Shuttle Columbia Disaster, April 14, 1981

During reentry of Space Shuttle Columbia after her first flight (the first flight of the Space Shuttle Program), hot gas gets ducted into the right main landing gear well. The damage is far greater than it was IOTL, and Shuttle Columbia is lost during reentry. John Young and Robert Crippen are lost.

A rather rocky start for the Space Shuttle program indeed. What are the results? How will President Reagan handle the failure? NASA in general? Will a 'return to flight'* be attempted?
 
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During reentry of Space Shuttle Columbia after her first flight (the first flight of the Space Shuttle Program), hot gas gets ducted into the right main landing gear well. The damage is far greater than it was ITTL, and Shuttle Columbia is lost during reentry. John Young and Robert Crippen are lost.
The first four Shuttle flights had ejection seats for both pilots. If the failure occurs similarly to OTL, I think those seats give the crew a chance of survival. It'd certainly factor into the decision from STS-5 on to delete the ejection seats--which was required since they couldn't fit 4 in the cockpit with the ejection seats as I understand and of course they couldn't put anyone on the mid-deck, limiting crew from 7 to 2.
A rather rocky start for the Space Shuttle program indeed. What are the results? How will President Reagan handle the failure? NASA in general? Will a 'return to flight'* be attempted?
Reagan actually didn't think much of civilian program early on in his presidency (something we're struggling with in Eyes Turned Skyward), so this accident is going to strip a lot of political cover off of NASA and Shuttle in particular--the decision not to provide for an unmanned flight capability and do unmanned testing will be criticized in the same breath as the tremendous amount of money spent on what is clearly a death-trap and a general waste of time and taxpayer funds. I wouldn't be surprised if the military summarily drops their plans to use the system just to avoid further ties. Would there be a return to flight...I don't know. This might be enough to kill Shuttle in its infancy, but that's not good--at this time, NASA has little else going on in manned space, and a lot of their unmanned stuff for both them and the military was dependent on Shuttle. Maybe you'd see a return to flight (almost certainly following a serious re-examining and redesign of the foam on the external tank and featuring the addition of several unmanned missions). If the public reaction is too bad, NASA may try and swap to some kind of kludge of a capsule (Apollo or Geminii-derived) on top of something like a sidemount Shuttle-derived heavy, billed as a safer way to get people to orbit, but that'd take time and money NASA may not be given.
 
not to provide for an unmanned flight capability

The space shuttle actually can autoland . It's just that NASA was so confident they didn't bother to do an unmanned flight test. Something about being so incredibly confident that the gods of Apollo could do no wrong.

This will hurt the use of computer models in the creation of new air and space craft. Nothing before the shuttle had been so dependent on them, and this failure will ensure that development remains more expensive for longer. High risk projects are even more rare due to the higher cost. Also the National Aerospace Plane gets scaled back, if it happens at all, again due to the questionable record of projects that require lots of computer time.
 
The space shuttle actually can autoland . It's just that NASA was so confident they didn't bother to do an unmanned flight test. Something about being so incredibly confident that the gods of Apollo could do no wrong.
Read that carefully. The Shuttle can and does fly the main entry maneuvers automatically, but the final descent and touchdown is all done with the pilot in the loop (it's not truly manual since everything is fly-by-wire with the computer making it remotely flyable, same as with the LM's "manual mode"). In fact, you will note that the content of that note is to specifically suggest adding a computer-controlled option for that final descent portion that has been hand-flown on every flight. I think it was in fact implemented, but it's never been tested. The pilots wouldn't stand for it. If it had wings and was flying, it was a plane. If it was a plane, no way were they going to let the computer land it.
 
The first four Shuttle flights had ejection seats for both pilots. If the failure occurs similarly to OTL, I think those seats give the crew a chance of survival. It'd certainly factor into the decision from STS-5 on to delete the ejection seats--which was required since they couldn't fit 4 in the cockpit with the ejection seats as I understand and of course they couldn't put anyone on the mid-deck, limiting crew from 7 to 2.

