BBC: The Space Shuttle that Fell to Earth

[nicp]

On BBC iPlayer (streaming service) there is the following about the 2003 Columbia disaster - I apologize to any not in the UK who are not able to access this.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001tts5/the-space-shuttle-that-fell-to-earth-series-1-episode-1

There are three episodes of an hour each. I have not watched these yet and do not yet know if it is a BBC production, a joint production or something they have bought in.

I don't have the time right now to look at this and (yes I'm being lazy, apologies) wonder if anyone could tell me if it worth the three hours?
Or is it just going to recap the reasons for the disaster, go over the 'normalization of deviance' etc, that I'm sure most people on this forum are familiar with.

I'll get to it sometime myself but not any time soon.

Best Regards,
Nic

[catdlr]

it's available here in the States on Apple TV

https://tv.apple.com/gb/show/the-space-shuttle-that-fell-to-earth/umc.cmc.6a28jok91ttfbk258blujtz9j

[jacqmans]

wonder if anyone could tell me if it worth the three hours?

I have seen the first 2 episodes, as BBC-2 is available here in the Netherlands.

It is definitely worth every second of it, highly recommended for everyone to see this, as it has some never before seen footage and interviews with crew members families and kids, recalling what happend during the mission...

Also NASA astronauts, workers and technicians tell their story including Mr. Wayne Hale.

So please do watch this !!

[john57sharp]

I have to agree, this series is very well worth a watch. It's a hard watch, certainly, but very interesting.

I'm sure this is answered elsewhere, and I'll go look, but given that a different response to the initial discovery of the foam impact might have flagged up a very real danger, are there any realistic rescue scenarios for this crew, or were they doomed from the start?

Watching the series, you come away with a suspicion that maybe there was nothing to be done, except pray, and play it down in case the prayers got answered.

John

[john57sharp]

Having a bit if a long night (not related to watching this!) so I did some reading on the various forums here, which led me to the actualmaccident report. One of the Appendixes contains some “what-if” scenarios that NASA officials wrote up after the event to document some possible rescue options.

Link here for anybody interested https://history2.nasa.gov/columbia/reports/CAIBreportv2.pdf then it's D.13

John

[Mogster]

The documentary is excellent, really recommend it. The final episode detailing the investigation did feel a bit rushed. A 4th episode may have been in order.

Ars Technica article summarising the suggested rescue option using Atlantis below. I’m unsure how practical this would have been in reality but after watching the documentary it does make a slightly emotional read, and I’m not an emotional guy…

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

As an astronomer the photographic options seemed unlikely to me and the possibilities overblown, both via ground and via satellite. However the fact they didn’t fully explore that avenue is odd. I also don’t understand why the crew going outside to view and photograph the potential damage was dismissed so readily. There is mention online of trials that indicated stuffing material from a space suit into the hole may have proved just enough. I can’t find too much about this however, so it may just be apocryphal.

[Blackstar]

Ars Technica article summarising the suggested rescue option using Atlantis below. I’m unsure how practical this would have been in reality but after watching the documentary it does make a slightly emotional read, and I’m not an emotional guy…

In 2003 I was an investigator for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. I was working in Houston when we brought in the team that had looked into the rescue option during the investigation. There were not a lot of people in the room for this briefing, and it was considered sensitive, because they had looked at if NASA could have saved the crew if they had done everything right. I was lucky because my position in the investigation gave me a lot more access than some of the other investigators. I remember sitting against the wall and there was some NASA official sitting at the table in front of me. And as the briefing went on, he kept tearing little pieces off his styrofoam coffee cup until he had shredded it almost down to its base. Things were a bit tense.

[hartspace]

Does anyone know if this documentary is the same as "Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight" that CNN is showing starting April 7th?  I've seen references to the CNN doc being a CNN/BBC co-production.

[AnalogMan]

Does anyone know if this documentary is the same as "Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight" that CNN is showing starting April 7th?  I've seen references to the CNN doc being a CNN/BBC co-production.

This is the final credit screen from the first episode of the BBC shown series.  A Mindhouse production for BBC and CNN.

[Blackstar]

Parts 1 and 2 tonight (April 7):

https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2024/03/07/cnn-surveys-space-shuttle-columbia-the-final-flight-in-new-cnn-original-series/

I'm recording it for later, but just caught the segment about the request for better imagery during the flight and now I'm really mad.

[sdsds]

Includes interviews with Sean O'Keefe, Bob Cabana and Wayne Hale, among others.

[Star One]

Seen all three episodes and it makes you angry in many ways. Seems like it was another case, as so often in the history of engineering large scale projects, of management ignoring what their engineers were telling them.

[Kansan52]

What I remember from the CAIB report is the Imagery people worked their weekend off because the foam strike seemed bad.

