Does Is it true that the Houston mission controllers knew about Columbia Space Shuttle damaged heat shield but did not tell the astronaut about it?

[Pawelk198604]

Does Is it true that the Houston mission controllers knew about Columbia Space Shuttle damaged heat shield but did not tell the astronaut about it?  Is it true that the Houston mission controllers knew about Columbia Space Shuttle damaged heat shield but did not tell the astronaut about it? And if it's true then why? 
 

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20180912215021AA362DZ

[mikegarrison]

[snip]

A) English is obviously not his first language. Cut him some slack.

B) They didn't "know" for sure there was damage. But they did know for sure that there had been an impact, and they suspected damage. But they decided that since they couldn't do anything about it in any case, there was no point to telling the astronauts.

Edited September 16, 2018 by Vanamonde

[Geonovast]

I read this a few days ago, pretty interesting.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/

Since getting back into KSP and doing almost exclusively shuttles, I've been watching a lot of shuttle related videos on youtube while playing KSP.  The biggest revelation was that Columbia did not go to the ISS on its final mission.  Somehow, for the last 15 tears, I though they did and nothing ever corrected me until now.  Weird.

[StrandedonEarth]

2 hours ago, Pawelk198604 said:

Is it true that the Houston mission controllers knew about Columbia Space Shuttle damaged heat shield but did not tell the astronaut about it?

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

B) They didn't "know" for sure there was damage. But they did know for sure that there had been an impact, and they suspected damage. But they decided that since they couldn't do anything about it in any case, there was no point to telling the astronauts.

They (management) didn't even want to try to get some pics

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/13/us/shuttle-team-sought-view-from-satellite-nasa-official-says.html

[mikegarrison]

10 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

They (management) didn't even want to try to get some pics

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/13/us/shuttle-team-sought-view-from-satellite-nasa-official-says.html

Maybe that toothache you have will just go away if you skip the dentist and pretend it isn't there.

[YNM]

[snip]

In any case, the US government made something called CAIB - Columbia Accident Investigation Board - and here is their final report on the matter*. Part 1 describes how the event unfolded, and Part 2 tries to scrutinize what allowed these errors to occur, and ultimately lead to a huge disaster.

 

EDIT : I think the answer to OP's question is very thoroughly answered and explained on page 140-166.

 

*EDIT 2 : With thanks to @Lisias who made me aware of the Volume 2 to 6 appendix of the report.

Edited September 16, 2018 by Vanamonde

[Kerbinchaser]

3 hours ago, tater said:

The answer is "No."

Well how do WE know?

Edited September 13, 2018 by Lo Var Lachland

[Lisias]

7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Maybe that toothache you have will just go away if you skip the dentist and pretend it isn't there.

There's no point on diagnosing a toothache if there're no dentists available.

When your life is on the line, you focus on what is fixable. There's no point on looking for unfixable problems - you would be already dead no matter what.

Edited September 13, 2018 by Lisias
whoops… bad grammars... Really bad grammars. :-P

[mikegarrison]

53 minutes ago, Lo Var Lachland said:

Well how do WE know?

It's pretty hard to hide something like that when it was later investigated as thoroughly as this incident was.

[YNM]

39 minutes ago, Lisias said:

There's no point on diagnosing a toothache if there're no dentists available.

Then seek one.

Seriously, I think it's best to try and actually read the report. It's... very sensible.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, YNM said:

Then seek one.

Seriously, I think it's best to try and actually read the report. It's... very sensible.

You don't seek for something you know is not available. It's a waste of time - time that would be better spent in something else you know is possible.

At the very best, the report will show that something that was thought impossible was possible after all (or was unduly declared impossible). But reports written after the events are of no use on the event itself.

Coulda. Woulda. Shoulda. Give a good peek on the CAIB Report's Appendix D.13.

Edited September 13, 2018 by Lisias
adding link.

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, YNM said:

Then seek one.

If you're in a space shuttle and none of the other 6 people around are are dentists... good luck.

I'm not commenting on the report because I didn't read it and won't read it.

Edited September 13, 2018 by 5thHorseman

[Cassel]

Even if they did what would that change? There was no way to fix this?

[YNM]

4 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

If you're in a space shuttle and none of the other 6 people around are are dentists... good luck.

Seek help through communication.

 

________

3 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Do you (a) wing it and drive to the job interview or (b) bring it to the garage to have it looked at.

 

2 hours ago, Cassel said:

There was no way to fix this?

Not even the CAIB suggest anything to do if such scenario was to occur again to the exact details (no backups were done, no one expects it).

But what we can do is to err on the side of caution from that moment on.

Which is why :

- Bipod ramp foam block was removed;

- Contingency plans always ready (on ISS up to 1 month, off ISS needs another shuttle ready even at launch);

- The Space Shuttle programme was ended.

