Lock the doors: Remembering Columbia's final homecoming (2020)

Re:Lock the doors: Remembering Columbia's final homecoming (... by gameswithgo on Friday February 11, 2022 @07:27PM (#30308730)

I've seen many offhand accounts that repair would have been impossible or nearly so. Yet a previous shuttle survive re-entry with a missing tile in part, it seems, due to a metal bracket being in place behind the missing tile and it did a good enough job.

So given that, would it have been impossible to space walk around the shuttle, identify missing/damaged tiles and shove some spare material in gaps? Could the shuttle crew have not carried epoxies designed for this purpose? Obviously it would be a repair that might not work, but at least give you a chance.

I think about this now as well when I see Starship tests that knock tiles off of it's heat shield just from vibrations.

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Re:Lock the doors: Remembering Columbia's final homecoming (... by pfdietz on Friday February 11, 2022 @08:40PM (#30309104)

A tile on the flat bottom of the orbiter had a much lower thermal loading than the carbon-carbon leading surfaces of the wings. That's why they used carbon-carbon there.

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Re:Lock the doors: Remembering Columbia's final homecoming (... by bambax on Saturday February 12, 2022 @05:31AM (#30311652)

I wonder about this too. Instead of a rescue mission, which would have been extremely difficult and risky, as the article well shows, could NASA have come up with a repair procedure?

Maybe it was completely impossible, but the topic is not even discussed.

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