Down.

They had a piece of "insulating foam" come off the external tank during liftoff. I'm wondering if that "during liftoff" means 3 seconds after liftoff, or 30 seconds.

There's a rather significant speed difference between the two.

Man. These guys hate to lose funding, I know. And false alarms are bad PR. But when it gets bad, it really gets bad.

What does everyone else think?

[ February 01, 2003, 16:06: Message edited by: ejsmith ]

Since it was about to land, I doubt the 3 or 30 seconds after lift-off makes any difference.

Are there any confirmed reports yet? All I can find are reports of debris and lost contact.

Man,all channels are showing the same thing, "avoid debrisses".I wonder how it fell...

And to think, there was so much security around the hotel they were staying in, for Gods sake, there were snipers on top of the hotel in case terrorists came! Then this happens.

It seems everyone heard this at the same time.

All I heard that it was over Texas, they lost contact and have pictures of debris coming from the sky.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=514&ncid=514&e=1&u=/ap/20030201/ap_on_sc/space_shuttle_42

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/space/20030201/sc_space/columbia_destroyed_during_re_entry__crew_lost&e=1

When the insulating foam was lost doesn't matter - the fact that it wsn't there to do its job matters A LOT.

If only the average American understood relative risk, let alone stopped babbling long enough to actually apply it. In that case, this disaster would have the right outcome: more funding, not less.

[ February 01, 2003, 20:31: Message edited by: Rallymama ]

200,000 feet up at mach 18, not the greatest time to disintegrate into fumes and flame.
Debris scattered over 5 (I think) states.
Next Press briefing at 3 o'clock on CNN, so much for me doing my homework.
I wonder if they can get a better view than the miniscule shot they keep showing, where Columbia looks about as big as a large grain of rice....I hope so

A harsh and sad reminder of how truly dangerous space travel is... those poor people.

I've been a long time follower of the space program, and aviation and space flight in general. There are a few things I've seen here that are incorrect.

The "insulation" that came off was about 70-odd seconds into the launch. A former astronaut was talking about it on National Public Radio this morning. He has been involved with studying the video of the launch from two weeks ago and he is not sure if it was insulation from the external fuel tank (which never makes it to orbit - it separates after the fuel is used up), or if it may have been ice buildup on the ET that eventually fell off. He also stated that this is normal. The insulation on the tank is used to keep the liquid oxygen cool before launch, so that it doesn't all "boil off"...after launch, it's not really needed, and is very fragile anyway. The outside of the tank gets very cold and Florida is a very humid state. The moisture in the air condenses on the cold surface and freezes, like the condensation on a cold glass of beer or soda. If you can find film/video of the Apollo launches, there are several that show close-ups of the Saturn V liftoff were you can see chunks of ice falling off the vehicle. Again, let me state that this is normal, and always has been.

Anyway, the insulation or ice struck the left wing. There is a possibility that this may have damaged some of the heat-resistant tiles used to protect the shuttle during re-entry. Again, this is a fairly normal occurrence. Nearly every shuttle flight loses tiles at launch or during re-entry, usually just a few out of over 33,000, with no serious effects. In this case, there may have been more damage than originally thought. There was no way to check during this flight because there was no robot arm installed on this flight, since no satellites were being launched. The arm is usually used to inspect the shuttle after it reaches orbit, using a camera attached to it. In this case more tiles than normal could have been damaged, possible causing what is referred to as a zipper effect, or domino effect, causing even more to come off during re-entry.

All reports I've seen or heard have stated the shuttle was at 200,000 feet and traveling at Mach 12, not 18 as was mentioned elsewhere, not that there's much difference. A recent report said that the pilots reported a temperature rise in the left wing, and more specifically, a pressure rise in the landing gear of the left wing. This would be consistent with losing tiles, causing the temperature to rise. Higher temps would cause the air in the tires to expand, possibly bursting the tires explosively, damaging the wing. When Mission Control asked for confirmation of the pressure and/or temp rise, there were a few words spoken, then loss of signal. Note that this was in the left wing, where the "insulation" or ice apparently struck during liftoff.