- Hopefully anyone who plans another winged shuttle would look with more scrutiny on their design. (*winks at SpaceX*)

Edited September 13, 2018 by YNM

[Pawelk198604]

6 minutes ago, YNM said:

- Hopefully anyone who plans another winged shuttle would look with more scrutiny on their design. (*winks at SpaceX*)

1

Lol xD

[K^2]

11 hours ago, Geonovast said:

Since getting back into KSP and doing almost exclusively shuttles, I've been watching a lot of shuttle related videos on youtube while playing KSP.  The biggest revelation was that Columbia did not go to the ISS on its final mission.  Somehow, for the last 15 tears, I though they did and nothing ever corrected me until now.  Weird.

I feel like there must've been some misreporting about it. Because I remember some talk about using ISS crew to do the inspection. But then I learned that the orbiter was nowhere near the ISS, and given the orbits, didn't have enough fuel for a rendezvous.

So even if there was absolute certainty of damage to Columbia, there was very little anybody could do about it. If somebody knew for sure, and decided not to tell anyone, maybe they did the right thing?

[YNM]

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

If somebody knew for sure, and decided not to tell anyone, maybe they did the right thing?

About as right as someone that's forced to deal with smuggling.

Anyway, I digress - the question was about whether they did a thing or they didn't and why did they choose to do what they choose, not about whether is it the right choice to choose or not.

And as a remark, the CAIB didn't suggest anything massively different than what NASA did anyway - they noted that the hypothetical rescue mission is "challenging" and an on-orbit repair to be "high-risk".

[KerikBalm]

The shuttle has been shedding tiles and/or foam chunks since its first flight.

Management had "normalized" this. They knew its thermal protection system had some damage... it always has some damage.

They didn't know how bad it was, and didn't seem to want to know. It seems some engineers were concerned that the damage was unusually bad, and communicated this to upper management. AFAIK, its (very reasonable) speculation that management didn't want to investigate further because they didn't think there was anything that could be done anyway.

After the accident, there were ideas of trying to make a patch with material they would have had available (which would be even more of a jury-rigging exercise than the apollo 11 air filter situation)... which may well have worked considering that the shuttle made it past peak heating before breaking apart... it seems the shuttle *almost" made it down, and if they could have improved its tolerance a little more they might have lived.

On orbit repair would have been high risk, but... well... so was attempting a de-orbit with a damaged TPS

As for the correcting "does it"... one doesn't learn from their mistakes if they don't even know they've made a mistake.

[razark]

The foam impact was known and communicated to the crew, as well as the belief that it would not have caused much damage.

Several imagery requests were made by various people at different times.  Some were turned down due to going through the wrong channels.  Some were turned down due to lack of knowledge of capabilities¹.  Some were turned down due to confusion with other previous requests.  There was no desire not to know.

Concerns were raised about the possibility of severe damage.  However, computer modeling was done and showed that a foam strike would not have caused a large enough amount of damage to the tiles for major concern.  This model was later found out to be faulty, but was largely accepted at the time, even by those who initially raised the questions.

Even if the damage had been known, repairing it in flight was highly unlikely.  Even if a method, materials, and tools could be worked out using what was onboard, getting astronauts to the damaged area would have been a challenge, there was the risk of making the problem worse, and Columbia was not equipped for extensive EVA operations.  We'll never know if a repair attempt would have been approved, but I personally doubt it.

A rescue launch was also out of the question.  You already have one severely damaged ship in orbit, without a full understanding of what happened, how to prevent it, or the likelihood of it happening again².  Readying a shuttle would have involved rushing through the preparations, cutting corners, and putting a second ship and crew in danger.

NASA engineers did internally downplay the foam-shedding problem, and came to accept it as normal and an acceptable risk.  I know many of them later regretted not taking it more seriously and investigating further.

 

¹There had been previous attempts at using satellite imagery to view the shuttle which did not work very well.  People within NASA capable of making those calls lacked the knowledge of what capabilities had changed in the decade plus, due to it being classified.  Part of the result was NASA managers and engineers being cleared and briefed on the capabilities of certain satellites.

²STS-114, the flight after 107, also had foam-shedding problems, resulting in an 11 month long grounding of the fleet.

[KerikBalm]

Quote

NASA engineers did internally downplay the foam-shedding problem, and came to accept it as normal and an acceptable risk.

Which was really quite unacceptable given:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27

Quote

When Commander 'Hoot' Gibson saw the damage, he thought to himself, "We are going to die." This was a situation that was similar to the one that would prove fatal 15 years later on STS-107, but the damage that Atlantis had sustained happened to be survivable, and the mission landed successfully, but the intense heat damage needed to be repaired.

...

the crew was prohibited from using their standard method of sending images to ground control due to the classified nature of the mission. The crew was forced to use a slow, encrypted transmission method, likely causing the images NASA engineers received to be of poor quality, causing them to think the damage was actually "just lights and shadows". They told the crew the damage did not look any more severe than on past missions.

...

Commander Gibson did not believe that the shuttle would survive reentry; if instruments indicated that the shuttle was disintegrating, he planned to "tell mission control what I thought of their analysis" in the remaining seconds before his death. Upon landing, the magnitude of the damage to the shuttle astonished NASA; over 700 damaged tiles were noted, and one tile was missing altogether. The tile was located over the steel mounting plate for the L-band antenna, perhaps preventing a burn-through of the sort that would ultimately doom Columbia in 2003. There was almost no damage present on the orbiter's left side. STS-27 Atlantis was the most damaged launch-entry vehicle to return to Earth successfully.

