What if Space Shuttle Challenger had survived?

I wonder what could have happened if Space Shuttle Challenger had not exploded on January 28th, 1986. On amazon.com I saw a novel called Launch on Need: The Quest to Save Columbia's Crew, which makes you wonder what could have happened after NASA discovered the damage on Space Shuttle Columbia, but actually decided to do something about it. I almost think they could write a novel about what could have happened to Space Shuttle Challenger if it had survived the STS-51L mission. What do you guys think?
 
An accident was coming. The launch schedule for '85 was so pushed that the safety issues brought on by management-driven schedule pressures would have eventually seen some kind of accident. Maybe a launch failure (though weather played a big role in that), maybe a thermal protection system failure like Columbia (there were flights before Columbia that, when re-analyzed after Columbia, engineers basically looked back and said, "Boy, we got lucky." Maybe a few more satellites go up, and maybe some of the outer system probes that were planned for Shuttle..but an accident was going to happen soon. The Shuttle design almost ensured it was possible, and the relentless drive to fly often enough to justify the costs of the Shuttle were causing lapses in safety that "possible" became "probable." It was just a matter of time.
 
A disaster appears inevitable. If the disaster doesn't happen for another 2 years, Richard Feynman who died in 1988, would not be available to be assigned to the commission created to investigate. Without Feynman's dogged presence, its quite likely that the formal report created by the investigative commission would completely white wash the horrible management culture in place at NASA that made a disaster inevitable.
 
I'm thinking Challenger could have made it into space. At launch, the shuttle's right solid rocket booster's o-ring joint did not seal because of the cold weather that day, and they started to burn away. For a few seconds, a few puffs of black smoke came from the right booster but stopped because aluminum slag from the rocket fuel built up around the joint and sealed it, which prevented a disaster on the launchpad. At 58 seconds into the flight, the shuttle encountered a jet-stream which shook the shuttle and caused the aluminum slag to be dislodged. After that, a flame appeared and started burning away the joint connecting the right booster to the external fuel tank. Just 6 seconds from disaster, the flame burned through the external tank and liquid hydrogen started to spill out. 1 second from disaster, the right booster separated from the external tank, and the bottom of the external tank gave way, and the hydrogen tank was pushed up into the liquid oxygen tank of the ET while at the same time the right booster was rotating around and struck the external tank, causing the destruction of Challenger. My opinion is that if the aluminum slag that had built up around the joint of the right booster had held on despite the weather, Challenger could have made it into space and the 7 astronauts who perished would probably still be alive today.
 
Here's a weird butterfly:

The lack of unifying sentiment around the Challenger disaster makes national support for Republican national leaders a touch less entrenched, resulting in the election of President Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election.

Dukakis creates the cabinet-level position of "Auditor General."

The Aud-Gen office hops on NASA, resulting in months of blood-curdling stories leaking from the half-year full audit and investigation.

Billions of dollars are spent rebuilding the shuttle fleet to "an acceptable degree of safety" and the shuttles continue to function --all of them-- well into the 21st century.

edit: the rebuild of the shuttle fleet would include the expensive but nonetheless laudatory rededication of the Enterprise into a fully functional orbiter. :D
 
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If they ever do an alternate history novel on what could have happened to Space Shuttle Challenger, I would definitely read it. But I guess we will have to wait and see.
 
The point is not whether Challenger could have made it safely to space on that flight, the point is that the overall safety of the program made a disaster inevitable within a few years. Sure, with some butterflies in weather or the precise sequence of events in the accident, the loss of crew might have just become a loss-of-mission with some kind of abort, or perhaps even with a small miracle just an off-nominal flight. But then it wouldn't be Challenger that had the disaster, it'd be Discovery or Atlantis or Columbia or even Challenger on a later flight.

They were pushing the bounds of safety to achieve the Shuttle's originally intended flight rate, and what Challenger and the ensuing investigation served to expose was that the effort to do so was seeing increasingly unsafe procedures and more and more pressure to let schedule override solid engineering. By 1989, they were still pushing to hit 24 missions a year, which means flying every orbiter 6 times with a two month turn-around. Flying like that, losing a Shuttle and a crew was essentially inevitable within a few years.
 
The point is not whether Challenger could have made it safely to space on that flight, the point is that the overall safety of the program made a disaster inevitable within a few years. Sure, with some butterflies in weather or the precise sequence of events in the accident, the loss of crew might have just become a loss-of-mission with some kind of abort, or perhaps even with a small miracle just an off-nominal flight. But then it wouldn't be Challenger that had the disaster, it'd be Discovery or Atlantis or Columbia or even Challenger on a later flight.

