Shuttle Disintegrates Over Texas : All Astronauts Reported Dead

ToshiroOC

The space shuttle Columbia broke up as it descended over Texas Saturday toward a planned landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, showering debris across southeastern Texas and into Louisiana.

Police in Nacogdoches, Texas, reported "numerous pieces of debris" both inside the city limits and in Nacogdoches County.

"Information is really sketchy," Det. Greg Sowell said. "We want people to stay away, because some of it could be toxic."

Sowell said officers and city and county employees were being dispatched to stand by the debris until the arrival of FBI and NASA representatives. The debris field is believed to be very large.

Residents as far east as Shreveport, Louisiana, reported seeing and feeling an apparent explosion.

"As we seen [Columbia] coming over, we seen a lot of light and it looked like debris and stuff was coming off the shuttle," Kemp, Texas, resident Benjamin Laster told CNN.

"We seen large masses of pieces coming off from the shuttle as it was coming by," Laster said. Then, "the house kind of shook and we noticed a sonic boom ... and then we seen a big continuous puff of vapor or smoke stream come out and then we noticed a big chunk go over."

Search-and-rescue teams from the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, area were alerted and residents were urged to stay away from any possible debris from the shuttle, which may be hazardous, said NASA public affairs officer James Hartfiel

Article can be read here.

JLP

If government wouldn't pay so much for stupid things like army and war and if they used all this money for things like science and research this probably would never happen. Space shuttles wouldn't be in such a bad shape becase maintainance is very expensive and NASA can't afford it. And no, jerks like Bush still want more money for bad and useless things.

Matth

All built by the lowest bidder??

Compared to the rejected alternative to the Shuttle - "Big Dumb Booster" the Shuttle has not been a great success.

A good many of the problems are to do with the re-usable nature - damage sustained during one mission being patched up before the next.
The turn-around time, SLOW.
And then the boosters - which were originally supposed to be re-usable, parachuted to ground and refurbished, wre replaced by one-time units - and even then, were the cause of the FIRST shuttle disaster.

On the whole, a much poorer record than the Saturn IV rocket programme!


The "Big Dumb Booster" idea had just one major approach - to make use of the fact that the first stage would NOT be going to space, and could therfore be bigger and heavier, using cheaper and less exotic fuel.

And according to some TV investigations, was deliberately suppressed in favour of the high-tech flagship Shuttle

The very Shuttle now responsible for TWO space tragedies!

Frodo301

Of course with reusable craft things can go wrong, nothing made by man is perfect; but I don't think the shuttles are in quite as bad shape as JLP would seem to assume . At this point we don't know *what* caused the accident. A little less kneejerk reaction would be appeaciated. Give the inspectors time to do their job and give their theories first. At this point we should be showing our sympathy and not debating. The time for debate on the issue will come all too soon.

raid517

Is it just me, or am I the only one here to feel that this is a massive tragedy? I know I've had my 'moments' with some members of the forum. But I felt my heart being wrenched when I saw those images on TV. First and foremost I feel for the human element in this tragedy, but secondly I feel that this is a tragedy for man's exploration of space. No doubt this means that the ISS will have to be more or less abandoned. In itself this is a shame, since although funding had been slashed so much that it had become little more than a flying bus, it still represented a spirit of international co-opertation and retained the prospect that it could be expanded when a more favourable administration came to power. Also a lot of other very worthwhile projects were scrapped in order to fund the ISS. How can this program continue now?
I did read some articles expressing concern for how recent funding cuts might be putting Shuttle maintainance at risk (Bush prefers tax cuts and wars to funding space research) but I though it would be crazy if this meant that standards would slip again. I thought this was just scare mongering. Obviously it wasn't. Now what? Where do we go from here? Will this give this current administration an excuse to cut back completely on space research?

In any case the extent of this human tragedy should not be ignored. And from one human being to another, I am so sorry that this has happend.

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Frodo301

Yes, this is a massive tragedy raid. I was only trying to comment on the prior posters.

digitalwanderer

Yeah, it is. Second time for me, I still remember the first disaster. I was 19, the whole fricking world just stopped dead for a few hours that morning to freak out over it.

raid517

Early indications are that it was a massive structural failure, rather than a systems failure. Prime suspect is a piece of foam that is known to have fallen off and impacted with a wing during launch. While NASA claimed at the time that no damage had been caused, it must be recalled that small flaws during low speed impacts can at speeds greater than 15 times the speed of sound become massive flaws. When you have bits falling off your primary launch system, it seems almost crazy not to call them 'significant'. If maintainance standards are so poor as to consider structural failures to be non significant, then something is very amiss in the management and implimentation of the space shuttle program.

If I were to guess, I would say that a small flaw on the wing caused at low speed during take of damaged one of the heat resistant tiles, which came loose during high speed re-entry and caused the wing to fail. But so far that's only a guess. How it could have been stopped lord alone knows. But I guess that's what will be argued about in the months and years to follow.