I am not an expert, but this has been my thoughts on what may have happened. It is strictly opinion and not a definitive answer.

[ February 01, 2003, 21:17: Message edited by: MaxxQ64 ]

I heard the shuttle was travelling at 12,000 mph. I am not sure, but doesn't 'mach' mean the speed of sound? If i am right then it would have been mach 18 not 12.

But who cares? the fact is the damn thing blew up. Damn shame really. But then it is a risky job, and as a wise man once said: S**t happens.
And i thought the presidents speech was actually rather good. Very appropriate.

As long as it doesn't get referred to as 1/02.

:cry: This is awful.

But if it were 7 RUSSIAN Astronaughts, no one would care.

That would be Cosmonauts, and what makes you think nobody would care if they died? I sure would.

I think was Zlayer meant was, the Russian government would have denied they ever existed.

But Z, you realize all that's changed now, right?

The Bay of Pigs is over.

You can order a Russian chick online, now, too.

A watchdog group questioned whether the budget cuts in NASA affected the safety in the space program just several days ago. And the shuttle was the oldest in the fleet.
I know it was probably a formality, but the whole administration, Chenney, Rumsfeld, Powell, etc was put on alert. Again, prob just a formality.

Boom! :)

Shell, seeing how you're new, I presume you don't know much about the board. Normally I wouldn't hold this against you, but this shows a total disrespect for lost lives. Perhaps you should invest a point or two in the feats common sense and tact. :rolleyes:

Edit: Okay, so you're actually Mortensen, and familiar with the board. My point still stands though.

[ February 02, 2003, 12:06: Message edited by: Faragon ]

Hey they all knew it could happen. Did anyone show respect for that dog they sent up into space? I'm fed up of having people get more rights than animals :mad:

When I first heard the report, I initially thought it was one of those "On this day in history" things going back 17 years. The more I listened, the more I came to understand that was not the case. Another one had exploded. Horrible shame.

Ok, i just saw this on CNN and it really pissed me off. They were showing a site where one of the pieces had fallen. There were two young women there, with cameras, taking pictures. There were giggling like they were tourists on vacation and taking a picture of some major historical marker. I'm sorry but this is absolutely ludicrous. How much more disrespectful can you get? Another major tradgedy falls on this country and we have to rush out to see the pieces. Good God! Why?
I didn't know any of the astronaughts, but I cried when I heard the news. My thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of those 7 heros.

[ February 02, 2003, 12:56: Message edited by: Elios ]

When humanity wants to go forward it has to make sacrifices, **** happens..

I didn't see the things on telly that Elios told about, and I'm glad I didn't. I think I wouldn't have any telly left here.
On the 1st of Februari, 50 years ago, our country was flooded for a big part. But you see no pictures of the many dead people. It was immoral. If people today are gonna search out the catasrofies by themselves, giggling while thay do, then what will I see on telly in the next 50 years?
And what 'funny' jokes will be made?

Sorry for being off-topic. :heh:

[ February 02, 2003, 13:52: Message edited by: Master of Nuhn ]

Shell, I agree with you, but if you want animals to get more rights, taking away respect from humans isn't going to be the way.

Eilos, you say this is a major tragedy, i hardly think it can be classed as that, and as for crying about it. Well i don't believe you.

I think Z-Layrex was actually making the point that because they are American everyone has to hype up the situation. If it was Russians, it would not even make the headlines.

It is a shame that this has happened but not really worth thinking about too much. These people died doing what they know to be a dangerous job, same principles as apply to the army. But i DO have a lot of respect for their work. (unlike the army)

I think Z-Layrex was actually making the point that because they are American everyone has to hype up the situation. If it was Russians, it would not even make the headlines.
I call B.S. Just turned on CNN and they were talking about -- the 7 Canadians in B.C. that lost their lives in an avalanche.

I distinctly remember when the Kursk was lost noone sat around saying : "well, they knew it was dangerous." They certainly didn't say, "Boom!" The loss of the Kursk was all over the news in the U.S. and the loss of a shuttle would be as well.

