Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2009
- Messages
- 9,560
- Reaction score
- 1,748
"Secret Space Escapes" on the Smithsonian Channel is excellent and describes in great detail manned space near catastrophes that I'd known about, but never heard or read much detail about:
https://corporate.discovery.com/dis...-secret-space-escapes-on-november-10-at-10pm/
One example on the show is the STS-27 tile issue. The Wikipedia entry doesn't cover it in much detail so I'll add what the commander (or pilot?) on that mission said in "Secret Space Escapes" - had it not been for the fact that the one tile that completely came off was one placed over an antenna mounting point, there would have been a burn-through. There was a steel plate in that location that had melted away and the thin aluminum underneath it was in the process of doing so when the heating regime ended. BTW, the commander/pilot interviewed said that during reentry, since the crew knew about the tile damage, he was watching aileron deflections, looking for one continuously up while the other was continuously down. At that point he was going to radio Mission Control and tell them what he thought of their "no problem" damage assessment to get that comment in before they broke up.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27
In this excellent NARCON 2014 video discussing the SSME design, the speaker mentions Eileen Collins' first mission as commander where an OMS burn was required to reach a stable orbit due to multiple SSME issues that could have easily led to a very dangerous abort:
[video=youtube;1eXmx57tGgE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eXmx57tGgE[/video]
Since he didn't mention which STS mission that was, I looked it up and found that it was this one. The Wikipedia entry describes the problems in detail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-93
https://corporate.discovery.com/dis...-secret-space-escapes-on-november-10-at-10pm/
One example on the show is the STS-27 tile issue. The Wikipedia entry doesn't cover it in much detail so I'll add what the commander (or pilot?) on that mission said in "Secret Space Escapes" - had it not been for the fact that the one tile that completely came off was one placed over an antenna mounting point, there would have been a burn-through. There was a steel plate in that location that had melted away and the thin aluminum underneath it was in the process of doing so when the heating regime ended. BTW, the commander/pilot interviewed said that during reentry, since the crew knew about the tile damage, he was watching aileron deflections, looking for one continuously up while the other was continuously down. At that point he was going to radio Mission Control and tell them what he thought of their "no problem" damage assessment to get that comment in before they broke up.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-27
In this excellent NARCON 2014 video discussing the SSME design, the speaker mentions Eileen Collins' first mission as commander where an OMS burn was required to reach a stable orbit due to multiple SSME issues that could have easily led to a very dangerous abort:
[video=youtube;1eXmx57tGgE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eXmx57tGgE[/video]
Since he didn't mention which STS mission that was, I looked it up and found that it was this one. The Wikipedia entry describes the problems in detail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-93
