Columbia Was Beyond Any Help, Officials Say
By KENNETH CHANG
OUSTON, Feb. 3 — Even if flight controllers had known for certain that protective heat tiles on the underside of the space shuttle had sustained
severe damage at launching, little or nothing could have been done to address the problem, NASA officials say.
Virtually since the hour Columbia went down, the space agency has been peppered with possible options for repairing the damage or getting the crew
down safely. But in each case, officials here and at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida say, the proposed solution would not have worked.
The simplest would have been to abort the mission the moment the damage was discovered. In case of an engine malfunction or other serious problem at
launching, a space shuttle can jettison its solid rocket boosters and the external fuel tank, shut down its own engines and glide back down, either returning
to the Kennedy Space Center or an emergency landing site in Spain or Morocco.
But no one even knew that a piece of insulation from the external tank had hit the orbiter until a frame-by-frame review of videotape of the launching was
undertaken the next day. By then, Columbia was already in orbit, and re-entry would have posed the same danger that it did 16 days later.
Four other possibilities have been discussed at briefings or in interviews since the loss of Columbia, and rejected one by one by NASA officials.
First, repairing the damaged tiles. The crew had no tools for such a repair. At a news conference on Sunday, Ron D. Dittemore, the shuttle program
manager, said that early in the shuttle program, NASA considered developing a tile repair kit, but that "we just didn't believe it was feasible at the time." He
added that a crew member climbing along the underside of the shuttle could cause even more damage to the tiles.
Another idea, widely circulated on the Internet in the last few days, was that the shuttle could have docked with the International Space Station once the
damage was discovered. But without the external fuel tank, dropped as usual after launching, Columbia had no fuel for its main engines and thus no way it
could propel itself to the station, which circles the earth on a different orbit at a higher altitude.
"We have nowhere near the fuel needed to get there," said Bruce Buckingham, a spokesman at the Kennedy Space Center.
Another shuttle, Atlantis, was scheduled for launching on March 1 to carry supplies and a new crew to the space station, and it is possible to imagine a
Hollywood-type series of events in which NASA rushed Atlantis to the launching pad, sent it up with a minimal crew of two, had it rendezvous with
Columbia in space and brought everyone down safely.
But Atlantis is still in its hangar, and to rush it to launching would have required NASA to circumvent most of its safety measures. "It takes about three
weeks, at our best effort, to prepare the shuttle for launch once we're at the pad," Mr. Buckingham said, "and we're not even at the pad." Further,
Columbia had enough oxygen, supplies and fuel (for its thrusters only) to remain in orbit for only five more days, said Patrick Ryan, a spokesman at the
Johnson Space Center here.
Finally, there is the notion that Columbia's re-entry might have been altered in some way to protect its damaged area. But Mr. Dittemore said the shuttle's
descent path was already designed to keep temperatures as low as possible. "Because I'm reusing this vehicle over and over again, so I'm trying to send it
through an environment that minimizes the wear and tear on the structure and the tile," he said at his news conference on Sunday.
Today he added that he did not know of a way for the shuttle to re-enter so that most of the heat would be absorbed by tiles that were not damaged, on its
right wing. "I'm not aware of any other scenarios, any other techniques, that would have allowed me to favor one wing over the other," he said.
Even if that had been possible, it would probably have damaged the shuttle beyond repair and made it impossible to land, requiring the crew to parachute
out at high speed and at high altitude. He said there was no way managers could have gotten information about the damaged tiles that would have
warranted so drastic a move.
Gene Kranz, the flight director who orchestrated the rescue of astronauts aboard the crippled Apollo 13 in 1970, said that from what he knew about the
suspected tile damage, there was probably nothing that could have been done to save the flight. "The options," he said in a telephone interview, "were just
nonexistent." |