[ February 02, 2003, 18:00: Message edited by: Laches ]

The reality of the situation is that CNN is based here, in the States.

So is MSNBC. So is ABC, ESPN, and a few others which I don't remember the acronym for.

It's closer to home. I don't get the BBC on my TV. But I do get CNN and MSNBC.

If I was watching BBC, I'd be expecting Britt stuff. If I was watching FBC (whatever), I'd be expecting French stuff. MBC, Mongolian stuff. RBC, Russian stuff. SBC, Slovakian stuff.

Anyways, those airframes are getting old. Really old. Upwards of 20 years old.

Time for a new Shuttle.

It wasn't just an American mission, there was an Israeli and Indian astronaut on the ship as well. The other thing to keep in mind is, the NASA space program is not about just advancing American interests in space, it's advancing the interests of humanity as a whole.

Although it is a terrible loss and tragedy, I hope it doesn't set back the space program too much. The truth is, space travel is an exacting science, desptie how "routine" shuttle launches seem nowadays. The re-entry trajectory needs to be perfect every time! Too steep and your craft burns up on re-entry, too shallow and you bounce off the atmosphere.

I certainly feel for the familites of those lost...But their's was a dangerous profession, each astronaut knows the risks each time they go up. And if given the chance to go or not into space, knowing the risks involved, I doubt any of them would have made a choice not to go.

To be honest here, I see some spokesperson for NASA has said "may have knocked off some tiles".

And, when I read about the foam nailing the wing, my instinctive reaction was that they would have done an hour-long space walk, and visually inspected the wing as best they could, and done a cursory inspection of the rest of the craft.

Man.

They go out with the equipment every single time. They go up with all the tools they need, and the SCPU's and the whole works for anything "extra" that they might just be handed. I don't really know, but as psycho as they let those engineers get, I bet they have a contingency plan for losing the teflon tiles. There's probably one or two spares they take with them.

And yeah, everytime they exit the craft, they take some radiation and a greater risk of losing someone to debris.

But, from what it sounds like, it wasn't quite a "routine" glitch for the foam to hit the boat. Hell, even the ice doesn't make the headlines, and the foam was registered on the news the day after it went up.

Even if it was just a bad call, I'm wondering why they didn't check out the boat.

Wouldn't this better fit AoDA?

EJ...there was no way for them to go out and inspect. They haven't carried MMU's (Manned Maneuvering Units - basically jet backpacks) since before Challenger was lost, and there are no handholds on the outside of the shuttle (they wouldn't be practical as they would just burn up on re-entry and need to be replaced). Most EVA's you see them doing are usually confined to the payload bay area, and anywhere the robot arm can reach....the wings and underside of the vehicle are not accessible, even with the arm. Also, on the first three missions, there was a plan to repair tiles in case of damage. It was just an epoxy resin that would ablate, or burn off, during re-entry. They don't carry it anymore, for what reason, I don't know. As for carrying replacement tiles, that wouldn't be practical, since no two tiles are exactly the same. They would have to carry an entire set just to be sure they had the ones that needed replacing, and that's over 30,000 of them.

As for the age of the shuttle fleet, each shuttle was designed to last for 100 launches, and this was Columbia's 28th flight - not even middle aged yet. Also, since Columbia was the first shuttle built, it was overengineered and actually much stronger than the other 4 (now 3). This also meant it was heavier than the others, so was the only shuttle in the fleet not able to reach the ISS. Also keep in mind, Columbia just came off a 17 month overhaul and upgrade, using 1,000,000 man-hours of labor.

As for the foam coming off and making headlines this time when they don't usually do that, the only thing I can think of is that normally pieces falling off are not as visible as this one was. They are usually only a few inches in size, but this piece has been described as "as big as a door".

If there is one thing I hate, its being called a liar. Sir Dragon, where the hell do you get off doing so? You, don't believe I cried hearing aobut this? Are you some shallow person that you think it is impossible for someone to be emotional over an event were lives were lost because you aren't? You don't know me, you have no idea what kind of a person I am except from reading what I post here. How dare you make an an accusation of me such as that.
I consider any event that takes place were lives are lost to be a major tradgedy. Yes, its true they knew the risks getting into it. But that still doesn't make it any less of a terrible event.

