Columbia is missing!

“It really hit me today when I saw several flags at half staff. Made my eyes weepy.”

“I was not referring to Aheeb. I was referring to a statement made by an Iraqi government official in an article at msnbc.”

“2scoops Every student who took a gun to school talked about it first. If one of the students who heard those comments would have said something alot of lives would have been saved. The comment 'Let more tragedy strike America'...While not an out and out threat in general was suspect, I think it should be reported. I agree with Artex.

That being said I do not think this has anything to do with terrorism.”

“They just stated in the press conference that they have found remains of all seven astronauts- another reason to treat the debris with respect.”

“tango- you lost me there, babe. what students? the columbine students? talked about what? taking a gun to school? talked about the columbia? did somebody go on a shooting spree that i missed? im confused. of course, im just an ignorant redneck, so thats easy to do ;P. besides what can they do? i know matt would have the ip address the message originated from, but his real location is probably hidden behind layers of whatever computer geeks hide behind. and what exactly are they going to charge this guy with, if they catch him? saying mean, nasty things? they cant charge him with anything, but theyll "keep an eye on him". can you say "big brother"? hell, its probably some flag-waving ultra-patriot trying to stir up xenophobic attitudes by pretending to be some fundamentalist anti-american kook. lets concentrate on whats important and forget about this rabeeb jerkoff. thats really the best way to deal with him.”

“I was corrolating two different but similar events. Yes all the past school shootings, such as Columbine, the one in California, the one in Florida, and all the rest. All mean is that criminals are stupid! And they talk! Thank God!!!”

“matt would know who it is.....”

“yea but hes a frickin troll! and he probably posted from his local library. now everyone who has entered that libary the last two days is a suspect. forget it.let go of your anger. feel the force flow with.... uhhh sorry bout that”

“no , i think we should ask him....”

“Sorry, 'scoops, but if someone ever needed to be on Ashcroft's radar, I think that's the guy. I believe a little 'rousting' would be great for his character.

I'm all for free speach 98% of the time, but I guess that other 2% indicates that I'm not an absolutist.

If it's just 'one of ours' doing a sick trolling exercise, he should apologise NOW.”

“yesh tilt, by all means. i'd like to know who is capable of sinking that low...”

“no i dont think that hes one of ours. someone earlier mentioned it was somebody doing this all over the internet at various message and chatboards”

“1. I'm glad Artex did what he did.

2. Thanks for expressing your opinion here Tilt, I know you are a big time space junkie, and it must be difficult for you.

3. Hey, Ice Tea is speaking the truth in a way, but I have to say this, these folks PUT THEMSELVES in harms way, and have been doing it their entire life. They were also very intelligent, dedicated people, who worked for the good of every human on this planet..... not many people can say the same. The death of someone in a car accident is tragic, yes, but it can't be compared to the folks on the Columbia, regardless of the "attention" our worthless press gives it.

4. Although I like artex's solution to Ahab, I have to agree that we do have free speech in this country, and he has the right to say what he wants. I also have the right to beat the crap out of him (and suffer the consequances), fire him (and suffer the consequences), not patronize his place of business aor company he works for, etc. It's the price of freedom, I guess.”

“ok, i just talked to my buddy and he's a big time computer hac...uhhm...geek and he says it'll be no problem to locate this scoundral. we'll find out just who's trickin who round here....




he'll be here in 10 minutes...”

“well spoken, bb. you are a man above bears”

“There IS FREE SPEECH...... and kudos to Buddha Bear. And I also wouldn't doubt with the anti-terrorism climate in today's country, that a lot of internet boards and communications are being watched.”

“I guess I've finally crossed over to the Dark Side, Lizs! Hell, I agree with the ACLU just about All the time. This guy pressed the Wrong Button on me.”

“Lizs... email me.

I've been in shock since yesterday morning... for some odd reason, I was up early, clicked on the tube, and from that point forward, I was inundated with an incomparable sadness.

Latest word I hear is that NASA detected a 60 degree rise in the shuttle interior temperature, indicating the possibility that several protective tiles were missing...

Could this have been the "debris" detected hitting the left shuttl4e wing on liftoff?”

“Too soon to tell, but I've been hearing that the insulation that came loose is super lightweight material.”

“yeah tilt, thats what i've been thinkin. how could foam tear a tile away. i just dont see it.


sorry bout my lil rant eariler .i have a feeling the a-hole in question is someone we all know and that's perty cruddy in my book.”

“The foam wouldnt have had to tear off a tile , just damage it. re-entry puts an extreme amount of stress on everything.”

“If you should receive an email telling you that the Columbia disaster was foretold by Nostradamus, it's hokum.”

“nosty seems to have predicted every thing....”

“having spent a weekend in the wilds of Arkansas, I was unaware of our great tradegy, this is not an American tradegy, it is a human tradegy. This kind of event effects all peoples of the world. Space exploration is to benifit mankind, not just America.

I didn't listen to the radio last night on the drive home, nor watch TV once getting home. And I missed this thread last night when I posting my trip report, and Lizs didn't mention it to me as we were communicating, so I woke up to devestating news on NPR. I truely hate waking up to this kind of thing.