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Frodo301

I was reminded of that same day too Dig.

peterosesbookie

Lets give the NASA and the rest of them time to reconstruct what has really happened today. Yes the shuttle in now gone, but the crew of the shuttle are now home. We as a nation will recover from this horrific event as we will watch this for the next few weeks to months as FEMA, and NTSB reconstruct the shuttle from the debris collected. It takes time to figure what has really happened during reentry.

Lets wait it out and not start blaming who did what.

Time will tell and time will heal the wounds and move on

my prayers

pete

raid517

No dude you get me wrong. I was just more or less repeating what I heard some experts saying on Sky News (UK verion of Fox). Of course the first concren is the human loss - that's what I said in my original post, but generally lots of people like to ask why it happend too. Structural failures don't happen without a very good reason - and so far this looks like the best candidate. This could change in weeks to come, who knows what levels of incompetance will come out in the wash. But things like this usually have a cause - and that cause is generally someone not having done their job properly. But I agree, some time should pass to allow the human tragedy to come into focus first. Afterwards though, there will no doubt be some very tough questions to answer.

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ToshiroOC

I'm aquainted with the head of JPL - I'm trying to get through to him and ask him what happened, but he either doesn't have time to return calls right now or he's busy doing stuffs related to the incident... JPL builds a lot of this stuff, not NASA, so he is definitely in the know about what is going on so far...

EDIT: His secretary just told me that he isn't at work today. So much for that...

BWX

Just another reason to bash the republican party huh? What a jerk you are JLP- you don't know what you are talking about.

You know where you can shove your political comments. This isn't the time or place for it. Good people died today for whatever reason (like you know everything!), and all you can think of is your political views?

Why don't you take a little time out and think about the human aspect of this and forget for one second about trying to put down the US government.

You make me sick.

God bless the crew of the Columbia.

tenndevil

And I would like to add their famlies, they too have lost an awful lot, our prayers are with them

BurL

First I would like to say I am a fan of Howard Stern. I was watching the tragedy on tv this morning, and was suprised by the number of assholes trying to impress Howard Stern by calling in and saying they had seen it explode or had parts of the shuttle on their property, and then they would say some dumbass remark about Sterns cast and joke about the tragedy that just happend on live tv. It just pisses me off how many classless people are out there thinking they are funny or just being a-holes. This was a very tragic day for a lot of people and I just dont see how people can make fun of or try to make fun of this. I guess what I am trying to say is show some RESPECT!!! I hope if you all hear anyone joking about these events you will set them straight. I personally will drop below there level and beat them bloody and then see if they think that is funny. Sorry for the rant but I just had to get that off of my chest.

My respect for the 7 crew members
My condolences to the families

nForcer

After Challanger all NASA shuttle launches were haulted for quite a long time. The incident did not shutdown or even slow down our ability to explore the stars - this won't either.

Granted this is the first incident since Challanger, but the 2nd oldest ship to her, it will be interesting to see how NASA handles its 3rd oldest shuttle (i forget which) to see if there are certain items that are failing sooner than believed/tested. One other item to note: we still have astro/cosmo-nauts in space, and we can't just 'leave' them up there. With Challanger, this was not the case, so the turn-around will have to be VERY quick by NASA standards. But not without EXTENSIVE investigation mind you.

We'll mourn the loss of our fallen comrads, but we will push on. They did not die in vain, and for us in America, we will always keep these events in the back of our minds when the next shuttle launch is eventually made.

I feel damn proud to be part of a country that, despite outside negative opinions, has the drive and shear will power to cope and move on in these hard times. We lost 6 of our own and an honored guest from Isreal. We will continue to do, as we have always done, to pick up the pieces, see what went wrong, fix it, and continue to pioneer the space travel industry.

"The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to earth, yet we can pray that all are safely home." - GWB

AT_curiousB

.... and prayers are with the families of the people who lost their lives in this accident.

The post mortem of the accident can wait a little while, but the families have to endure the heartbreak at this time.

Like others here I recall all too vividily how helpless I felt as an unwilling spectator, thanks to the tv pictures which were played and replayed, to the tragedy that occured in the first Shuttle disaster, and as a child can well recall the fatal fire that overcame the apollo craft on the launch pad,

I can only but feel humbled at the courage displayed by people, like those who have perished in this disaster, who know the risks but still choose to go, if only to push the envelope a little more.

To the relatives and those left behind, I cannot know your personal pain, but as someone who has also lost someone close, my thoughts are with you.

raid517

Well in case anyone is interested in a technical view of what happend - and given it isn't innapropriate to say so, it looks like it was the wing. The crew were busy 'tapping' a wing heat sensor in the cockpit (well really it was probably a computer warning, or a red light flashing somewhere) when the Shuttle exploded, which as it happens turns out to have been the same wing that got hit by a piece of foam falling from the Shuttle during take off. The bottom line is, there probably wasn't any way to stop it. Sadly they were probably dead from the moment that piece of debris hit the wing onwards. There was no way they could have been saved. The rescue craft that was destined to deal with such emergencies (particularly for the ISS) was cancled. The only other way to stop this would be to stop things falling off during take off - and with such complex systems this is very hard to do. No doubt though a specific fault like this can be traced back to a single engineer. And as sorry as I feel for the families, I sure wouldn't like to be that guy either today.

