this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
89 points (98.9% liked)

Spaceflight

582 readers
64 users here now

Your one-stop shop for spaceflight news and discussion.

All serious posts related to spaceflight are welcome! JAXA, ISRO, CNSA, Roscosmos, ULA, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity, Blue Origin, etc. (Arca and Pythom, if you must).

Other related space communities:

Related meme community:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] x4740N@lemm.ee 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I've always wondered if there was a viable solution to save the Colombia astronauts

[–] atocci@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It was possible to save them, but it wasn't actionable. The level of danger the crew was in wasn't fully understood, and NASA didn't believe that they were going to lose the crew and ship on reentry, so nothing was done.

I would recommend watching this whole video if you have the time, but I've linked to the most relevant chapter. It's a very good breakdown about the failures of NASA's risk management around the space shuttle.

[–] Gerudo@lemm.ee 3 points 3 months ago

The only option they had were to send another shuttle up and transfer to it. There was nothing in place to repair the heat shielding, even if they had known the amount of damage.

The shuttle transfer would have been something never attempted or even planned for.