilan Ramon successfully transfered to the safety, warmth and cleanliness of the Atlantis flight deck. Each pair that exited the airlock was greeted with hugs, flowers and a big box of chocolates.

NASA couldn't resist broadcasting the rescue live, and as such, down on the big planet Earth rolling below the two shuttles, millions of people whooped, shed tears and cheered.

Meanwhile Commander Rick Husband, like a faithful capitain, was the last to exit his ship. For the last time he looked at the orbiter interior, his little home for five weeks. Columbia had kept them alive all this time, bleeding itself to death in the process; never would it fly into space again.

However, it was not over, not yet.

Rick Husband watched Steve Robinson exit Columbia’s airlock. Together they had a last, controversial bit of work to achieve before leaving Columbia forever.

"I suppose your presence here means they have taken the decision."

"They did." Robinson said. "I was there, and I can tell you the debate was heated, and it raged for a long time."

"This is hardly surprising. This has only one chance in a hundred to work."

"Oh, they are taking little risk. You are all safe, ready to return to Earth with us: Atlantis slipped across foam losses and reached orbit intact, and that’s what matters. Everything past that point is a bonus."

"A bonus - that's the word. So let's do this, and then get out of here."

Husband sat on his commander seat, and Robinson on his right. They could see Earth rolling past Columbia's windows, and a large chunk of Atlantis' nose and payload bay. So close, Husband felt he could touch it with his hand.

They started removing a handful of panels - F6, F6A3, C3A5, R2. Robinson then carefully plugged the connectors. Together they floated downwards, into the obscure, smelly middeck. There they had another panel removed. They accessed the orbiter avionic bay 3A, and Robinson plugged a black box into it. Husband caught the 6 pound cable that sneaked out of Columbia's cockpit and connected it to Robinson's GCIL box. They then unloaded instructions uplinked from Houston into Columbia's electronic brain - its five General Purpose Computers.

That work done, Rick Husband said a moving goodbye to his ship and, with the help of Robinson, went along the harrowing path to Atlantis safety - Columbia's airlock, the wrecked payload bay that had his heart pinch (where's my Spacehab ?), climb roping on the telescopic boom and Noguchi himself, more crawling, and finally Atlantis' airlock.

With Noguchi's return, the rescue mission was essentially over; Atlantis backed down, leaving Columbia alone. The eleven astronauts aboard all had a pinch of heart at the sight of the abandoned orbiter drifting away in the distance. Columbia had been left on her own.

Before returning to Earth, Atlantis had one last job to accomplish. After Columbia vanished in the distance, Commander Eileen Collins maneuvered her orbiter to their next target, the heroic Eureca. Its lone solar array had been folded so that Noguchi could capture the platform and delicately depose it into Atlantis' payload bay. All of a sudden, the European Space Agency had had a renewed interest (and budget) for the brave little ship that had worked so well. As such it would be returned to Earth, refurbished and reflown.

Aboard Atlantis, the crew enjoyed a hot, delicious meal - Columbia's galley had been shut down as part of the power-down, and needless to say, the food aboard had been pretty much atrocious (although Eureca's arrival had improved things: French cooks had jumped on the occasion and provided the stranded crew with the finest meal compatible with cold water and zero gravity).

There were obviously heart-shattering telecons with the families, all the wives, husbands, children, brothers, sisters, parents and grandparents that for a month had been devoured by anguish.

The NASA astronaut corps official band Max-Q, led by Hoot Gibson, did its part by engaging in a remake of the famous 1985 charity single We Are The World.





- - - -





Flight day 36

February 20, 2003

Aboard Atlantis

(music: U2 , Beautiful day )



At the end of an unventful reentry, the orbiter glided to a perfect landing at Cape Canaveral.

The unfortunate crew and their saviors were acclaimed by thousands of people. The President himself was there, the NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe and all the unsung heroes of the odyssey - thousands of Cape Canaveral, Houston and Marshall workers and managers, veterans and active astronauts, celebrities by the dozens.

For a few days, America forgot about the tensions with Europe, the military buildup against Iraq, the 9/11 aftershocks. The country had eleven heroes to worship.

Columbia waited in orbit for its part, while NASA decided of its ultimate fate. However, time was running out, and so did the reactant in the fuel cells.





- - - -





Flight day 40

February 24, 2003

Vandenberg Air Force Base, California

(music: Keane , Everybody's changing )

The OMS pods fired one last time; the orbiter flip-flopped, tail-first, then it returned to a nose-first attitude before hitting the upper atmosphere at an angle of 45 degrees.

Within the empty cockpit, the fiery show outside shed some light on the instrument panels and empty seats.

Just like the mechanical pianos seen in old movies, Columbia's controls moved without any human intervention, under ghost-like remote control. Never in history had an American orbiter been treated that way - like an ordinary Soviet Buran !

