Author Topic: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???  (Read 9982 times)

Offline Tony Trout

  • Member
  • Posts: 84
  • Murphy, North Carolina (USA)
  • Liked: 24
  • Likes Given: 111
Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« on: 10/24/2020 08:56 pm »
I just heard about this particular report today on a Facebook group that I'm a member of. 

Of course, my inquiry is.....where can the "internal" un-redacted Columbia Accident report be found??  I know it probably sounds morbid of me, but I'm interested in reading it. 

Any help is appreciated. 

Thanks a bunch!

Tony Trout
"The Image Is One Thing & The Human Being Another...It's Very Hard To Live Up To An Image, I'll Put It That Way."  (Elvis Presley During A Press Conference Before The First Of Four Sold Out Performances At New York's Madison Square Garden - June 9 - 11, 1972)

Offline Phil Stooke

  • Full Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 1354
  • Canada
  • Liked: 1424
  • Likes Given: 1
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #1 on: 10/24/2020 09:04 pm »
Let me Google that for you:

www.caib.us

(I'll leave it to you to check that it's not redacted).

Offline Jorge

  • Senior Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6404
  • Liked: 529
  • Likes Given: 67
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #2 on: 10/24/2020 10:10 pm »
I'm guessing the original poster is referring to the 2008 Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report (CCSIR) and not the original CAIB report. Parts of section 3.4 of the CCSIR, "Crew Analysis", are redacted. The redacted CCSIR is available here:

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/298870main_SP-2008-565.pdf

I doubt that an un-redacted version of this report will ever be released to the public.
JRF

Offline Tony Trout

  • Member
  • Posts: 84
  • Murphy, North Carolina (USA)
  • Liked: 24
  • Likes Given: 111
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #3 on: 10/25/2020 04:56 pm »
I'm guessing the original poster is referring to the 2008 Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report (CCSIR) and not the original CAIB report. Parts of section 3.4 of the CCSIR, "Crew Analysis", are redacted. The redacted CCSIR is available here:

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/298870main_SP-2008-565.pdf

I doubt that an un-redacted version of this report will ever be released to the public.


Yes, this is what I'm looking for, and......you're probably right about an un-redacted report ever being released by NASA.....although, it probably will be released after we are all long gone.  The person on the FB group that I'm a member of actually does have the un-redacted report but, this person (whoever they were) told everyone that they weren't going to post it on the group.  The group is "The Space Shuttle Era 1981-2011:  I Lived Through It (the link is in the previous text if you want to visit the group). 

BTW, how do you properly make a hyperlink to another website? 
"The Image Is One Thing & The Human Being Another...It's Very Hard To Live Up To An Image, I'll Put It That Way."  (Elvis Presley During A Press Conference Before The First Of Four Sold Out Performances At New York's Madison Square Garden - June 9 - 11, 1972)

Online DaveS

  • Shuttle program observer
  • Senior Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 8526
  • Sweden
  • Liked: 1199
  • Likes Given: 65
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #4 on: 10/25/2020 05:57 pm »
I'm guessing the original poster is referring to the 2008 Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report (CCSIR) and not the original CAIB report. Parts of section 3.4 of the CCSIR, "Crew Analysis", are redacted. The redacted CCSIR is available here:

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/298870main_SP-2008-565.pdf

I doubt that an un-redacted version of this report will ever be released to the public.


Yes, this is what I'm looking for, and......you're probably right about an un-redacted report ever being released by NASA.....although, it probably will be released after we are all long gone.  The person on the FB group that I'm a member of actually does have the un-redacted report but, this person (whoever they were) told everyone that they weren't going to post it on the group.  The group is "The Space Shuttle Era 1981-2011:  I Lived Through It (the link is in the previous text if you want to visit the group). 

