samcster94
Banned
In February 2003, in TTL, the shuttle lands safely due to NASA fixing some of the sands on the shuttle's bottom before takeoff. Everyone who died in OTL in the accident lives. What happens now?
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I was talking about pre-flight.If you are talking about Columbia, she had a 20cm diameter hole in the the leading edge of her left wing. It was not repairable in orbit.
You need a pre-flight policy change to save Columbia. Given NASA's history with the shuttles, I feel this borders on ASB.
In February 2003, in TTL, the shuttle lands safely due to NASA fixing some of the sands on the shuttle's bottom before takeoff. Everyone who died in OTL in the accident lives. What happens now?
I was talking about pre-flight.
Indeed. What if there was a case in the 90's where the crew survives, but the craft is damaged(over something different)???Samcster94 wrote:
WHAT is the change though? This is highly important because as far as anyone knew BEFORE Columbia happened was that the Carbon/Carbon plates SHOULD be pretty much immune to high speed impacts. Because initial testing and calculations showed they should have been pretty damn tough. So tough in fact the US Army had started a program in the mid-80s to examine the use of C/C plates for both armored vehicle and body armor plates.
(In fact due to that testing the Army was well aware the plates were in fact pretty fragile in impact tests but the results were classified and NASA didn’t have a need to know since no one would be firing a “high velocity” object at the Shuttle now would they?)
So if C/C is so tough why would they need any change since it is only being hit by ‘frozen’ chunks of foam so obviously it can stand up to that kind of punishment since it’s been doing it till now… Have a piece of foam smash a bunch of tiles off instead? Unless the mission is endangered or lost, (and if it still gets back down ‘safe’ look to NASA ignoring the problem because, frankly, it was all NASA really had and they couldn’t get a replacement LV from Congress. And their lifetime had already been extended far past the ‘planned’ 15 year service life, (or in theory “100” flights but as of their retirement Discovery only had 39 flights under its belt) and as noted there was no replacement beyond some initial planning.
Say the crew/Shuttle/NASA dodge the bullet this mission? They it probably happens later to another crew and another Orbiter since the actual ‘problems’ still remain.
To solve those problems first NASA has to be aware they ARE problems AND be given both sufficient motivation and resources to fix the identified problems. In essence you need a reason to fix the light weight foam so that it doesn’t fall off during launch, otherwise what happened to Columbia will ‘happen’ eventually to someone else.
Randy
I recall my first thoughts when I heard about the Columbia disaster. First thought as the radio announced that Columbia apparently hit a wing failure while descending into the upper stratosphere was: "Awww, Sh''t. That's too high and too fast for the crew to use their escape hatch". My second thought, 10 minutes later when it wa confirmed that the shuttle had disintegrated mid-air with no survivors was:"Columbia, that's the first shuttle isn't it? So it must be how old? 25 years?? 26??? How the -bleep- was that one still flying in the first place????"In February 2003, in TTL, the shuttle lands safely due to NASA fixing some of the sands on the shuttle's bottom before takeoff. Everyone who died in OTL in the accident lives. What happens now?
So, NASA must admit to a vulnerability in the shuttles and if they can't lobby for the money to correct them, the vehicles might be grounded earlier than 2011 (OTL ending). It would significantly impact the development of the International Space Station.Say the crew/Shuttle/NASA dodge the bullet this mission? They it probably happens later to another crew and another Orbiter since the actual ‘problems’ still remain.
To solve those problems first NASA has to be aware they ARE problems AND be given both sufficient motivation and resources to fix the identified problems. In essence you need a reason to fix the light weight foam so that it doesn’t fall off during launch, otherwise what happened to Columbia will ‘happen’ eventually to someone else.
Randy
So, NASA must admit to a vulnerability in the shuttles and if they can't lobby for the money to correct them, the vehicles might be grounded earlier than 2011 (OTL ending). It would significantly impact the development of the International Space Station.
I might have to eat my words about suggesting that Columbia would be retired for her weight.
https://web.archive.org/web/2003022..._standard.xsl?/base/news/1041675363226150.xml
As of shortly before STS-107, the official NASA plan was to have each of the four orbiters fly no less than 100, and potentially as many as 400, missions. At a flight rate of maybe 8-12 Shuttle flights per year, that implies a Shuttle fleet remaining in service until at least 2030, and possibly to about 2100.
Somewhat more realistically, there was a plan to add a fifth segment to the RSRMs (as became the plan for Constellation), to eliminate the RTLS abort option.
So I just learned about a rather interesting Shuttle upper stage variant Boeing proposed around 2000 called ‘Advanced Shuttle Upper Stage.’ This was in many ways a revisit of the old Shuttle-Centaur concept, with one of the big safety concerns (what to do with all that LH2/LOX in an abort) addressed. The idea was to launch the tank empty and fill it from the External Tank during ascent, after reaching a safely high altitude. Apparently, testing in 2002 showed that the rapid-chill-and-fill (under 5 minutes) technique would work, but STS-107 put an end to that.
It is an interesting idea, and it could be used to convert the Shuttle into a surprisingly-effective (if not necessarily cost-effective) tanker-and-crew-taxi for lunar access. If you could dock repeatedly with your empty Centaur-type upper stage (stretched 50%), and use the Shuttle RCS to induce a slight spin for fluid control, then a hypothetical Shuttle Orbiter with 5-segment boosters could tank up a cislunar tug with a payload to LLO (and back) of a little over 2 tonnes. Not really anything to write home about, but, if you keep the missions short to control boil-off, you give the Shuttle system the ability to send crew to LLO and back, again, and again, and again. It would look a bit ungainly during the fueling—Centaur, Orbiter, and ET, rotating about an axis through the Orbiter itself.
You could do something similar with methane/oxygen, I suppose, transferring LOX from the ET and CH4 from the payload bay, but you’d want to break it up into two stages like e of pi and I did for Right Side Up’s cislunar tug.
If you keep it to the OTL Shuttle-Centaur dimensions, and make it a throwaway stage, your Orbiter (with Five-segment Boosters) has a TLI payload of up to 10 tonnes. Not exactly good (DIVH gets a bit under 16 tonnes), but it is man-rated (by default).
This is just one example of the capability the Shuttle system could have had with some very slight incremental improvements that could have been implemented by 2010—enough, perhaps, to do exactly what SLS is supposed to do.
EDIT: Kind of spurious, but I sketched out a slightly-upgraded Shuttle stack designed for increased LEO mass, mostly propellant to transfer to a proposed ASUS-derived cislunar tug. There were some OTL proposals to stretch the ET, so running with those and the Five-Segment Boosters (called FSB in those days), I present a Shuttle Orbiter that can haul 50-odd tonnes to LEO, of which most is propellant carried in the ET. I put the LH2 tank extension where the Aft Cargo Carrier was once supposed to go, to keep the ET tip under the ceiling of the LC-39 towers.
I thought this was rather general knowledge?
Well more officially to 'offset' lower performance to the ISS orbit IIRC but yes ensuring they weren't tempted to to RTLS was a 'bonus' I suppose![]()
Er, what that supposed to be that tiny?
Randy
Maybe, but the fact that they were even talking about 400 flights is not something I knew about. 2020-2025 I get, and I'd heard. 400 flights per orbiter? That's a remarkably optimistic confidence in one's job security.
The articles I read seem to indicate that having abort-to-orbit capability right off the pad was the bigger interest--concerns about maximum payload size for reentry capped the maximum Shuttle payload anyway.
No--not sure what happened there. The one attached here should be more legible.