Seems he should have told mission control what he thought of their analysis, and the astronaut corps should have (in effect) unionized to support him and prevent him from being punished. Based on STS-107, he wouldn't have been able to tell mission control what he thought of them by the time they realized they weren't going to make it, given that STS-107's last received transmission was "Roger, uh, bu – "... then hydraulic pressure was lost 5 seconds later (preventing control surfaces from operating) and that's probably when the astronauts would have knew to start telling mission control where they could stick their analysis.... even though it was another 41 seconds until the shuttle broke apart.

Quote

Several imagery requests were made by various people at different times.  Some were turned down due to going through the wrong channels.  Some were turned down due to lack of knowledge of capabilities  ... There was no desire not to know.

According to https://web.archive.org/web/20110516132723/http://caib.nasa.gov/news/report/pdf/vol1/chapters/chapter6.pdf

Quote

Bob Page told MER that KSC/TPS engineers were sent by the USA SAM/Woody Woodworth to review the video and films. Indicated that Page had said that Woody had said this was an action from the MER to work this issue and a possible early landing on Tuesday. MER Manager told Bob that no official action was given by USA or Boeing and they had no concern about landing early. Woody indicated that the TPS engineers at KSC have been ʻturned awayʼ from reviewing the films. It was stated that the film reviews wouldnʼt be finshed till Monday.” ... “I also confirmed that there was no rush on this issue and that it was okay to wait till the film reviews are finished on Monday to do a TPS review.”

 

Quote

At 8:30 a.m., the NASA Department of Defense liaison officer called USSTRATCOM and cancelled the request for imagery. The reason given for the cancellation was that NASA had identified its own in-house resources and no longer needed the militaryʼs help. The NASA request to the Department of Defense to prepare to image Columbia on-orbit was both made and rescinded within 90 minutes

Maybe they didn't go through the proper channels, but someone at NASA actively cancelled the request...

You said:

Quote

Concerns were raised about the possibility of severe damage.  However, computer modeling was done and showed that a foam strike would not have caused a large enough amount of damage to the tiles for major concern.

The report says:

Quote

Boeing analysts conducted a preliminary damage assessment on Saturday. Using video and photo images, they generated two estimates of possible debris size – 20 inches by 20 inches by 2 inches, and 20 inches by 16 inches by 6 inches – and determined that the debris was traveling at a approximately 750 feet per second,or 511 miles per hour, when it struck the Orbiter at an estimated impact angle of less than 20 degrees. These estimates later proved remarkably accurate.

...

For the Thermal Protection System tile, Crater predicted damage deeper than the actual tile thickness. This seemingly alarming result suggested that the debris that struck

Columbia would have exposed the Orbiterʼs underlying aluminum airframe to extreme temperatures, resulting in a possible burn-through during re-entry. Debris Assessment Team engineers discounted the possibility of burn through for two reasons.

...

 

 

[razark]

Ah, it's been a while since I read the report.  My understanding of the modeling used was based on personal conversation well before the report came out, though.

[Vanamonde]

If the thread seems suddenly shorter, it's because all the off-topic stuff in which people gripe at each other about grammar has been removed. Not everybody here grew up speaking English, folks, and if you see somebody complaining about someone else's English, please just report it rather than reply to it and add to the off-topicness. 

[KerikBalm]

On 9/14/2018 at 4:46 PM, razark said:

Ah, it's been a while since I read the report.  My understanding of the modeling used was based on personal conversation well before the report came out, though.

Its my understanding (not going digging for quotes now, that their Crater prediction system would often overestimate damage for certain types of impacts... but it seems they  essentially just guessed/cherry picked/applied an arbitrary correction to get smaller damage estimates in line with what they were expecting. Overall my impression was that they had some idea in their head of the numbers they expected to get, and just tweaked the parameters of their prediction tool until it matched... which is not scientific at all. Their tweaked numbers were just serving as confirmation bias.

FWIW, I don't think they knew the shuttle was doomed and just didn't tell the crew. I think they were just complacent and deluded, and didn't want people to cause trouble over something that (from their point of view) was a routine event that wasn't really a problem.

Edited September 17, 2018 by KerikBalm

[YNM]

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

... But it seems they  essentially just guessed/cherry picked/applied an arbitrary correction to get smaller damage estimates in line with what they were expecting. ...

There's an illustration in the report that shows the size comparison between what they simulated as being the impactor during the mission time vs. what they then simulated after the crash. The latter is properly inferred from photographs and videos while the former is just the average size of impactor (they just adjusted the impact direction and the point being hit).

The software predicted deformations beyond the thickness of the plate (which should just be a hole given how brittle the thing is).

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I think they were just complacent...

Very bad to do in any case, but such is the human nature.

Edited September 17, 2018 by YNM

[razark]

4 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I think they were just complacent and deluded, and didn't want people to cause trouble over something that (from their point of view) was a routine event that wasn't really a problem.

That pretty much sums up the situation.