The mystery of the Columbia crew crash intensifies * The weekly "Aviation Week" today reveals high-quality photographs of the shuttle "Columbia" a minute before the breakup that reveal severe damage to the left wing near the body of the shuttle
Photographs confirm: severe damage to the left wing of the ColumbiaHigh-quality photographs of the shuttle "Columbia" a minute before the breakup reveal severe damage to the left wing near the body of the shuttle, as the aviation and space weekly "Aviation Week" reveals.
According to the report, the photos were taken by a control camera of the US Air Force base in New Mexico. The spokeswoman for the base confirmed that telescopes at the base took pictures of the shuttle before it broke up, which were handed over to NASA. The weekly "Aviation Week" specializes in space technology and aeronautics.
Almost a week after the "Columbia" disaster, and the mystery of the ferry crash is still far from being solved. Yesterday, NASA researchers decided to reject the leading hypothesis - the piece of insulation that broke off from the fuel tank during launch and hit the shuttle's wing.
A source close to the investigation of the crash told the weekly that the photographs show the damage in the front part of the wing, where it connects to the body of the shuttle. It was also reported that the photos show the shuttle's auxiliary rocket engines in action, while they were trying to correct the shuttle's tendency to the left side during entry into the atmosphere, a tendency caused by the damage to the left wing.
These data, about the inclination of the shuttle to the left and about the operation of its auxiliary engines, have long been confirmed in the daily reports given by NASA about the progress of the investigation. All the while, by the way, the body of the shuttle and the right wing appeared to be in good condition.
The photographs, it was reported, were sent for testing at the NASA Space Center in Houston. Likewise, NASA instructed the personnel of the tracking base not to provide any additional details on the matter to any party, until the inspection of the photographs is completed. The director of the shuttle program, Ron Ditmore, said at a press conference that the investigation is now focused on the attempt of the automatic control systems to maintain the stability and speed of the shuttle, while the left wing was under increasing and increasing loads.
The first theory was that the impact of the part that was detached from the tank caused cracks in the insulation tiles, which protect the body of the shuttle from the enormous heat during entry into the atmosphere. Dittmore presented reporters with a piece of the spongy insulation material. He explained that the piece of insulation was light - only XNUMX kg - and its speed was slow. "At the moment it doesn't seem logical that such a piece could have led to a disaster", he said, "there must be another reason". NASA did not believe in the insulation part theory from the beginning, but it was decided to test it rigorously in the absence of other explanations.
The researchers hope to find among the fragments computers containing the flight data. This is to find out what exactly happened in the last 32 seconds before the crash. This is the period of time that passed from the moment the connection with the shuttle was lost until it broke up.
The researchers hope that in these 32 seconds the computers continued to record the flight data. It is possible, NASA believes, that some malfunction in the computers caused the shuttle to enter the atmosphere at too high a speed. The same presumed fault also caused overly sharp steering corrections when the shuttle began to veer to the left. Another new hypothesis - although less likely - is that the shuttle hit "space debris" such as fragments of satellites or pieces of old spacecraft.
Although about 12 fragments have been collected so far, including the nose and parts of the wings, no part that points to the cause of the disaster has yet been found. The shuttle consists of two million parts, so the researchers assume that it is only at the beginning of the journey. And in the meantime, the authorities began to deal harshly with the collectors of souvenirs from the ferry. In an attempt to deter, a 43-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man were arrested and charged with theft of government property. The authorities called on everyone who has fragments from Colombia to return them by this afternoon - otherwise they will be punished.
Experts told the weekly that the damage to the front part of the wing could have been caused by the impact of a foreign body, or as a result of a structural failure - a crack, for example - that was aggravated by the extreme heat conditions during entry into the atmosphere. Another possibility is that the wingtip fell off at this stage of the landing for an unknown reason. In any case, the damage to the wing significantly affected the nature of the shuttle's flight and caused local heating - a deadly combination of two variables that caused the wing to tear or the shuttle to depart from the exact angle at which it should fly when entering the atmosphere.