Wow.

Just wow.

I was under the impression they carried a MMU (hell, I called it a Self Contained Propulsion Unit; shows you how much I know) every time. I know you have to cut back on weight, so you can do other things, but it gives me the willies just thinking about not having the ability for someone to leave the shuttle. I've seen them launching the satellites with them, so I know they still take them up according to the mission. And the neat satellite missions are still classified to this day, so you never really know what their whole manifest is. With an Israeli onboard, I'm guessing they didn't take any of the fun stuff.

It's like Apollo 9 (?), where they had just the command module. And if that little jewel didn't work, or the batteries started popping, there'd have been some dead astronauts.

This one time, I'm wondering if it (the MMU) would have come in handy. If we've just been getting pretty lucky all this time.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not the guy that sits down here and says crap like "you were wrong". I don't know the pressures everyone was facing. I know it's different when you're the one on the scene, making the call.

Hell, half the mission control guys might have been operating on 4 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours for all I know. I do know funding is a pain. Micromanagers yelling about money better spent on affirmative action and kickbacks and whatnot.

All I'm saying here is how do we (in reference to NASA and the United States; it's not like I work for NASA here) prevent something like this from happening again?

Would a visual inspection have even turned up anything if there was something amiss? Can you do internal damage that isn't externally visable?

If there were tiles missing, what's the option? Get another shuttle up there? How dangerous would it be to have to just throw the whole mission together within 3 days like that? Is there another External Tank ready to go within that time frame? What about the SRB turnaround time?

Man. This is the kind of psychosis I'm talking about. When the Apollos were going up, and even when the shuttles were first launching, they had people who's jobs were just comming up with THE most retarded possibilities, then they had other teams comming up with solutions from those retarded possibilities. The waste tube backing up and stuff.

The resin sounds like a good engineer's plan. But if it was 5 or 6 tiles, you'd have to have another answer.

Well EJ....the biggest reason they don't do what they should is cost. It costs money to send up shuttles on a more frequent schedule, and it's not a simple matter to just fuel up the ET and mosey on out to the pad. At best, a shuttle can be readied for a flight in about two months, and once it gets to the pad, it takes a couple days to go through all the system checks, fueling, and such. I have no doubt that if an emergency cropped up with a magnitude of the Apollo 13 mission, that they could accelerate the prep time somewhat, but it would still take at least a month to get another shuttle up there.

Most of the costs of the shuttle program - and the space program in general - is in manpower. Sure, the launch vehicles have a high cost in and of themselves, but it's the day-to-day workings of the ground crews, mission-control people, contractors, janitors, security people, and whatnot that eats up most of the budget. It's the same with military funding...most of the $$ goes for paying the soldiers, giving them and their families medical care, providing housing, food, etc. Even while I was in the military, we were always told that the government would rather lose equipment than people, because equipment is easy and cheap to replace, people aren't. It's the same way with the space program.

The short-sightedness of the government budget people is what has brought on a lot of this. By cutting NASA's budget constantly, they forced them to cut back on better systems, some safety features (biggest example - using solid rocket boosters for liftoff...once they're lit, you can't shut them off, unlike the liquid-fueled main engines), building a larger fleet, which would allow more frequent flights and allow a backup that might be needed for emergencies, and so on. The original plans for the shuttle were to have a totally reuseable system, with the shuttle riding piggyback on a larger launch vehicle (similar to the modified 747 used to transport the orbiter from California landings back to Florida), but it was deemed too expensive, and so sacrifices were made. In the past ten years, there have been many programs started that would eventually replace the shuttle system, but nearly all have been abandoned due to costs - NASA just doesn't have the funding to continue with projects such as the ISS, AND develop new launch systems, so they have to rely on older systems and modify existing equipment, to do things it was never intended to do. Even the crawler/transporter used to ferry the shuttle to the pad (originally built to carry the Apollo Saturn V vehicles to the pad) wasn't intended to last more than a few hundred hours of operation...it's at several thousand hours now, and to be honest, even if NASA had the money to replace it, I don't think they would, because in this case, it was well-designed, and well worth the money spent on it to begin with.