I don't think this was a terrorist event, just an accident. Where I will stand on the soap box is when Congress starts hollerin for cut backs and suspending operations. I will scream bloody murder when that starts to happen. Its ok for congresspersons to waste, imbezzel and misappropriate money, but not to let NASA have the necessary funds to safely run its operations is more of a crime...I think its high time that the criminal activities of our elected officials comes to an end and that NASA, the true hope and heros of our land, get to spend money in useful and meaningful ways...

and who are our hero's today...Tiger Woods, Dale Jarret, Michael Jordan, Emmit Smith...NO!!! they haven't done blip to enhance the betterment of mankind...All you parents out there...stop putting so much emphasis on sports and start teaching your kids that Astronauts are our last hero's, exploring the last frontier and trying to make the future a reality. Teach your kids the names of the Columbia crew.

I wish I was a Columbia crewmember...It would have been an honor to die with them.”

“Me and my daddy and Gissmo was lookin at the TB Sunnerdy mornin. I seen the rek. It was perty bad I gess.

I herd some buddy say "Roger got a stinky butt" on the fone, so it was not that.

Mebbe they rund into a berd flyin aroun in the sky. Busserds fly aroun WAAAAAAY hi!”

“One report I heard stated it the tiles do occassionally fall off, yet the shuttle can survive. The aluminum shell is damaged and subsequently repaired. Like all the NASA dudes say, they'll look into every possible scenario to find the answer.”

“On one of the early shuttle flights, a lot of tiles were lost. Some sort or problem with the adhesive. They have been reporting that a spy satellite was trained on the shuttle (probably Columbia, but don't remember which one) to determine which tiles were missing, but I had always heard that an SR-71 was dispatched for the task. The skin underneath the tiles has a number corresponding to the matching tile engraved or painted on it. Supposedly, the Air Force sent NASA a list of exactly which tiles were missing, and it was determined it would be safe to land the shuttle. Like they would have been able to do anything else.

A lot of attention is being focused on whether or not the left landing gear door may have been damaged.

It's also now being reported that NASA considered retiring Columbia in 2001, but didn't because they needed her to keep up with their ISS launch schedule. Because she couldn't be docked with the ISS, she would have been used solely on missions like STS-107, freeing the other shuttles for ISS missions.

It's worth noting that Columbia was the oldest operating spacecraft in the world, other than probes. I believe that distinction now falls to Discovery, but I could be mistaken.”

“stikie sez:

"..Where I will stand on the soap box is when Congress starts hollerin for cut backs and suspending operations. I will scream bloody murder when that starts to happen....."

Warm up that box, cut backs have been happening for a while now and could have played a part in this. The new Bush appointed head of NASA isn't even a space guy like the last head was. It's interesting to see that they took short cuts by not using land based optics to look at the shuttle to make sure. They just relied on the "people" to come up with an assestment. If it were me:

When lives are at stake, you do what ever it is to make sure they come back safely.

Now, I gets the feeling that they might have known they had damage and knew that this might happen on re-entry. It would be there only option becasue they don't have back up plan to keep'em out there for repairs (another REAL sore spot with me. They practice for every possible thing to happen, but they don't have a back up plan, like re-supplies and space walks to repair? DUMB or it just costs too much). It wouldn't be the first time NASA had to take some risks to bring people home. You find out that there was many things they could have done, but didn't because of budget.”

“bit - I believe it's is Discovery or Enterprise, would have been Challenger, but....”

“Enterprise was a tooling and test article. It never flew into space.

I've actually seen Enterprise, close up. They brought it here, to Huntsville, when I was about 13. My stepfather worked at NASA, so we got to go out on the Arsenal, watch it land on the back of the transporter. Then we waited a little, while they took it off the back of the transporter and parked it near a large building with a hangar in it. You could walk up really close to, almost close enough to touch. It was cool.

I believe Enterprise is the property of the National Air and Space Museum now, stored in a hangar out at Dulles Airport where they keep large stuff they don't have room for in the museum in Washington, like the Enola Gay. They used her (Enterprise, that is) for destructive testing to determine what stresses the shuttle could take, so they did stuff like cutting the main wing spar and dropping it from heights to see what would happen from a really hard landing. It'll never, ever be able to fly.”

“They've flown about 120 shuttle missions and lost two. There are about 7 astronauts on each. That means that roughly 840 astronauts have flown (with some duplicates, of course). We've lost 14. That means 1 out 60 astronauts who attempt to fly to space die.

I've seen statistics that say that historically, attempts on Mt. Everest have killed 1 out of every 6 or 10 climbers who attempt it. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but...

If you are an astronaut, race car driver or mountain climber, there is risk.

That said, anything really worth doing involves risk. We can't stop. Put another shuttle up next month.”

“Right on, RL!

I think a lot of you are making some pretty big generalizations about the space program. You aren't inside the organization, and don't know which decisions are made for what reasons. These astronauts know they could lose their life, and they still get on board. I don't think NASA is blatently making decisions that they know could cost lives.”