They were pushing the bounds of safety to achieve the Shuttle's originally intended flight rate, and what Challenger and the ensuing investigation served to expose was that the effort to do so was seeing increasingly unsafe procedures and more and more pressure to let schedule override solid engineering. By 1989, they were still pushing to hit 24 missions a year, which means flying every orbiter 6 times with a two month turn-around. Flying like that, losing a Shuttle and a crew was essentially inevitable within a few years.
I agree with your point, that if what happened to Challenger had not happened like it did in real life, it would have most likely happened to Discovery, Atlantis, Columbia, or Challenger (at a later date). If Challenger had not been destroyed, Endeavour would have never been built, because Endeavour was built to replace Challenger so that the shuttle fleet was back up to strength with 4 orbiters. It would be interesting to see what would happen to the shuttle fleet in alternate history.
 
Here's a weird butterfly:

The lack of unifying sentiment around the Challenger disaster makes national support for Republican national leaders a touch less entrenched, resulting in the election of President Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election.

Dukakis creates the cabinet-level position of "Auditor General."

The Aud-Gen office hops on NASA, resulting in months of blood-curdling stories leaking from the half-year full audit and investigation.

Billions of dollars are spent rebuilding the shuttle fleet to "an acceptable degree of safety" and the shuttles continue to function --all of them-- well into the 21st century.

edit: the rebuild of the shuttle fleet would include the expensive but nonetheless laudatory rededication of the Enterprise into a fully functional orbiter. :D

Not a likely butterfly, but an interesting one none the less.
 
A lot of people would have less exposure to science museums in school. (Several Challenger Learning Centers were set up thanks to efforts by the widows and widowers of the crew.)
John Hockenberry or Walter Cronkite or another journalist might have gone through astronaut training and gone up on the shuttle.
NASA could still sell space on the shuttle to the private sector...perhaps even having corporate astronauts.
Vandenberg would be up and running for shuttles. (Of course if something happened on STS-61-L, Secretary of the Air Force* Edward Aldridge might have died.)
One drawback is we would have less knowledge of long duration space flight on materials. The LDEF satellite was scheduled to be returned after eleven months, and retrieval was postponed indefinitely after the Challenger accident. It was finally retrieved in 1990.

* He became Air Force Secretary after Challenger. However, he was scheduled to go into space on the aforementioned cancelled mission beforehand.
 
There's only one way, IMHO, that Challenger could've survived and the necessary changes to operational practices and management be made. That is for the two O-Ring seals to fail, yet the Aluminium Slag hold in place until it was returned for refurbishment. Seeing the potential catastrophe was was somehow averted would scare the living s*** out of everyone involved. And they would have no option but to implement the required upgrades.

But that is as close to ASB as you can get.
 
Bahamut I recall engineers being scared shitless when they got a look at a booster recovered from a previous flight(Columbia I believe). NASA however didn't take the hint. The best thing that could have happened was for the shuttle to have been designed with a monolithic solid rocket boosters and later fitted with liquid fly-back boosters. Columbia could be prevented by redesigning the wind from a double-delta configuration to a more conventional stub-wing design this would have allowed for a Apollo style reentry and have greatly reduced the amount of energy to be burned off during reentry. Of course for this to happen USAF would have to be willing to find a different launch location or design a separate vehicle for their own needs.
 
abort?

Could some other near disaster happen, that would be a dramatic failure, and cause a "We got lucky!" reaction? If the O-ring failed in such a way that the flame jet was venting away from the main fuel tank, could they have jettisoned it? Tanks explodes clear of the shuttle, and there's a dramatic abort?
 
Bahamut I recall engineers being scared shitless when they got a look at a booster recovered from a previous flight(Columbia I believe). NASA however didn't take the hint. The best thing that could have happened was for the shuttle to have been designed with a monolithic solid rocket boosters and later fitted with liquid fly-back boosters. Columbia could be prevented by redesigning the wind from a double-delta configuration to a more conventional stub-wing design this would have allowed for a Apollo style reentry and have greatly reduced the amount of energy to be burned off during reentry. Of course for this to happen USAF would have to be willing to find a different launch location or design a separate vehicle for their own needs.

However, those O-Ring failures were where one failed, while the second one performed as expected. Challenger OTL was a double O-Ring failure in the one segment, temporarily sealed by Aluminium Slag. If that slag had stayed in place all the way to refurbishment, that would wake anyone up.

Of course, having the flame plume going away from the ET would work just as well - for a while.
 
Could some other near disaster happen, that would be a dramatic failure, and cause a "We got lucky!" reaction? If the O-ring failed in such a way that the flame jet was venting away from the main fuel tank, could they have jettisoned it? Tanks explodes clear of the shuttle, and there's a dramatic abort?

No, it would have been impossible. There were no abort mode involving tank jettison or (to my knowledge) early SRB separation, since the Shuttle carries essentially no fuel of its own. Even the RTLS abort involves "waiting out" the SRBs, jettisoning them, then turning the stack to use the ET's fuel to reverse the Shuttle and bring it back to KSC. Even if there was such an ability, the main advantage would be that it would put the Shuttle into gliding flight where the crew could bail out, since the Shuttle would be too far from land to glide back and had no capability to survive a water landing.
 

