I know the official story Bill but It is common knowledge such imagery was
used in a earlier mission were tiles were dislodged from the aft end of the
orbiter, can't remember the mission but it's on record. So it would be
ludicrous that they wouldn't utilize such assets again. I also remember the
chatter about preparing Atlantis for a rescue mission, it would of taken
round the clock crews working against the clock with limited expendables
like oxygen but it was possible to do the mission under a month.Why would
such discussions of a rescue take place if no damage wasn't plausible?
We'll in all probability never know.The pisser is that we lost lives in
such avoidable situations, we/US really had an extremely safe space program
with really reliable hardware despite the awful politics, really amazes me
and is what equally frustrates me. So glad the private sector has in effect
taken over.
Bed time.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 9:27 PM William Claybaugh <wclaybaugh2@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Ken:
There was no call up of the KH11 for Columbia.
There were other occasions when such imaging was used, but not on that
mission: the then accepted belief was that foam could not possibly damage
the tiles or carbon-carbon and an internal request to ask NRO for imaging
was denied within NASA.
Bill
On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 7:24 PM roxanna Mason <rocketmaster.ken@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I guess then it's best the general public doesn't know these facts as we
might not have any space program as flawed as it is and was.
For me, the inability to fully cope with the two shuttle tragedies has
plagued me, not just the loss of life but the people responsible not
being punished in any way, particularly Challenger. But there's reason
to believe that the extent of damage to Columbia's wing was known
in advance thru 'spy' imaging satellites. It's not my intention to get
into a heated discussion on this topic just venting among colleagues.
For what its worth, I had a 'premonition a few weeks before Challenger's
launch. I was being pummeled on the pad by flaming debris just
after launch, though in a not very realistic scenario, but as dreams
go, none the less. I awoke very disturbed and for days afterwards.
One of numerous reasons I get overly emotional about the demise of the
Saturn 5.
On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 5:24 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Thu, 26 Mar 2020, roxanna Mason wrote:
it turned out that shutdown
transient loads would be too high for the orbiter and ET structures.
Did not know this was ever a consideration. So instead of
shelving SRB's for liquid boosters they rolled the dice. Another
example of politics over engineering.
The Shuttle program, alas, had a bad case of one of the problems Nevil
Shute describes in the R-101 project: once a decision was made and
money
started being spent based on it, admitting that the decision had been a
mistake and money had been wasted was deemed too embarrassing.
Earlier example: When NASA finally accepted non-reusable drop tank(s),
that should have made it possible to build something like the Lockheed
StarClipper concept -- with all the engines in the orbiter and no
separate
booster -- which had previously been ruled unacceptable because it used
a
drop tank. People did notice this, but the decision to build a
two-stage
Shuttle with separate booster(s) could not be changed.
Later example: When the orbiter design came in considerably overweight,
reducing payload fraction and threatening a considerable loss in
payload,
the right answer was to back up and design a somewhat larger Shuttle
that
would have the desired payload despite the smaller payload fraction.
Instead an expensive and painful mass-reduction scrub was done, and one
consequence of that was that a lot of "operability" aids like built-in
work platforms were deleted, regardless of what it would do to ops cost.
And for a non-Shuttle example, the whole sad story of Ares I was one
instance after another of designers doggedly carrying on with a
fundamentally flawed basic design, because it could not be changed no
matter how difficult the implementation proved to be.
Henry