A visual inspection MIGHT have turned up some missing tiles, but if they weren't missing, but simply loose, or cracked, they might never have noticed. It would also take several hours to inspect them, and even then you wouldn't get a good look at them. It takes several people a couple weeks to check them out on the ground...imagine one or two people, in EVA suits and microgravity, trying to check them all out.

Again, it all comes down to the compromises required to perform a mission on a very limited budget. I'm not saying that if NASA had an unlimited budget, that things like this WOULDN'T happen, but they would happen less frequently. Actually, when you think about it, NASA's safety record is pretty good. We've sent over 400 people into space since the early sixties, and lost only 17 people (and 3 of those were on the ground, with no intention of a launch for another couple weeks), 115 shuttle launches, 6 Mercury flights, 12 Gemini flights, 10 Apollo flights, 3 Skylab missions, and the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project. That's really not a bad record for such a low budget agency to have. Think how much better it would be if they had the money to implement certain safety features.

For example, when I was in the Air Force, I worked on F-111's. These were the only aircraft the military had in active duty with an escape capsule, rather than ejection seats. The entire cockpit would seperate and land on a parachute. Now if NASA had the $$, they could have implemented a similar system for the shuttle, and 14 astronauts might still be alive today. Or at least they would have stood a better chance...

True, they may have had some options. But going at the speed they were going? I was listening to a press conference today that was with a NASA representative (I think) and a similar question came up. He pointed out that anything being ejected from that speed would have been shredded instantly.

Not if it was designed from the start to be able to withstand the forces involved. After all, the shuttle as a whole survives those speeds and higher with no problems (except in this case, obviously). Again, it goes back to all the design compromises made at the beginning of the shuttle program - the original designs had an ejectable crew capsule, but it was deemed too costly and not necessary.

Of course, that spokesman is correct in his assessment, but only for the shuttle as it exists now. There's no way that an ejectable crew capsule can be retrofitted onto current vehicles, but any new programs that make it to production can - and dare I say it? - WILL have a crew capsule that can survive separation at high speeds and altitudes. But only if the budget allows for it.

The shuttle program is the only manned program in the history of either the American or Soviet/Russian space programs that has no escape system for it's crews (well, actually there is one, but the shuttle has to be at 20,000 feet or lower, traveling under Mach 1 and in a normal flight attitude - no help for those seven souls lost yesterday). Mercury and Apollo had the Launch Escape System (the latticework tower and rocket motors above the capsule) and the Gemini program had ejection seats. In the case of Columbia, it wouldn't have helped, since the accident occurred during re-entry, but it may have helped the Challenger crew.

On that note, I'd like to end here with a poem that might help people to understand why we (meaning mankind) do things like go into space. This poem and the words before it was copied and pasted from another message board I frequent.

The poem, "High Flight," was written by John Gillespie Magee, a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force whose life ended in the Second World War. It's such a trifle compared to the heavy sadness we all feel, but I think it captures the reason why some of us -- and maybe all of us -- dream of "slipping the surly bonds of Earth," even if it means risking the ultimate price. The poet and Columbia's brave crew may have met the same end, but it's comforting to know that they had much, much more in common.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds,--and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless falls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor e'er eagle flew--
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Hmmmm.

Man.

Sounds like not a whole lot that could have been done. Even if they'd seen something was wrong.

How much oxygen and water do they take up with them? The usual missions last, what, 14 days?

Do they take a full month's worth of consumables?

So, you'd have had, at the most, maybe 2 weeks to come up with something?

Beautiful and fitting poem.
The news tonight was like, "We take you live, to where roving reporter, Max Studreporter is with John Redneck who has found what may be the largest piece of the shuttle Columbia."
WTF, so you find a piece you're a celebrety or something? The guy was talking about how he found it this morning in his horse pasture. He said he didn't think anything of it yesterday. He thought it was a horse toy and the horses were kicking it around and playing with it overnight. Another was acting like he was the ***t for finding it. I know, I know, its just human nature. But, arrrgggghhhhh!