At the moment it is not clear whether the reports of insulating foam that detached from the external fuel tank during launch, and damaged the left wing, are related to the damage seen in the photographs. Yesterday, NASA officials announced that they are ruling out this theory because the weight of the piece of insulation that allegedly broke off from the tank is too light to cause significant damage to the wing. This opinion was consistent with the initial assessments on the subject, which were given while the shuttle was in space.
Today, on the other hand, senior NASA officials retracted their firm position on this issue, saying that the researchers are still open to any theory regarding the cause of the crash, and that the investigation into the "isolation foam" has not yet been exhausted. If it is now proven that the damage to the wing fits the pattern of a foam impact, then this determination will contradict NASA's assessments that the foam fragments did not retrospectively cause the disaster.
According to the report in the weekly, it is attached to special telescopic cameras, capable of sharply photographing even relatively small bodies floating in space. Therefore, the photographs of the shuttle during its landing, when it was at a height of about 62 km above the earth, were sharp and very clear.
My dream: Israeli and Arab together in space
"My dream is to see an Israeli astronaut and an Arab astronaut fly together in space." This is what former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, told "Maariv" last night in an interview with Emir Gilat in Maariv. Aldrin, a member of the Apollo 11 crew that landed on the moon in July 1969, said in a telephone interview from the US that he is sure NASA will do everything to find out the causes of the Columbia disaster. "Everyone was surprised and upset that this is what happened, after all the effort put into this flight, but everything must be done to continue exploring space," Aldrin said.
Aldrin says that even before Ilan Ramon was chosen for the shuttle crew, he made a proposal to NASA to fly an Arab astronaut and an Israeli astronaut into space together. The attack on the Twin Towers thwarted the idea. "I still dream that my proposal will bear fruit," Aldrin said. "We need to continue reaching the moon, but not as a goal in itself, but only as part of a big plan, which will focus not only on the moon but also on the exploration of Mars and the journey to other destinations in the universe. I do not rule out the possibility that the Israeli flag will finally be flown on the moon." "I know that the Israeli pilots are considered very good. Ilan Ramon was one of them, which made him a person with very good abilities to be in space," adds Aldrin. "I was very impressed
From what I heard about his personality."
Aldrin estimates that the people of Colombia were not aware of what was going to happen. "I guess they didn't understand what was going on. They began to prepare for reentry into the atmosphere, and then the situation began to deteriorate moment by moment. It seems to me that they saw that things were starting to go wrong, and that the situation was going from good to worse and then to worse. But actually, they didn't have much to do."
who killed "columbia"
7.2.2003
By: Amir Oren, Haaretz, Walla
The Israeli Air Force has not had good years, in terms of flight safety, in the last three years. This is a rare achievement: since the death of Major Yonatan Begin and Lieutenant Lior Harari, on March 27, 2000, no fatal air accident has been recorded in the Air Force, not in operations, not in training, not in transport.
Pilots who were used to losing friends, and sometimes also the ground forces they flew, once every few months (and sometimes weeks), almost as if by fate, discovered that it was also possible otherwise; Until the "Columbia" disaster came and the death of Major General Ilan Ramon, this time, as a patient guest of another flight agency, NASA. Ramon was a hero-victim of an accident, and as such he was placed in the public consciousness next to the navigator who has been missing since October 1986 Ron Arad.
The commission of inquiry into the Begin-Harari accident - the crash of an F-16 plane in the Mediterranean Sea during a night practice of helicopter interception - classified it as "aircrew personnel" ("excess motivation in the interception attempt, complacency in performing a sharp maneuver at low altitude at night above the sea, and a poor work method in neglecting data and alerts").