[Blackstar]

What I remember from the CAIB report is the Imagery people worked their weekend off because the foam strike seemed bad.

The second episode deals with that. In short, the engineers were told to assess the foam strike. They determined that they could not do an analysis without better data. They believed that the only possible better data was "national" (non-NASA) imagery of the orbiter. They started an effort to obtain that. Then it was shut down by the mission manager, Linda Ham. The documentary did not include any discussion with her. I wonder if they tried to contact her? It does explain why she may have shut down that effort, because obtaining the imagery would have disrupted the mission.

[Emmettvonbrown]

I had written an alternate history of the Columbia disaster. And doing my research, I dug into the tracking camera issues.
Long story short
There were two "208" tracking cameras: E-208 and ET-208. Only the second saw the impact: bad luck, despite all the efforts of Oliu and others the resolution was not good enough to make an emergency case strong enough to "raise alarm" with Linda Ham and the rest of the chain of command across NASA.

As for E-208: it was much more powerful and could have done it... but when Oliu team watched the ascent film, they found it to be hopelessly blurred. The camera was in poor shape.

A case could be make that the Shuttle ascent tracking camera network had been badly neglected and underfunded during the Goldin years, when NASA Shuttle budget was cut by 20 - 25% (from memory, and I'm not starting a flame war or a finger pointing game here).

[woods170]

What I remember from the CAIB report is the Imagery people worked their weekend off because the foam strike seemed bad.

The second episode deals with that. In short, the engineers were told to assess the foam strike. They determined that they could not do an analysis without better data. They believed that the only possible better data was "national" (non-NASA) imagery of the orbiter. They started an effort to obtain that. Then it was shut down by the mission manager, Linda Ham. The documentary did not include any discussion with her. I wonder if they tried to contact her? It does explain why she may have shut down that effort, because obtaining the imagery would have disrupted the mission.

Emphasis mine.

To me, that's always been a b*llsh*t argument. "National" imagery of the shuttle (with suspected damage to the primary heat shield as the driving force) was obtained for STS-1 as well. Getting Columbia in the proper attitude at the right time for that was most definitely a disruption to the STS-1 mission. Likely more so than it would have been for STS-107, due to the jam-packed flight plan for STS-1. But nobody hesitated back in 1981, unlike several of the managers working the STS program in 2003.

[Star One]

What I remember from the CAIB report is the Imagery people worked their weekend off because the foam strike seemed bad.

The second episode deals with that. In short, the engineers were told to assess the foam strike. They determined that they could not do an analysis without better data. They believed that the only possible better data was "national" (non-NASA) imagery of the orbiter. They started an effort to obtain that. Then it was shut down by the mission manager, Linda Ham. The documentary did not include any discussion with her. I wonder if they tried to contact her? It does explain why she may have shut down that effort, because obtaining the imagery would have disrupted the mission.

Her absence throughout it is very noticeable.

[Blackstar]

But nobody hesitated back in 1981, unlike several of the managers working the STS program in 2003.

There was 30 years in between.

Obtaining imagery of a shuttle in flight was not a normal procedure or requirement. It is unclear how often it was done, but the documentary mentions an instance where it was done on an earlier flight and was inconclusive, apparently leading to an attitude that a lot of effort had been expended for no benefit, so they were reluctant to do it again.

[Blackstar]

A case could be make that the Shuttle ascent tracking camera network had been badly neglected and underfunded during the Goldin years, when NASA Shuttle budget was cut by 20 - 25% (from memory, and I'm not starting a flame war or a finger pointing game here).

It is a little difficult without some digging to figure out what all of the volumes of the CAIB are. However, I think that there were later published multiple appendices and at least one covered the tracking camera network. It had been allowed to degrade over time. I believe that one example was a tracking camera located in Cocoa Beach that had its view obscured when a new building went up. NASA did not move or replace that camera.

[Jodie Peeler]

The documentary did not include any discussion with her. I wonder if they tried to contact her?

The second episode as aired on CNN has a card at the very end that reads:

Attempts to reach Ron Dittemore
and Linda Ham were unsuccessful.

Jodie Peeler

[Star One]

The documentary did not include any discussion with her. I wonder if they tried to contact her?

The second episode as aired on CNN has a card at the very end that reads:

Attempts to reach Ron Dittemore
and Linda Ham were unsuccessful.

Jodie Peeler

I’m guessing I must have missed that on the BBC showing.

[woods170]

But nobody hesitated back in 1981, unlike several of the managers working the STS program in 2003.

There was 30 years in between.

Obtaining imagery of a shuttle in flight was not a normal procedure or requirement. It is unclear how often it was done, but the documentary mentions an instance where it was done on an earlier flight and was inconclusive, apparently leading to an attitude that a lot of effort had been expended for no benefit, so they were reluctant to do it again.