BTW, how do you properly make a hyperlink to another website? 
Just copy and paste the actual address. The forum software should make it a clickable link once the post is made.
"For Sardines, space is no problem!"
-1996 Astronaut class slogan

"We're rolling in the wrong direction but for the right reasons"
-USA engineer about the rollback of Discovery prior to the STS-114 Return To Flight mission

Offline Jorge

  • Senior Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6404
  • Liked: 529
  • Likes Given: 67
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #5 on: 10/25/2020 06:09 pm »
BTW, how do you properly make a hyperlink to another website? 

I just paste the complete URL into my post, with no markup... the forum software seems to take care of turning it into a clickable link on its own.
JRF

Offline Hog

  • Senior Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2846
  • Woodstock
  • Liked: 1700
  • Likes Given: 6866
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #6 on: 10/26/2020 05:06 pm »
I'm guessing the original poster is referring to the 2008 Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report (CCSIR) and not the original CAIB report. Parts of section 3.4 of the CCSIR, "Crew Analysis", are redacted. The redacted CCSIR is available here:

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/298870main_SP-2008-565.pdf

I doubt that an un-redacted version of this report will ever be released to the public.


Yes, this is what I'm looking for, and......you're probably right about an un-redacted report ever being released by NASA.....although, it probably will be released after we are all long gone.  The person on the FB group that I'm a member of actually does have the un-redacted report but, this person (whoever they were) told everyone that they weren't going to post it on the group.  The group is "The Space Shuttle Era 1981-2011:  I Lived Through It (the link is in the previous text if you want to visit the group). 

BTW, how do you properly make a hyperlink to another website?
Oh the old "I have proof, but I'm not sharing" line j/k.

I agree with Jorge. I also doubt that the unredacted Parts of section 3.4 of the CCSIR, "Crew Analysis" will ever be released to the public.

Such an excellent paper, details galore.  The comparison of the Columbia and SR-71 breakups at high altitude were very interesting.  (discussed 3.2.3 Aircraft in-flight breakup case studies)
Paul

Offline Chargrilled

  • Member
  • Posts: 4
  • Liked: 2
  • Likes Given: 2
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #7 on: 05/17/2023 10:23 pm »
Forgive me for resurrecting this thread after so long but I've been researching Columbia in-depth for the last few weeks and found this thread. Made an account just to contribute.

I have the unredacted 2014 report which contains in-depth analysis about crew survivability in the CE/CMCE environment.
From a quick search someone did post about it here at the time it was released, but the link they provided is now defunct.

A brief excerpt:
"Between the catastrophic event and the crew module catastrophic event, the unconscious crewmembers
(with the exception of one crewmember who succumbed to pulmonary barotrauma) sustained mechanical
trauma and associated bleeding into soft tissues. Active hemorrhage into injured tissue implies active
circulation, as seen in these slides of crewmember neck muscles. This is an important temporal marker for
events that occurred antemortem.
"

Offline leovinus

  • Full Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 1095
  • Porto, Portugal
  • Liked: 867
  • Likes Given: 1727
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #8 on: 05/17/2023 10:41 pm »
Let me Google that for you:

www.caib.us

(I'll leave it to you to check that it's not redacted).
On archive.org these days e.g.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050222093447/http://www.caib.us/news/report/default.html

Offline Chargrilled

  • Member
  • Posts: 4
  • Liked: 2
  • Likes Given: 2
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #9 on: 05/17/2023 11:51 pm »
Let me Google that for you:

www.caib.us

(I'll leave it to you to check that it's not redacted).
On archive.org these days e.g.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050222093447/http://www.caib.us/news/report/default.html

I should've worded my first post better, but I was referencing a different thread where someone posted a now-defunct link to this 2014 LOS report, rather than the defunct CAIB link above.

This 2014 report contains the redacted parts from Section 3.4 of the CCSIR discussed above.

Offline Chargrilled

  • Member
  • Posts: 4
  • Liked: 2
  • Likes Given: 2
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #10 on: 05/22/2023 11:38 am »
So I've read through my physical copy of the unredacted report a few times now and compared it side-by-side to the CCSIR.
In essence it is an industry/academic paper rather than a highly publicised public-facing report.
It is more streamlined than the full CAIB or CCSIR reports because it zooms in on the medical and forensic aspects of the disaster, response and investigation.