To this main cause of the accident, the committee added "command management contribution" - the absence of the deputy squadron commanders from the days of activity in the wing and the failure to present their content to the head of the training department at the corps headquarters. Following the accident, as the head of the air force's flight safety branch reported a month ago, "a team was established to examine the human factor in flight safety in the air force." This is the factor - air crew personnel (as opposed to mistakes or negligence of ground crew) - which is the basis of three out of five accidents. The percentage is constant even when the number drops, and it does drop steeply; The number of serious accidents in the last decade was only a third of the number in the previous decade, and the small number of accidents for three years gives hope for a further decrease. Not all the conditions are the same, but there is no mistaking the meaning of the phenomenon: the strict adherence to safety and medical tests (vital tests) succeeds in producing results to such an extent that fighter pilots warn that the price of freedom from obeying the laws of immortality of training will be paid in the first hours and days of the transition from routine to war.
And if this is the case in the Air Force, whose character is still Israeli, even if not as wild as before, how is it that at NASA, a heavy and conservative American body, "squared and fixed", a space shuttle explodes again, as if the lessons of the Challenger disaster in January 1986 were not learned? NASA maintains an extremely high level of safety", marveled a year and a half ago the head of the Technology Section in the Space Branch of the Air Force. "The rate of accidents in it is the lowest in industry and government agencies. She sees safety as a complete complex - the employee's driving his car on a weekend is just as important as his adherence to the procedure for mounting the engine to the satellite. The astronaut training planes are more usable and safer than the US Air Force squadrons, from which they came and no longer exist. As part of the preparation of Ramon's experiment, we were required to go through a series of safety surveys to make sure that there was no danger to the astronauts or the shuttle. Every tiny component, every material and color must be approved by NASA.
Every component that may break down is tested in the vibration facility. At NASA they realized that mission and safety are intertwined."
Who, then, killed "Columbia" - an engineering failure, organizational culture, "contribution of management and command" (not "space crew personnel", since the pilot William McCall and his commander Rick Husband were not in control of the vehicle at the time of the breakup)? Are the aviation experts right who claim that it is forbidden to link air accidents to space disasters? Answers to questions can also be found in the field of optics and statistics: ignoring the cruelty of probability, which ends up catching those who run away from it, is an optical error. During that grace period of the Air Force, in the last three years, there have been many incidents of almost being injured. Only last year there were 54 "serious traffic incidents" - fighter jets passed too close, sometimes only 100 meters, either of them or of civilian planes.
The "Columbia" disaster occurred 17 years after the "Challenger" disaster, which occurred 19 years after the "Apollo" disaster. 1 The rate of success in rocket launches - American, French, Russian - hovers around 92%. One out of every 11 launches fails ( And this, coincidentally, is also the failure rate in the "Arrow" experiments.) In the seven "Apollo" launches to the moon, only one partial failure was recorded, in "Apollo 13", but the success of the return of this spaceship to the earth was also due to the fact that, at the time of the accident, it had not passed the point of no return of the journey.
It is possible that the continuation of the landings on the moon, another 10 or 20 times, would also have resulted in a crash there, or a failure to return to the mother spacecraft. In such a case, the astronauts on the moon might have been rescued by the next spacecraft, but only if they survived until its arrival, and provided that it was ready for an immediate rescue . Such standby, for constant availability, is very expensive. NASA is not immune to shortages of national resources. The eagerness to launch the "Challenger" even under borderline conditions stemmed from the desire to prove to the administration, Congress and the public that "we are always ready"; It is certain that a business and commercial consideration then underpinned the decision of the manufacturer of the booster engines, Morton Thiokol, to ignore the concerns about the effect of frost on the engine seals. This is a weak point in the quest to privatize defense industries or industries of similar national importance - market forces may be too reckless, too short-term in their appetite for profit.
The shuttle - "sobbat" is a more correct translation into Hebrew of "orbiter" - was born as a hybrid creature, an interest to answer for NASA between the big initiatives of the flights to the moon and the space station. It was affected, mainly negatively, by the competition between NASA and the American Air Force, a competition in which the CIA also participated in the sixties. At the center of attention was the question of launching intelligence, observation and communication satellites for the needs of the Ministry of Defense, and above all to supervise the missile and nuclear power of the Soviets. As the emphasis shifted from manned photography (U-2 planes) to satellites, the need to bring these satellites into space intensified.