The AFSRI had long been turned to dust and blown into the atmosphere. The big load of ice stuck in the wing was doing its best, but the plasma was melting it fast. Columbia vibrated, growled. The orbiter suffered like hell.The shuttle was bleeding speed away, banking high over the Pacific in immense S-turns... left, right, left, right... every second had the plasma closer to the wing spar; every second also had Columbia closer to her home planet. If it burned through, the orbiter would meet an immediate, ungainly death; it would burn like a comet and its debris would sink into the Pacific, joining space station Mir in its wet, dark grave.

However, Brown's and Anderson's makeshift repair busted the NASA engineers' wildest dreams.

It held.

High above the California coastline, a battered, burned, sooted Columbia turned from a spaceship into an aircraft for the last time. Under Houston control, the pitot tube sprouted out of the fuselage. However, no one knew how the undercarriage tires would fare after so much time in space; the prognosis was pretty bad.

Suddendly, out of nowhere, a bunch of T-38s thundered in the Californian sky: a trio of the sleek jets carefully closed on the fast descending orbiter. Aboard the fleet of T-38s were NASA astronauts paying a tribute to the crippled shuttle.

With the '38s buzzing around it, Columbia aligned itself with Vandenberg main runaway. There would be no second chance; it was land or bust. The orbiter flared, bleeding speed one last time; it now approached the runway in a nose high attitude at two hundred miles per hour. The main undercarriage touched first and a couple of tires immediately blew up. By some miracle they were on different legs; Columbia was now hurtling on the runway with, from left to right, one tire gone, one holding, one gone, one holding. The orbiter gradually lowered its nose until the front wheels touched - and then both tires blew. Columbia's nosewheel rim scorched the runway in a fiery show of smoke and sparks.

The crowd of NASA officials, astronauts, and anonymous people held their breaths, certain they were assisting in the beginning of the end for Columbia (as imagined by a bitter Stephen Baxter in his arguably worst novel, Titan, in 1997).

As Columbia slowed down to less than a hundred miles per hour, the nosewheel finally gave up and the orbiter ended on its nose. The undercarriage doors flew away into the distance or were destroyed. Ceramic tiles were ripped away and smashed to bits.

But in the end, Columbia's massive nose provided a huge brake that stopped the orbiter faster than if it had stood on its wheels. Two decades before, not too far away (in Downey), Rockwell workers had built an orbiter cockpit as strong as a fortress, and in this extreme case it paid off... in a different way.

It's nose smoking, but the rear undercarriage still standing, poor Columbia finally came to a stop near the edge of Vandenberg runway, putting an end to the most scary landing in shuttle history - and, incidentally, to the most amazing rescue mission ever.

Fire trucks rushed to the crash site; Columbia's OMS pods and RCS were retard bombs, courtesy of the dirty storable propellants they used. Before the crowd could approach the wrecked orbiter, that mess had to be cleaned up first.

At the end of a memorable day, the battered Columbia was hauled to a hangar at Vandenberg. In a final, biting irony, the hangar had been built two decades before, near the SLC-6 - the Air Force rocket pad of the base, where military space shuttles were to be flown from into polar orbit.

Mission STS-62A (6_A for the first 1986 mission out of -2 : Vandenberg launch complex, -1 being The Cape) had never happened, since Challenger blew up only six months before the SLC-6’s Initial Operating Capability. The billion dollar pad ended in mothball for a decade before enduring a costly reconversion for the Delta IV classic rocket.

Columbia stood there, in Vandenberg hangar, with an immense crowd gathering around it. The military base obviously could not allow a major invasion by the public, so a solution had to be found rapidly.

After crude repairs a few days later, Columbia was hauled on the back of a 747 carrier. The massive airliner carried the crippled orbiter to Edwards AFB, specifically to the NASA Dryden Center located there.

Columbia was to go through a lenghthy, painstaking disassembly process. At Dryden, the old orbiter somewhat ironically met its failed successors - a couple of X-34s were stored there, along with the stripped X-33 hull.





- - - -





EPILOGUE



December 17, 2004

National Air and Space Museum

Washington DC



The 747 SCA roared above the capital. It was the end of a long farewell tour; with Columbia on its back, the NASA Jumbo Jet had toured the United States, a glowing tribute to the heroic rescue mission.

Columbia had found a natural home in the NASM's new Udvar-Hazy annexe, where it would be displayed alongside the Apollo 13 capsule. There had never been any question about scrapping Columbia or sending it elsewhere. Even without the epic rescue, Columbia had been the first reusable ship ever, worthy of a place in the world's best aviation and space museum - alongside her sister Enterprise that had never been transformed into a true shuttle. The two orbiters were placed nose to nose before Columbia was nested into her final home. Some scars had been left in place, a testimony to the most epic rescue mission in human history.





THE END...





With a twist !