It does indeed have the redacted parts from the Crew Analysis section of the CCSIR.
In particular sections 3.4.2, 3.4.3 and 3.4.4 of the CCSIR, which have extensive redactions, are covered here in detail.
The paper describes the type, mechanism and timeline of injury much more clearly with useful visualisations.
For example one of the most helpful is a chart showing the timeline of each lethal event mapped relative to the orbiter breakup timeline, GMT, altitude, cabin pressure and G loads.
This chart was redacted in the CCSIR.

Whilst it's not visually graphic and is done with tact and respect, the matter-of-fact medical descriptions and the unredacted diagrams/images (important to stress no visually identifiable remains) mean that you can form a pretty detailed mental picture of what conditions during the breakup must have been like, which will not be to everyone's taste.
Mercifully as we know the depressurisation precluded the crew from consciously experiencing the following events, which makes the reading more palatable.

My theory as to why NASA (somewhat) released the unredacted paper is that:
A - Simply more time had passed compared to 2003 with CAIB or even 2008 with CCSIR. The disaster was nowhere near as fresh in the public consciousness.

B - As a narrow scope industry/academic paper presented to a limited audience at a handful of conferences prior to release it has significantly less reach and newsworthy-ness than CAIB or CCSIR.

C - As the paper states itself, Columbia is the only instance of a hypersonic spacecraft breakup on reentry where the effects on humans can be studied, so it has massive academic and aerospace industry value.

D - The families expressed support for as much information as possible being made available. Whilst not explicitly referencing this paper, which had not yet been written, the principle still stands.
From an email sent by a Flight Surgeon also working as a family liaison during the investigation:
"In discussion with the Columbia spouses we were entirely unified in our desire to ensure that all the lessons learned from this mishap be applied to prevent this type of accident from happening again. We discussed the crew survival section and our desire is to ensure this information is made available to learn all we can from it. A fundemental aspect of every aerospace mishap investigation is the understanding of crew survivability issues and there is much still to learn about survival during upper atmospheric reentry. As sensitive as this issue is, it is essential that the facts related to crew survival be disseminated to ensure the next generation of spacecraft are afforded the maximum protection."

Hopefully this has been more illuminating than someone in a Facebook group claiming they have a copy and refusing to elaborate.

Offline Blackstar

  • Veteran
  • Senior Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 15288
  • Liked: 7823
  • Likes Given: 2
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #11 on: 05/30/2023 10:57 pm »
A few useless anecdotes:

I was a staffer on the CAIB in 2003. Because of my position, I had a lot more access to board deliberations than most of the other staffers. I didn't have access to any of the crew mortality information. A colleague on the staff sat through the crew mortality briefing and sometime later mentioned it to me and offered to tell me what he had learned. I did not want to hear it. I heard other interesting information about the investigation that never became public, but I stayed willfully ignorant about that.

During the investigation, probably around June or so, there was an article that appeared in a media source that claimed to have information on the crew deaths. I cannot remember the publication, but I do remember that when it appeared, a number of the staff were very angry and also very paranoid/suspicious, asking about who had access to that information and who might have leaked it. It was a very tense day. But there was no reason to believe that any "leak" had come from the CAIB itself, as opposed to NASA. I read the article really carefully and noted that it only had one bit of insider detail. The rest was all speculative, based upon the kind of information that you could get from a shuttle technical manual (like details of the cabin pressurization system and spacesuits and so on). It was a reminder of something I've experienced numerous times, that most people are not careful discerning readers, but if you are, you can (should) figure out what is actual new information vs. speculation or already-public information.