The US Air Force, as the Pentagon's space agent, preferred "disposable launch vehicles"; I mean, rockets. It would be a waste, said NASA, both of the rockets themselves and of satellites that would be lost in launches that would fail; It is better to launch a reusable vehicle, a shuttle, and from it - upon reaching space - the satellites. The new operational requirement, as a carrier of satellites, required a different characterization of the shuttle, in terms of its size and launch method.
NASA's original idea, as a counter to the Air Force's rockets, which are ballistic missiles that are difficult to stabilize and maneuver, was to take off horizontally as a passenger plane, and only then penetrate space as a projectile. The awkwardness of the shuttle, in order to adapt it to military needs, in an era of dependence on communication and intelligence from space, defeated the purpose: now the shuttle can only take off vertically, and only with the power of the rocket boosters attached to it. A malfunction in the launch phase, directly in "Challenger" and perhaps indirectly in "Columbia", increases the risk.
In 1988, the launch of the "Ofek" satellite failed - and an alarming gap was created in the intelligence coverage of an area vital to Israel - when from the coastal road it was possible to observe the shocks of the rocket engine (manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries) of the satellite launcher "Shavit" (manufactured by the Aerospace Industry). The engine could not withstand the load, the "comet" flew like a Scud until near the shores of a Greek island, and the satellite sank into the abyss. It was a costly failure rather than a horrific disaster simply because the payload was not human.
Retired admiral Harold Gaiman, former co-chairman of the commission of inquiry into the attack on the destroyer "Col" in the port of Aden in October 2000, was placed at the head of the commission of inquiry into the "Columbia" disaster; as far as is known, 17 sailors were killed in the explosion, as far as Osama bin Laden's mission is concerned. The "Col" investigation report shows that Gaiman tends to look for the responsibility for an omission or a misunderstanding in the chain of command above the vessel or pilot involved in the incident and to spare the commanders of the vessel, mid-ranking officers, lieutenant colonels or lieutenant colonels. He looked for a "crack" in the armor, or a seemingly innocent "seam" that would lead to a fatal tear in the fabric.
In "Col" he found that the intelligence gathered and decoded in Washington was not processed and distributed properly to the arena; that there was insufficient attention to the security of forces in transit, such as ships on a voyage, which left the home port but have not yet arrived at the fleet in which they will operate; that the spatial command must raise the security of the forces from terrorism at the top of its concern, to a top priority identical to that of the mission itself.
This, of course, is an exaggeration to the point of an internal contradiction, intended to spur the commanders to do more, four and a half years after the attack on the American soldiers' quarters in Riyadh (Khobar Towers, 19 dead), and the effectiveness of the investigative committees is limited. The General Downing Commission, which investigated the attack on the Khobar Towers, was of no use to "Kol", and no previous lessons were learned either. One of the members of the Gaiman Committee now, also an admiral, commander of the US Navy's Security Center, was a third of the commander of the Sixth Fleet during the American involvement in Lebanon in 1983 and experienced the attack on the Marines' headquarters company in Khaleda (more than 240 casualties).
The importance of the event is not in the findings of the investigation, but in its public image, and this has been the case ever since the explosion on the battleship "Maine" (266 killed) in Havana harbor in 1898. More than 100 years and investigations for the most part later, the debate has not yet been decided, if indeed it was an attack - And if so, who keyed the "main" - or an internal accident in the ship's ammunition store? Such a debate, whether it was an accident or an ambush, continues to accompany the Sheitat 13 disaster (Operation "Poplar Song") in Lebanon in September 1997. The big difference is that the Americans did not wait for an unequivocal report, went to war, and expelled the Spanish government from Cuba.
