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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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NASA's shuttle program, set to make its final flight later this week, has resulted in the death of 14 astronauts. But it could have been a lot worse. The agency’s fleet of 100-ton orbiters faced numerous imminent threats for more than 30 years, both on the Earth and traveling at 28,000 kilometers per hour a slice above its surface. Some are well-documented, but many drew little public attention, let alone scrutiny.
Dangers ranged from faulty equipment to orbital debris to human error—but the bottom line is that space travelers faced risks far greater than the space agency likely cared to publicize. The International Space Station (ISS), which orbital crews traveling via the shuttle (as well as Russian Soyuz spacecraft) spent the past 13 years constructing, will continue to face such issues long after Atlantis launches and closes the books on NASA's shuttle program.
If anyone can speak to the tensest moments in the history of the two historically linked wonders of engineering, it would be former shuttle chief Wayne Hale and astronaut Leroy Chiao.
Hale worked on the space shuttle’s propulsion systems in the late 1970s and eventually oversaw 41 missions as a Mission Control flight director. He later stepped up as manager of the space shuttle program, a position he held until he retired a year ago.
Chiao, meanwhile, rode three space shuttle flights under Hale’s watch, lived in space for a total of 229 days and ventured outside of the space station six times within the confines of a bulky space suit for carefully choreographed spacewalks.
"It’s hard to pick the closest calls," Hale says. "There were surprises every day because the space shuttle and space station are such extraordinarily delicate and complex systems. Everything may look very calm and unexciting on TV, but let me tell you, my heart raced every time a mission was going on and I was in the control center. You had to be ready for anything and everything."
With NASA’s last functioning orbiter preparing to part ways with the ISS and the final frontier forever, Scientific American chatted with Hale and Chiao about their experiences from the ground and in orbit. We stroll here through some of the closest calls in the space shuttles’ and ISS’s intertwined careers.
» View a Slide Show of the Top 10 Most Dangerous Moments in Shuttle History
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10 Comments
Add CommentI’d like to add some tweaks to the writeups on two of these ten, that I was directly involved with:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this#6, Severe Tile Damage due to debris – I was the first person from the Space Shuttle Program Office to go to the lakebed post-landing and assess the damage. Weeks later when the official Incident Investigation Team made its report, they noted that the this debris damage issue was not going away, and officially recommended that a Debris Mitigation Manager be appointed in the Shuttle program office to make sure that never happened again. I was the person selected. However.......when I was promoted away to another job a year later, I was not replaced. My pleas with then Shuttle management that they needed to replace me because this issue of debris coming back and hitting the vehicle was not going to go away...in fact, left unattended, it would probably get worse – were ignored.
There is no doubt in my mind that the Columbia accident 14 years later – which not only cost lives, but billions of dollars – was likely directly a result of not having that single full-time position working over those years to constantly decrease the seriousness of the issue. This was not directly addressed in the official Columbia Accident Investigation Report. The CAIB report did note, however, that the Columbia accident did “(illustrate) the lack of institutional memory in the Space Shuttle Program that supports the Board’s claim...that NASA is not functioning as a learning organization.”
#8: Explosive Landing – was much more dangerous than this short report indicates. Firstly, it wasn’t just one of the 3 APUs (Auxiliary Power Units) that caught fire and was burning; it was two of the three. Second, it didn’t happen after landing – the fires were burning ever since the vehicle hit the atmosphere during entry and all the way thru landing, and continued burning until the two units detonated before the crew did their normal APU shutdown. Two simultaneous fires – the type of failure NASA normally does not consider ‘realistic’ - occurring inside the vehicle (under the tail), with no one really aware they were happening until long after, qualifies to me as the first real ‘close call’ of the program.
Dave Huntsman
Commercial Space Development
NASA
#1: "...and NASA reported no anomalies even after retrieving the rockets from the ocean and inspecting them"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNASA has kept a lot of things out of the public eye, apparently now it is becoming okay to talk about them. As a postdoc at JSC I learned that some astronauts come back dehydrated so much as a result of headward fluid shifts in weightlessness that intravenous fluids have been administered to them so they could stand up and walk off the Shuttle. Yet NASA spent millions of dollars on an "emergency egress system" which these same astronauts would have been unable to use, apparently without any consideration or possibly any knowledge of the postflight orthostatic tolerance problem. What happens is that headward fluid shifts stimulate reflexes that tell the body it has too much blood in it, and it goes about the process of reducing its blood volume. Water and electrolytes are rapidly excreted by the kidneys in an attempt to compensate, but blood also contains cells and protein which cannot be reduced rapidly so they remain behind and become concentrated in blood. That concentration raises the osmotic pressure causing fluid to move into the blood from all the other body water compartments, keeping the reflexes activated until the whole-body dehydration is quite severe: astronauts typically return to earth dehydrated by 4% to 6% of their body weight, and some cosmonauts have returned dehydrated by 8% of their body weight. A doctor will call an ambulance and send you to the emergency room if you become dehydrated by 2% of your body weight, so the dehydration of astronauts is not trivial. This problem wasn't understood in the early days of the Shuttle program and for the first two flights neither commander nor pilot wore anti-G suits, after all a good fighter pilot can handle 4.5 G without a suit and just using Valsalva maneuvers to keep blood flowing to their brains, so why would they need G-suits when the Shuttle only produced 2.5 to 3 G on reentry(?) was the logic. The story I was told in all seriousness is that STS-2 came close to crashing on reentry when both pilot and copilot nearly passed out, and which was 'solved' by NASA requiring all astronauts to wear G-suits on reentry afterward, a documented fact. But you never heard that on the evening news either.