As an aside: the CAIB didn't leak. I think it had a leak problem early on before I started, but the chairman got rid of the leak and that was it. We sat on some pretty big secrets right up to the release of the report. I know of one blogger who kept reporting scoops based on "insider-information" that were totally made up. They were reporting that X or Y happened, when I knew for a fact that they had not happened.

I know that the attitude of the CAIB leadership, particularly Admiral Gehman, was that the report should include more information on crew mortality issues than had been released for the Challenger investigation. Gehman and the other board members knew that one of the things that undermined the Challenger investigation was the crew mortality leak that happened after that report was released. I thought that we had the right amount of information in the report itself. However, after it was issued, some members of the public criticized it for not having more. I don't think that criticism was morbid curiosity, but I also disagreed with it. We had to balance the need of the public to know with the sensitivity of the families. However, I think that CAIB was very good with dealing with the astronaut families. I also think that the people who dealt with them talked about the need to keep future astronauts alive by sharing information.

I should add that many of the staff on the CAIB were USAF accident investigators, and their attitude was that it is important to know how the people died in order to design better safety equipment and procedures in the future. I remember one Lt. Col. explaining that to me, saying that, for example (I'm making this up) they need to know if a pilot connected his parachute wrong and that killed him, because that might make it necessary to redesign the parachute so that it cannot be connected wrong in the future. The attitude, which I think is common to accident investigators, was that they don't want somebody's death to be in vain, but to maybe save lives in the future. That requires sharing information on the cause of death. This attitude was not held by many in NASA, meaning that once the CAIB was done, NASA controlled any future releases, and they clammed up.

I have a very vague recollection--maybe I am wrong--that when we released the report we expected a follow-on report about crew safety that would release more information on crew mortality. I think that we expected that to happen within a year or two. However, that did not happen. It took many years before NASA released the crew safety report. Pam Melroy pushed for that really hard. I heard at the time it was released that she had faced a lot of pressure inside NASA where they did not want any of that public. I asked her that at an event soon after the release and she confirmed it. Melroy could end up as NASA administrator, but back then she was really brave to fight for that.


Offline Chargrilled

  • Member
  • Posts: 4
  • Liked: 2
  • Likes Given: 2
Re: Internal Un-Redacted Columbia Accident Report???
« Reply #12 on: 06/13/2023 08:25 pm »
Really fascinating anecdotes, thanks for sharing.

It's interesting you mention how Pam Melroy and others with military backgrounds were pushing for the release of more information.
Pam Melroy is actually a contributor to this unredacted paper, along with several others who have USAF/USN Aviation/Air National Guard backgrounds. There are also several Medical Doctors as you'd expect, and a small number of legal experts.
James Wetherbee and Smith L. Johnston are also credited as contributors.

As you mentioned yourself, they must have felt a duty to give as much information as they could to those in the industry so that it could be used to save lives in the future - sometimes in contrast to the wider NASA administration.
This is stated as the reason they created this third paper after the crew survival report.
"Our goal is to capture the passions of those who
devoted their energies in responding to the Columbia
mishap. We have reunited authors who were directly
involved in each of these aspects. These authors tell the
story of their efforts related to the Columbia mishap
from their point of view. They give the reader an honest
description of their responsibilities and share their
challenges, their experiences, and their lessons learned
on how to enhance crew safety and survival, and how to
be prepared to support space mishap investigations.
"

I do find it strange that this third paper was only released with limited scope in 2014, a whole 6 years after the redacted crew survival report and 11 years after CAIB.
It's possible Melroy and others may have had to wrangle once again for this one to be released just as you recall they did for the 2008 crew survival report.

In any case it's inspiring yet bittersweet to see the amount of time and effort that's gone into trying to prevent a tragedy like this from happening again.

Tags:
 

Advertisement NovaTech
Advertisement Northrop Grumman
Advertisement
Advertisement Margaritaville Beach Resort South Padre Island
Advertisement Brady Kenniston
Advertisement NextSpaceflight
Advertisement Nathan Barker Photography
1