[ February 03, 2003, 08:15: Message edited by: Elios ]

EJ....yeah, their hands were pretty much tied on what they could do. If something like this had happened before, mission control could have advised Columbia to abort the mission. During launch, there ARE plans to abort, depending on the circumstances. Assuming that they knew the insulation from the ET would have caused the kind of damage it MAY have done, they would just ride out the flight until the SRB's burned out and separated, then they could have shut down the main engines, separated from the ET and glided in to a landing at one of the emergency landing fields in Spain or Africa...that's what they're there for. However, since this was a first time occurence, they had no idea it was as serious as it turned out to be.

I believe every shuttle mission takes up a full load of 30 days supplies, just in case. You're right in that most missions only last about two weeks, but there have been several missions that had to be extended, for either weather problems on the ground, or problems occurring with whatever they are doing up there, such as satellite repairs taking longer than expected, or problems with one or more of the four main computers, or for other reasons. Unfortunately, I don't think it would be long enough to get another shuttle ready to go get them.

Elios....I agree. I've heard of this poem since I was about eight or nine (I'm 38 now). One of our local TV stations would play a video after the National Anthem when they would sign off at 2 or 3 in the morning. The video featured a voiceover of someone reciting it, while footage of U.S. Air Force T-38 Talon jet trainers were flying through "the long, delerious, burning blue". I wish they still did that, so I could videotape it.

About 15 years ago, maybe longer, Berke Breathed did a Bloom County Sunday comic strip with the poem being written over various panels of Opus the penguin attempting to fly. I cut it out and framed it and it hangs on the wall near my computer. The humor is lost right now, but the message is still the same...we will always try to strive for the impossible.

I've seen other news reports that make me really cringe at the ignorance of some people. CNN had a news ticker going that said the shuttle was flying "18 times the speed of light". Another report stated that the shuttle was at 200,000 miles altitude (it was actually 200,000 FEET - for reference, the moon is about 240,000 MILES from Earth), and another placed it at 200 feet. Another reporter was talking to some other official and deliberately trying to get the guy to say it was a terrorist act.

To paraphrase Don Henley of the Eagles:

"Well, I could have been an actor
But I wound up here
I just have to look good
I don't have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
We need dirty laundry

See the bubbleheaded bleachblonde
Comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the shuttle crash
With a gleam in her eye
It's int'resting when people die
Give us dirty laundry"

[ February 03, 2003, 08:44: Message edited by: MaxxQ64 ]

I think Z-Layrex was actually making the point that because they are American everyone has to hype up the situation. If it was Russians, it would not even make the headlines.Spot on.

Some people make me sick. I saw a picture yesterday, and I swear, it looked so computer generated. We have all seen the footage where you can't tell what it is, and it just splits apart, well this one had a huge explosion, and shrapnel flying off, with a good three millimeters of white bordering around all of that fake looking stuff! This is a time of mourning, not some jerks claim to fame.

Funny, I was under the impression they were all Amercans. Well there you go, they're trying to take over again :)

The NASA has faced the problem of serious underfunding for a decade ... it's not that surprising something like that happened. Silly tragedy.
I wonder what the US will do to adress that problem since money is becoming shorter in face of the growing defence spending. Most likely the republicans find a solution in buying more space based defence applications :evil: eventually that was the starting foundment and testing ground of commercial use of US space transport missiles (after a few years of spectacular failures with the losses of costly military satellites over the 90s they eventually matured ... more or less) ....

... and they accuse the europeans of subventioning the Ariane .... :shake: we just pay openly and do not mask it as defence spending.

My wife's father worked for NASA doing technical drawings. I forgot the one craft he worked on, but it was the one that was suppose to replace the shuttle. I'll look into that.
I think if we commercialized the space program, we could see a vast improvement. I say could, industry is not always the best. But competition does wonders sometimes.

