At 09:26 AM 2/10/2003 -0500, you wrote:
If I recall correctly, going to the space station was not an option because of fuel, and the fact that it was in a different orbit....This is so way off topic . . .
Any way . . . If I understand things correctly, Columbia would have had enough fuel and life support to stay up several more days which would have included hooking up with the ISS. NASA has specific rolls attached to each shuttle, Atlantis for instance is a satellite launch and repair facility. Columbia was science. Discovery and Endeavour are ISS service shuttles. Since Columbia was never intended to dock with the ISS, it may have been physically impossible to do so. In drawings I have seen, the shuttles that dock with the ISS have a docking bay in the payload bay.
NASA did not even include the robotic arm for Columbia since none of its payload needed it and the extra weight and space was used by other payloads. The crew may not have even been prepared to do an EVA since this was just an onboard science mission.
If Columbia could have docked with the ISS and if they had significant reason to believe there would be problems, there would have been a lot of options but with no ability to dock and no real reason to expect problems, there wasn't a reason to go to extraordinary reasons.
Now for theory . . . I think all of the existing theories work together to build up for catastrophe.
The falling debris didn't do enough damage to the tiles to cause a problem, but it damaged the heater on the waste water vent. Waste water formed a basketball sized chunks of ice that came loose during reentry damaging tiles. There was enough exposed metal to allow a static electricity charge to build up and set off a "sprite" or upper atmosphere lighting strike further damaging the left wing to a point where friction from the reentry was enough to destroy the orbiter.
Just an idea . . .
Rob
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Rob Miracle
Photographic Miracles
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