Have you ever read Rowland White's book "Into the Black"?

[Blackstar]

But nobody hesitated back in 1981, unlike several of the managers working the STS program in 2003.

There was 30 years in between.

Obtaining imagery of a shuttle in flight was not a normal procedure or requirement. It is unclear how often it was done, but the documentary mentions an instance where it was done on an earlier flight and was inconclusive, apparently leading to an attitude that a lot of effort had been expended for no benefit, so they were reluctant to do it again.

Have you ever read Rowland White's book "Into the Black"?

Yes. I'm also cited in the footnotes.

[Emmettvonbrown]

Attaching the little story I wrote. Can't publish it, the events are too recent and the subject too sensitive (even if if I'm 100% respectful in the story - you never know).

[Blackstar]

http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-041224a-space-shuttle-columbia-final-flight-cnn-documentary.html

[Durham Park]

It is far too soon and far too emotional a subject but I would love to see one of these rescue stories dramatised on screen one day if it can be done respectfully.

[Emmettvonbrown]

To the 50 people who downloaded this: feedback is welcome, just drop me a message in my forum mail box. Cheers !

[Blackstar]

I have not watched eps 1-3, but I just watched most of ep 4 about the investigation.

Although it looks like it was really well done, I didn't like how they approached the investigation episode. They chose the style of not having a narrator and simply having the interviewees tell the story. The problem is that then the producers have to use what they are told rather than having somebody explain what was going on. This can come at the expense of both details and context.

What I wished they had done was explain more of the CAIB story, the independent investigation. They had on CAIB board member Steve Wallace, but nobody else from the CAIB side. And they did not really explain what the CAIB was, how it was created, or how it did its work. So the way they told the story is that the key details that pointed to the foam strike and the hit on the RCC just sorta happened, rather than them being uncovered as part of an investigation that at times was at odds with NASA. This created a somewhat distorted view, a deterministic narrative that the outcome of the investigation was just pre-determined, rather than the result of a lot of people working on it. For instance, it is presented as if there were NASA engineers who were concerned about the foam strike, and then other NASA people who were not concerned. And then, voila, the evidence was uncovered and presented. But the way it happened was that CAIB board members and investigators (like me) dug through evidence and conducted interviews and tried to get to the bottom of what happened, and we then forced NASA to confront the issues.

As one example, the documentary shows only the final test of foam hitting the RCC panel at the test facility at San Antonio. But that was actually one of a bunch of tests that were done. I witnessed one of the tests prior to that one when foam was shot against a lower section (I think it was a landing gear door taken from Enterprise). The investigation gradually worked up to a higher-fidelity test, going for the correct angle and an actual RCC panel as opposed to a plastic mock-up. Before we did that test, there was actually some pushback from NASA, because if I remember correctly they only had two of those RCC panels, they took many months to manufacture, and they were majorly expensive. (I cannot remember, but they were something like $750,000 apiece, so that test was going to cost NASA a lot of money.) NASA pushed back and CAIB said no, do the test. They did the test and blew a big hole in the RCC.

What the episode got right, although they did not say so explicitly, was that the math behind the foam strike was pretty simple. It was F=MA. It did not matter if it was 2 pounds of rock or 2 pounds of foam, the impact energy was the same. But people could not wrap their heads around that. So that expensive RCC foam strike test that the CAIB told NASA to do was as much about psychology as it was about physics. Once there was a big hole in that piece of RCC, nobody could deny that foam could do that anymore.

I will have to watch the series from the first episode. But I need to be in the right frame of mind to do so.

[sdsds]

In general I give the CNN presentation an "A-" grade. There were no glaring omissions, but coverage of details was uneven.

Regarding the rescue mission option, Mark Kelly handled that well. Regarding the failure to characterize the earlier STS-112 foam strike as an In-Flight Anomaly, the presentation did not connect the dots regarding the Shuttle Program Manager and the Chair of the Mission Management Team having been pivotal in that earlier erroneous decision. Regarding the option of flying a modified re-entry profile, kudos to the documentary producers for showing the footage of the question asked by Marcia Dunn (Associated Press) and answered at the Flight Day 16 Entry Status Briefing.

[Blackstar]

In general I give the CNN presentation an "A-" grade. There were no glaring omissions, but coverage of details was uneven.

Having only seen about 25% of it so far, I agree with your grade. They were clearly leaning more heavily on the emotional story than a factual retelling. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does leave some things untold. For instance, they could have dug more deeply into Sean O'Keefe's role in all of this. After all, he was the NASA administrator, and previous NASA administrators did not fare well after major accidents. (I'm not saying that he was culpable, only that this subject could have deserved more attention.)