Elios....could it have been one of these? This is a web site (see link at bottom) that has several proposed shuttle replacements, most of which have been cancelled. Of note is the Rotary Rocket Roton, which was actually a commercially funded program, with no government involvement at all. There were some excellent videos of some test footage of the Roton, but with the Rotary Rocket website gone, so are the videos. I used to have them on my old comp, but the hardrive decided to imitate a cat at a scratching post, so they're long gone. Suffice it to say, it DOES work as far as the rotor blades go, with several flyby passes being shown in the video. Unfortunately, either lack of funding or government regulation got in the way of the continuation of the project. It was definitely one of the more unusual designs, but had passed all flight tests up until the demise of the program. BTW, Tom Clancy (author of The Hunt For Red October, The Sum of All Fears, etc) was one of the major investors in the company.

From the link below, click on the links on the left hand side and you will get a one-page summary of each proposal/program, with links to the actual program sites at the bottom of each page.

http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/rlvs/x37_sum.shtml

[ February 04, 2003, 22:17: Message edited by: MaxxQ64 ]

Three and one-half tons isn't a whole lot. I guess you could get supplies out to the Space Station. And maybe figure out a way to bring back samples or laboratory animals. But, I guess it could be scaled up to the limit of the materials.

P. Roto Type

Nifty beyond anything I've even imagined!

Yeah....the main purpose was to ferry people and supplies....the heavy-lift capabilities were to be carried out by the next-gen unmanned boosters, i.e. Delta IV, and others.

The videos of the Roton wer pretty cool to watch and listen to. The rotors were spun up using rocket motors mounted at the tips of the rotors and fed (after the initial pump needed for startup) through the centrifugal force of the rotating blades. I believe the highest they ever got was about 500 feet, not because they couldn't go higher, but because they were doing flight testing in very small increments. Pretty amazing watching it basically slip sideways, stop, then go off 90 degrees from that, then gain altitude...even more fun to watch than a helicopter.

It includes nine minutes before and four minutes after re-entry, and ends about 11 minutes before Mission Control lost the signal from the doomed orbiter.

Shuttle crews usually record their entire return flight to landing, but "we believe the rest of the tape was destroyed during the mishap," Altman said.Off CNN.

You have to be kidding me. And I really do mean it. You have to be kidding me.

I'm not really arguing. I'm just saying a flat no.

Like when someone asks if they can play Neverwinter Nights on a Dell Inspiron 3200, that has 144meg of SDRam and a Pentium II 266mhz processor.

No.

Now, if you wanted to say, "We're examining the last part of the tape, and will be making a statement concerning [the tape section that has been omitted from the released footage] when we have fully analyzed and are prepared to submit a detailed report concerning the destroyed Space Shuttle and the flight recorder information."

Then that would be cool. I'd wait for it. Even if it took 6 months. I might ask about it every couple of weeks or so, just as a passing reference.

"How's that tape comming along?"

"Pretty good. We're making noticable progress on it."

"Cool."

7 people died. Big deal. People die every day. Americans always go over the top about this kind of stuff. :flaming:

You know, sometimes it's better to say nothing when you have nothing to say. Especially in cases such as this one. If you have no respect for the people who died or for space exploration in general, that's fine. But one lame joke of yours at the start of this post was contribution enough. We have already heard the same opinion from others in this thread, so there really isn't any more need for reiteration.

7 people died. Big deal. People die every day. Americans always go over the top about this kind of stuff
Actually Americans, including myself, don't make a "big deal" out of this tragedy. Space exploration is inheritly dangerous and the loss of explorers is expected - to a degree.

We expect bad things to happen. It is the nature of life.

At least they died for a noble cause. They were not killed murder-bombers in Palenstein. They were not killed by Saddam's thugs. They died for knowledge and the liberty of free thought.

They are equal, in most American's minds, of the soldiers who died at the beaches of Normandy, in the deserts of Afganistan, the forests of Yugoslavia, ad infinitum...

Please remember this: Americans despise evil. This is why we are so actively involved in the world. The world appears chaotic and vile and we can see ourselves at its savour.

As the saying goes in United States: "We must be strong for the world".