“I stand corrected. Maybe I was thinking that because she was made right after Columbia. Then I do believe that honor goes to Discovery.

I agree with RL. Going one step further, we have lost many more lives due to airliners going down and yet they continue to fly, unless there are structure concerns, we don't ground all airliners because of a crash. These brave people knew what risks were involved and in the truest sense, gave there lives for spaceflight. If we stand by and ground the shuttle for months, we will put back an area that is already behind by decades. Sometimes failures are needed for future successes. Sad, but true.

In the meantime, NASA needs to revive the next generation of delivery vehicle, NOW. This means of delivery into space is anicent by todays standards.”

“I seriously doubt if NASA is up to the task. Their last design died because of problems with the fuel tank materials. You'll no doubt remember Al Gore unveiling NASA's choice for a prototype, the Lockheed design that was basically a shuttle redux that would push the limits of the design envelope as far as it could go. Well, they pushed the design envelope so hard that they discovered they couldn't build the design.

NASA talks big about always trying to be more creative and advance aerospace design, but we'll never get affordable space transport from that kind of thinking. We don't need the "Cadillac" of space transport, we need the "Model T" of space transport.

For instance: the space shuttle main engine design.

They were designed to have the highest specific impulse rating of any rocket engine up that point. That is, they get more thrust for the mass of fuel used than any other rocket engine. I think that might still be true, although there are some ion engine designs that absolutely blow them away on specific impulse, but don't generate enough thrust to work anywhere but in space.

The problem is that it's a very critical design, with weight shaved in every possible place. Ever see an aborted shuttle launch? It does happen from time to time, although not as frequently as it used to. Because of the way the shuttle engines are designed, they're not restartable, so when an abort after main engine start occurs, they can't just refuel the thing and try again. They have to take the shuttle stack back to the VAB, tear it down, take the engines off the shuttle, and overhaul them. This is mostly because they used burstable diaphragms instead of valves to save weight, I think there are a few other things which must be replaced every time the engines are fired. Sound like an affordable solution to you?

And here the kicker: The shuttle main engines were designed when NASA was a viable design organization, something that's not true anymore. Most major design is farmed out now, with subcontractors doing all the work, and NASA engineers making their lists and checking them twice.

NASA is probably not going to be a vehicle for change, and throwing more money at them is not going to give us affordable space transport. At best, an increase the NASA's budget will hopefully make the current space transport system safer. Hopefully.”

“bit - I'm reading your mail! Your are very right, good examples. I thought that Deep Space 1 was launched with Ion technology. I wonder what other of the 9 secret technologies are on there that could be used right now. It was a successful mission, to a point.

Anyhoo, I think that the thing that gets me going is that we have been using bombs to throw people into space for decades now. Time fer a change. Competition with NASA might bring this to be. It is a new area and I am suprised that someone hasn't made a real effort to capitalize on this industry. Maybe something for our young generation of slackers to get into?

It seems to me that there are simple solutions to some of NASA's problems, but if they are so simple, why aren't I getting paid! There must be some reasons for there designs, I just think that they need to think outta of the box a little.”

“Deep Space 1 does have an ion engine on board, but it was launched aboard a Delta II. The ion engine was tested successfully.

We will be using rockets for delivery to earth orbit for some time to come, unfortunately. There's no technology on the horizon that comes close to producing the necessary amount of thrust. Magnetic linear accelerators are one idea, but like any system which imparts all the acceleration needed to reach escape velocity at the beginning of the launch, the initial G forces are very high.

Another possible technology is using light pressure from lasers, but again, delivery of enough power is an issue. We haven't made big enough lasers yet, and it will be awhile before we do.

I don't think NASA could stand up to competition. They are such an inefficient organization, almost any private venture, funded at the same level, could do better. NASA's main focus is maintaining current funding and staff levels, more than anything else.”

“bit - do you know anything about the anti-gravity experiments? I recall talk of using this system for delivery in the future. Sounds like you and I should pool some money together and start a bid ness....:)

How about - - "Space Ports R Us" ??”

“The initial anti-grav experiments were successful. More like the gravitational force on a small area was manipulated and reduced. Postage-stamp sized area.”

“Yes, they did some of that testing here at Huntsville's branch of the University of Alabama. I can't recall exactly what they did, but it seemed to be a lot to get the minute reduction in gravity that was observed. I wouldn't count on seeing spacecraft being launched using gravity reduction anytime soon.

The laser launch is my bet, but it too will take some time.”

“Maybe they'll look harder at the duel propulsion system of delivery. The present system is just so violent.”

“Two men arrested and charged for picking and keeping Columbia debris.”

“I have a feeling that the US Attorney for that Judicial District will be a person for a while.”

“Is it a cactus or something right now?”

“RISK MANAGEMENT FOR THE TILES OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE – 1994 (PDF)

http://www.informs.org/Press/SpaceShuttle.pdf”

“Tilt, that link's not working for me...”

“That's the correct link... it must be getting some heavy traffic. It was included in a NASA press briefing yesterday.”

“It must be, I can't even get to the top-level page. They've been swamped!”

“I just tried it again and its working... for the moment!”

“Got it...thanks...”