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ToshiroOC

Something to ponder upon is that despite "budget increases", when you take into account inflation, NASA's budget has gone down by 40% since the building of the shuttles...

raid517

Ok maybe some people will dsilike me for picking over this right now. But I've just seen the video again of the launch (well I played it about 30 times) it looks like some debris hit one of the evelons and may have caused some slight damage. During normal flight such damage may not have been significant, but at high speed it seems that even very small flaws can have greatly exagerated effects. (However at this stage it should be pointed out that the full extent of the damage remains unknown). What is significant is if this was the case this would explain the heat sensor readings from the wheel mount areas and the leading edge areas of the wing, since damage to the evelons (or any major flight surface) could cause the Shuttle to loose attitude during re-entry. And as all true space cadets out there know, the attitude of re-entry is crucial in detrmining the viability of any heat shield protection. A few slight degrees off either way would cause sufaces that had not been designed for this degree of stress to heat up unaturally and might even cause them to fail (as seems to have happend in this case). Of course this involves a fair degree of speculation, but it is clear from the video that something significant did hit the evelon. And while speculation is something that might best be avoided, the maths of rentry are well understood (indeed as a engineer I have had much enjoyment playing with these numbers in the past). Calculating speed, temperature attitude and materials tolerance are all fairly simple tasks - although I confess there are one or two of these variables in this specific instance I don't have direct access to. I asked my wife (who is a physicist) her view and she said it sounded highly plausable. But I thought it worth commenting as ToshiroOC said he was familiar with the head of JPL and might want to discuss this particular scenario with him. I mention it too as investigators have expressed their confusion at the odd temprature readings from the wheel mount and leading edge areas of the wing. Indeed my wife offered to run a basic simulation in her lab to test this particular scenario, but I expect that Nasa will have their own resources and experts who will be better equipped to deal with this using their own resources. And of course they have access to specific flight data that I do not. In any case all I would 'prove' is that under certain conditions (such as described above) a re-entry system can quite easily be made to fail.
Still a very sad event, and I in no way wish to detract from this. But the investigations on what happend cannot be ignored. Lessons can and no doubt will be learned. But I would not be shocked if this version of events (or something very like them) were evetually confirmed to be accurate.


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ToshiroOC

Well, what is happening right now as far as I can tell is the investigators are compiling a big list of things that could have gone wrong, and then eliminating as many as they can from the list... while the engineers who can't do much for the investigation and the major heads are going around doing PR related stuffs... I thinkt that they have the bases covered, and that they will be able to at least come up with some very plausible scenarios such as raid's (you're an engineer? what kind?)...

raid517

Well funnily enough, although it probably doesn't sound like it, I worked on the fight control systems for the Eurofighter (I didn't design them, I just helped build and install them). Basically I helped with the wings and the control surfaces etc. It doen't make what I said any less guess work, but I do know some guys who's ass got fried due to accidents it the past. (Nothing fatal that I can recall though). As I said with such complex systems it is very hard to make sure everything works smoothly. The difficulty of achieving this naturally increases with the complexity. That's why the Russians have a comparitively good record. They kept the big dumb booster idea and developed it until they had a system that was - and remains highly reliable. The Shuttle will always have a great many more variables than this, because the systems are many times more complex than can be found on any normal rocket.

Still, if nothing else it points out how far away from the stars we still are. One day we may invent a 100% fool proof way of traveling to space and beyond. Sadly though, as has been shown by recent events, that day is still some considerable way off.

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ToshiroOC

The motto of engineers around the world - "Keep it simple, stupid!" Simple but elegant is almost always the way to go with things... so you are an aerodynamics engineer? mechanical engineer? I'm extremely interested in entering the field, but I'm not sure where I want to go within engineering, and to what level (get the masters and PhD, or stick with a bachelors, etc..)

raid517

No I'm a mechanical engineer. I just got lucky and got a chance to work on some pretty advanced stuff. If I had my time again I'd go more with the CAD and design side of things as a lot of what I do is very hands on - and there's more money in engineering design than in my lowly field. Ironic really as I probably know more about computers now than some of the kids who walk about my workplace and call themselves my bosses. But oh well, the money's good and I can't afford to go back to school to retrain.
Yeah that's what I'd say stick with the more accedemic side of things rather than the 'hands on', pretty soon you'll be lording it over guys with 10 times your experience levels and 50 times as much common sense... Mmm... Sorry that ain't you, I'm just remembering things at work. Well ho hum, there's worse things in life to do I guess. And as I said the money is good. Who knows if you get lucky, you might even end up working on the Space Shuttle... But from your perspective, in light of recent events you have to wonder if this would be a good thing or not.

Q