(End Nationalistic-Rant) :)

People die every day. True. More people died on that day from cancer and various other diseases. True. Does that mean that the 7 people who died on the shuttle deserve our disrespect? Not a chance. Any disaster deserves a brief moment ogf respect, not ignorant jokes, or trying to make this an issue of "American arrogance." Last I heard, since the Challenger, there have been over 180 missions. Not my math tells me that 1/180 is less than 1%. We take bigger risks going to the store. This horrible incident shows that although the American Space Program is a success (in the humanistic sense of the word -- people achieving the near impossible) but it is not a success that comes at no price whatsoever. While I'm not going to spend days mourning, I have no problem taking a moment to show some respect for the brave explorers who died -- the same way I briefly mourned the lives of the sailors killed on the Kursk, or my periodic thoughts on the miserably poor around the world. The callousness displayed by some people on this board is stunning. To use modern terminology, "dissing" the dead does not make you cool, funny, or hip. It makes you a small minded piece of crap.

Ok, hang on here for a second.

When the little girl from Colorado makes the headlines, I'm the guy sitting there, thinking about all the other ones in New York and Manila and Prague and Moscow and Peking; all the other ones that go missing, and don't make the headlines.

I have my little fantasy world. And I like my little fantasy world. It's on the outskirts of Kuldahar, and Nym got cut down with a Lightsaber before he got near the vault. There's sexy elven girls in thong bikinis, and nyphomatic dwarven chicks with beards.

But my little fantasy world isn't the real world. If it was, there wouldn't be little girls missing.

If you look ALL back through, ALL of my posts, I wasn't talking about the 7 dead astronauts.

I was talking about preventing any more astronauts from being killed in the future. It irks me that NASA is reporting that section of the tape is "destroyed". Physically, it just doesn't work like that. Saying that the data on it is scrambled and there are sections which are unrecoverable is one thing; but that's not what NASA is saying. NASA is saying "We managed to recover the middle section of the recorder."

And it doesn't work like a hard disk or cdrom. The flight recorder is a solid state box of NVram. It's a permanent write, just like all our jets. Except the box has been engineered to withstand a complete re-entry and 50g impact. It's got all the bells and whistles on it.

Also, I didn't mention, but I think I will now.
MAXX had a point, and I was trying to figure it out too.

So was one of the NASA engineer spokesmen. He said, the day after the shuttle went down, that there was nothing they could have done about it. In the past, NASA had used ground based "cameras" to look at the shuttle. And they just couldn't have gotten the necessary resolution to check the shuttle like that. The ground based cameras just couldn't resolve it down to the 2cm level.

The Hubble can't focus that close. So that leaves all the "spy" satellites. They'd have to have used one of the "spy" satellites to inspect the shuttle. And because the resolution is SO crazy on those, the pictures would be top-top-top secret. Even if there was a problem; the engineers would not have been allowed to see the damage. Not the picures, unless they were washed through a computer to "downgrade" the resolution to the bare minimum necessary. And even then, NASA would have to have picked a single engineer to look at the photos, and say "Yep. That's bad. Really bad.". And that's what those 1000 other engineers would have to go on.

And to top it all off, about the ONLY thing they could have done would have been a spacewalk. They'd have to have lauched a missile, with either the ablative epoxy, or a "near-fit" tile with the epoxy. And one of the astronauts would be in a space suit, outside the boat. Tied with pieces of cloth and hoses and whatever else they could have scrouged up around the thing. He (she?) would have been dangling out there, getting the supplies from the missile, and repairing the underside of the boat.

It would have been wicked kind of dangerous. And awesome kind of impressive if they had managed to pull it all off, and land the shuttle with all 7 alive.

And when it all goes back; when you draw all the lines back to the original problem.

Bad public relations. Means not as much cash. If they (NASA) had gone nutz, and had operated on the presumption that there was a problem of that magnitude, and they were wrong about it, it would have been absolutely terrible PR.

*whew*

EJ, I've read you posts. I was not referring to you when I mentioned callousness. All I know is that 7 people are dead. I don't know if it could have been avoided -- I don't know enough. What I do know is that to denigrate the astronauts because they are American, or for any other reason (which some others have done here), shows a very sick and twisted mind, one in which the owner can hold no pride whatsoever.