Hypersonic ejection? I don't think so; the fastest anyone's ever been thrown out of an airplane and survived was at Mach 3 (using the same type of ejection seat, actually). Young and Crippen are dead unless the failure becomes apparent low and slow, so that they're actually in a situation where they can eject without being ripped apart and incinerated simultaneously (say, when they go to lower the landing gear, the right main won't lower or is clearly deformed and useless). In that case, they're quite likely to do fine (well, as fine as one can be after ejecting, anyways).

I don't think NASA would die over this; Reagan was not a great friend to the space program, but by this point I think it had sufficiently powerful political backers and was sufficiently integrated into the national consciousness that it would basically stick around even if Shuttle was canceled outright and some new minimal program started. The difficulty would be the many, many, many payloads being designed for Shuttle which had to be launched on Shuttle. That would pose a problem, and one that might inspire a more Challenger than Columbia (OTL, of course) like approach to the return to flight (ie., trying to correct the problems which had appeared while planning to continue the Shuttle program relatively indefinitely). Naturally, the Air Force and NRO would instantly start pushing for Titan IV, and SLC-6 might not be constructed at all.

However, it's possible would be a bigger push for some "Son of Shuttle" or "Shuttle II" or whatever in the 1980s; less emphasis on the Shuttle attaining "production" capabilities, and instead treating it as an experimental (if useful) vehicle that could eventually be developed into a production vehicle.
 
Hypersonic ejection? I don't think so; the fastest anyone's ever been thrown out of an airplane and survived was at Mach 3 (using the same type of ejection seat, actually). Young and Crippen are dead unless the failure becomes apparent low and slow, so that they're actually in a situation where they can eject without being ripped apart and incinerated simultaneously (say, when they go to lower the landing gear, the right main won't lower or is clearly deformed and useless). In that case, they're quite likely to do fine (well, as fine as one can be after ejecting, anyways).
You're right, I hadn't fully considered the capability of the seats. They would indeed be going way too fast for ejection if their accident timeline is roughly the same as OTL's STS-107. As much as it pains me to say it, I guess there really isn't a way to something similar happen without Loss-of-Crew.

I don't think NASA would die over this; Reagan was not a great friend to the space program, but by this point I think it had sufficiently powerful political backers and was sufficiently integrated into the national consciousness that it would basically stick around even if Shuttle was canceled outright and some new minimal program started. The difficulty would be the many, many, many payloads being designed for Shuttle which had to be launched on Shuttle. That would pose a problem, and one that might inspire a more Challenger than Columbia (OTL, of course) like approach to the return to flight (ie., trying to correct the problems which had appeared while planning to continue the Shuttle program relatively indefinitely). Naturally, the Air Force and NRO would instantly start pushing for Titan IV, and SLC-6 might not be constructed at all.
I dunno--if the DoD is running away from it and likely commercial payloads suddenly develop interests in other rockets, a lot of the early shuttle missions start drying up. Maybe not the ones on the near-term manifest like Spacelab and the TDRS sats, but the ones that were planned-but-not-committed will likely find something else to launch on if at all possible. It seems more likely that they do what they did after Columbia OTL where they basically started thinking about what the Shuttle had to do and what missions could be done with alternate vehicles and launchers. As you say, they might just write it off as a major program and start focusing on making whatever's next "better" (though what that means could be anything from "second-gen shuttle" to "never mind this, back to capsules").
 
The the rumour that the Soviets destroyed it with an orbitting battlestation have a few extra voices.

But do not fear, the US will reply as the rumour says they did, by dropping the Enterprise (complete with clones of Crippen and Young) from the 747 carrier to act as Columbia.
 

Delta Force

Banned
If the hydraulics fail before reentry (there was some kind of damage to the flaps that should have badly damaged the system) Young stated that the craft would have been flown to a safe altitude and the crew would have ejected. That would have destroyed the orbiter but the crew might have survived.
 
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