NASA's audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

Adamantium

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/

The untold story of the rescue mission that could have been NASA's finest hour.

The result was an absolutely remarkable set of documents, which appear at the end of the report as Appendix D.13. They carry the low-key title "STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment," but the scenario they outline would have pushed NASA to its absolute limits as it mounted the most dramatic space mission of all time.

I honestly teared up reading this.
Something so honourable, brave and professional about looking at past errors and the pain that entails, and NASA in general.

It would have been harder to pull off than Apollo 13.
It's technical but still very understandable for the layperson to read.

Sir Arthur Daley

Adamantium wrote: »

It would have been harder to pull off than Apollo 13.

Indeed i agree with you, Apollo 13 had a twin turbo and 4 wheel drive with lsd which gave it a 0-100kph in under 2 seconds.

uch

You cant beat the ould LSD

Mr. Incognito

But imagine an alternate timeline

Got as far as here

/closed article

Capt'n Midnight

cloud cuckoo land stuff, too many gambles

they could have tried going to Mir (OK not so easy)

Fortunately, the flight software developed for STS-114's International Space Station (ISS) rendezvous could be adapted to instead rendezvous with Columbia,
...
In order to push Atlantis through processing in time, a number of standard checks would have to be abandoned.
...
Once on the pad, the final push to launch would begin. There would be no practice countdown for the astronauts chosen to fly the mission, nor would there be extra fuel leak tests
...
For example, in researching this article, I was unable to discover the number of times a shuttle has gone through an Orbital Processing Facility, Vehicle Assembly Building, and launch pad processing flow with no errors or faults. Based on the complexity of the machine, I suspect that it has never happened before.

redout

There'd been a better of chance of ET popping up than pulling that off.

One of the shuttle engineers who commented on the article:

The only hope that this plan would have ever had would have been if the plan had already been in place prior to Columbia's launch, as there is no way on this Earth that NASA would have approved a flight with untested procedures that could destroy both orbiters.............even if the entire NASA work force worked around the clock, that amount of work wasn't going to happen in just a few weeks. Sadly, I can't see a path where this would have actually been feasible.