Karl Simanonok, Ph.D.
During my time at JSC in the early 90's there were still a few of the Apollo old-timers around, the ones who met JFK's goal of getting a man on the moon before the decade was out by working 30% overtime at no extra pay to make it happen. They were the real heros of the story and the ones I knew inspired and mentored me greatly. I became deeply saddened however to see their Apollo spirit absent among so many of the newcomers who exhibited no sense of shared goals and instead largely devoted their efforts to strengthening and expanding their little fiefdoms, quarreling over lab space constantly, backbiting and even sabotaging the work of their perceived competitors, one of them even tried to steal my primary research idea and call it his own, so it got pretty personal. I was told 'sorry' by his boss and 'NASA has no mechanism for regulating ethics' leaving me to fight the bastard on my own (I eventually won, but at some cost). So I figure it's a good thing NASA is retiring the Shuttle before the devolving attitudes there cause any more crashes. There is a lot to be learned from the Shuttle experiences, but unless more of NASA's dirty laundry is aired like this article just barely begins to scratch the surface doing, some of the most important lessons will be lost and the next generation of spacefarers may have to learn them all over again, and that would be a dirty shame.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKarl Simanonok, Ph.D.
I am confident that sts107 will eventually cause bitterness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI remember #1 reported on the news dec 1985.It was reported as a close call.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisreally? how about this:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this*1. The US bank bailout exceeded the half-century lifetime budget of NASA. or *2. The US military spends as much in 23 days as NASA spends in a year - and that's when we're not fighting a war. or *3. The entire half-century budget of NASA equals the current two year budget of the US military.
I would rather have spent the money and gained the technology and knowledge from the space program then bailed a failing bank that shot itself in the foot. Oh and what good did the bail out do? Last I checked we are still in recession and the rich continue to get more rich as they buy up cheap assets.
So, before you try and "bash" NASA maybe you should do some research before posting what you did.
*Tweeted from @NeilTyson.
Just to clarify, the above post was to geojellyroll. Good day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissomeone will complain about anything. I suggest Jelly Roll focus on celebrity tweets rather than stressing out on the subject of the exploration of Space.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is more to NASA than the Shuttle program - much more. A huge number of NASA folks are silently breathing a sigh of relief that now it is safe for science and robots to come back into the light.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarbon-based humans are not meant for space exploration. Our job on the evolutionary ladder is to construct our silicon-based descendants, who can be perfectly adapted to space. We've done a heckuva job evolving from lightning bolts & ammonia, but the very adaptions that brought us to this point make us unsuitable for the environments of space.
I doubt it will be the year 2043 predicted by Ray Kurzweil for the first sentient silicon life because we still don't know what that means. Will we make an Einstein, an Adolf Hitler, or a Sally Ride? But as we figure out how to stay alive on this planet, we'll sort out the constructs of intelligence and personality and make self-aware machines that can stand the rigors of space.
I am as proud as the next person to be a part of a race that produced the Space Shuttle. I am even more proud that we produced the two Martian rovers, Spirit & Opportunity, and the Hubble Space Telescope. To infinity, and beyond!
In reply to bender227: I like to compare NASA's budget to what our sociel programs spend. NASA said it would go to the Moon and build the shuttle, and did. HHS and HUD said they would alleviate poverty and fix the slums, and have not. And after forty years, nobody has shown me a single improvement traceable to defunding the Apollo Program and spending the money on "problems here on earth."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn reply to ssidner: Spirit and Opportunity are fabulous machines. But in six years they've done as much as two human geologists could do in a couple of days.
What is all too likely to happen is we will decide we no longer need our own manned space flight. We'll just contract it to the Russians and, later, the Chinese. But the money won't be spent on other science. It will be spent funding Lifestyles of the Selfish and Irresponsible. The money will simply disappear and we will get zero in return.