Clipper747

Banned
I'm thinking Challenger could have made it into space. At launch, the shuttle's right solid rocket booster's o-ring joint did not seal because of the cold weather that day, and they started to burn away. For a few seconds, a few puffs of black smoke came from the right booster but stopped because aluminum slag from the rocket fuel built up around the joint and sealed it, which prevented a disaster on the launchpad. At 58 seconds into the flight, the shuttle encountered a jet-stream which shook the shuttle and caused the aluminum slag to be dislodged. After that, a flame appeared and started burning away the joint connecting the right booster to the external fuel tank. Just 6 seconds from disaster, the flame burned through the external tank and liquid hydrogen started to spill out. 1 second from disaster, the right booster separated from the external tank, and the bottom of the external tank gave way, and the hydrogen tank was pushed up into the liquid oxygen tank of the ET while at the same time the right booster was rotating around and struck the external tank, causing the destruction of Challenger. My opinion is that if the aluminum slag that had built up around the joint of the right booster had held on despite the weather, Challenger could have made it into space and the 7 astronauts who perished would probably still be alive today.


Amazing isn't it? Had it not been for the passing weather front and subsequent wind shear aloft that mission would've been successful.

Jeez I was a Senior in AP History class when it launched that day. After class a friend of mine came up to me munching on cheese popcorn saying the Shuttle blew up. He and few other had been watching live when it happened.
 

Archibald

Banned
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=26960.msg814769#msg814769

In the Challenger disaster, context is everything. As of 1986 NASA was cornered with the wrong launch system.
They had promised wonders - the shuttle was to fly 60 times a year to earn money, yet that flight rate had been cut to 24, yet 1985 burst at the seams with only 11 launches.

1986 was to see 15 launches, but the real problem was that some of these launches were planetary probes. The nasty thing with that: planetary probes have launch windows.
Galileo and Ulysses were both going to Jupiter in 1986, with a launch window in May. It was really launch-or-die.
Challenger next mission was to carry some telescope to study comet Halley, and that had to fly on March 6 - or die. Sending a shuttle in low earth orbit to study a comet far away was dumb, but after all, NASA had zero probe, unlike the Soviet Union, Japan or ESA...

Cancelling the Shuttle program was not acceptable either, not after spending $7 billion and building 5 machines, plus designing a space station around it. No way.

No, really, NASA situation was deseperate.

Challenger was horrible, but things could have been ever worse.

In May 1986, a shuttle was to carry a Centaur to boost Galileo to Jupiter. This peculiar shuttle mission would have carried no less than
- 4 astronauts
- 2 RTG with plutonium on Galileo
- 1 Centaur filled with (explosive) hydrogen.
And it could suffer no delays, otherwise it would miss the Jupiter launch window. Oh, and in order to carry the massive Centaur, the SSME were to be pushed to 109% of their maximal usual power - with a final orbit barely 100 miles high. And only four astronauts.

That was the situation in 1986.
 

AndyC

Donor
No, it would have been impossible. There were no abort mode involving tank jettison or (to my knowledge) early SRB separation, since the Shuttle carries essentially no fuel of its own. Even the RTLS abort involves "waiting out" the SRBs, jettisoning them, then turning the stack to use the ET's fuel to reverse the Shuttle and bring it back to KSC. Even if there was such an ability, the main advantage would be that it would put the Shuttle into gliding flight where the crew could bail out, since the Shuttle would be too far from land to glide back and had no capability to survive a water landing.

And before the Challenger disaster, there were no provisions made for a bail-out capability in any case. Had a shuttle somehow been placed in a contingency abort scenario where they were gliding over water to an inevitable ditching, they'd simply have had to sit tight until they impacted and almost certainly died.
 
...At 58 seconds into the flight, the shuttle encountered a jet-stream which shook the shuttle and caused the aluminum slag to be dislodged...

This is the first I've heard of this!

What I have heard is that the jet of flame and subsequent explosion took place right around Q-Max. That is, the dynamic pressure of the airflow rises with increasing speed but falls with decreasing air density at higher altitudes; given a more or less steady acceleration upward it works out that there is an altitude at which aerodynamic stress is at maximum after which the falling density trumps the rising speed. The normal ascent involves throttling back a bit just before that point, and then reboosting the main engine to resume the full-on climb, to as it were "tunnel" through that peak. The explosion was right around when they did this.

So I've always assumed the shifting accelerations at this point, or the maximal air stress on the boosters, or both, were the culprits in the exact timing. I don't know that it needed an errant jet stream to tip the balance.

In any case as e of pi says, the longer they got lucky, the longer they lived in a fool's paradise of known problems the institutions involved (NASA, Morton Thiokol) would ignore as long as they could. It took a disaster unfortunately to force an effective look at the problem.

NASA is not always like this. Sometimes if they can see a solution that doesn't stop the show and put the whole business of space travel into political jeopardy, they do something about it.

I actually think the real scandal is, there is no escape system for the crew. I can think of one but it would probably be so costly as to have scotched the whole program.
 
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