The maritime context - "Maine", "Cole", Admiral Gaiman - is not accidental. The customs of the sea, including the responsibility of the captain, were also copied in the last century to airplanes, and the ferry is seen as a spaceship; The parallel is correct, but not exact, because the ship is not a destroyer and not even a "Titanic", but a submarine. Challenger and Columbia are the Israeli Dakar, the American Scorpion and the Russian Kursk. The ferries, like the submarines, operate in extreme conditions, mostly without accidents; But if a "disgraceful incident" occurs in them, as is the common term at NASA, it rolls downhill, from an "incident" to a fatal "accident".
The William Rogers Commission, after the Challenger disaster, included distinguished figures from the field of experimental flights (Chuck Yeager, the first to fly at supersonic speed) and the group of astronauts (Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride), but its efforts to protect NASA They were thwarted mainly by internal leaks to the "New York Times" and the piercing questions of the scientist Richard Feynman. In addition to the fundamental problems that caused the disaster, an alarming disconnect was revealed between the professional ranks - the engineers - and the management ranks at the three space centers (Johnson, Kennedy and Marshall) and at NASA headquarters, who they claim were not aware of the warnings and would not disregard them in the decision to launch. Following the Rogers report, the status of safety officials at NASA was upgraded and a procedure was prepared for the escape of the astronauts, but only in the final stage of a malfunction before landing, from a height of 20 kilometers, along a mast from the shuttle's bow, and from there by parachute.
Unlike the Rogers Committee, the Gaiman Committee, whose members are mostly members of the military - especially from the field of flight safety - and science, began to act after the publication of the allegations regarding warnings about a concern for the safety of the shuttle. It will deal with the reasons for the disintegration of "Columbia" and the claims of arterial calcification at NASA, but its basic finding does not require waiting for the report: the more spectacular, the more pretentious the human initiative, the greater the disaster - by the power inherent in it, from the Tower of Babel to the Manhattan towers into which hijacked planes crashed, The atomic bomb in the "Manhattan Program" for spaceships. The periods between disasters serve as a mock calm.
The most sophisticated machine cannot be more successful than the person who plans, maintains and operates it; And when the human is in the machine, the risk to both increases. The head of the Air Force, Lt. Col. Ido Nushtan, claims in an internal Air Force magazine that today's aircraft can "fly around the clock and enable many and varied capabilities of flying at high altitudes, at long ranges, at unacceptable hours and with extreme performance. Today, the human capacity of the air crews is the limit." A tired and hungry pilot is dangerous to himself, others and their mission. Other aeronautics also equip the pilots for long sorties with energy pills. Officially, the Israeli Air Force opposes this, and its commanders and doctors say that proper nutrition and sleeping hours are enough, without medicinal stimulants.
Ilan Ramon and 13 of his colleagues (another seven in an attack, six escorted to intercept attackers) flew to Baghdad once, during the day and unexpectedly. The fighter pilots of the next war may operate under more difficult circumstances, and they are not convinced that the corps' resistance to pills will survive the stress of war, especially in transport squadrons and helicopters, if they are required to fly nights and days hundreds of kilometers and back.
The last monkey launched into space, before the first American astronaut Alan Shepherd, was honored with the primordial name "Anush". The manned flights into space, and even to the moon, froze the questions of the need and cost of risking human beings; The disasters dissolved the question. In his last position in permanent service, at the head of the US Army's Inter-Army Forces Command, Admiral Gaiman used to say that he was the "Command General of the Future".
The Gaiman report will greatly influence the continuation of manned space flights; But it is already clear that the advanced air forces believe that the future belongs more and more, although not exclusively, to unmanned aircraft, planes without a pilot, in intelligence and attack missions. As the planes are less manned, the number of casualties in the air will decrease - but not zero. At least twice, last year, unmanned aerial vehicles passed in dangerous proximity, in February to a formation of F-15s and in November to Phantoms. Another 50 or 100 meters, and the achievement of no accidents, nothing to report, would be replaced by black headlines and obituary notices.
