NASA Makes Ready For Future Rescue Missions

If NASA astronaut Steve Lindsey and his crew have their way, the mission for which they've so vigorously trained will never get off the ground.

Sure, that sounds pretty odd for the normally gung-ho astronaut corps, but consider: Lindsey, Mark Kelly, Piers Sellers and first-time space traveler Michael Fossum will be standing by in case the crew of STS-114 must be rescued from orbit.

The STS-114 mission will mark the space shuttles' return to flight, more than two years after Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry over eastern Texas and western Louisiana on February 1st, 2003.

If the worst happens to Discovery in the first shuttle mission since the Columbia tragedy, Lindsey (below) and his crew might be called on to launch in Atlantis in a flight designated STS-300. They would head for the International Space Station -- where, in an emergency, the crew of STS-114 would also head -- to retrieve the astronauts and bring them home.

The rescue plan will be in effect for both STS-114 and the following mission, which Lindsey will lead, STS-121. But the Orlando Sentinel reports a rescue mission would be considerably more challenging for NASA than the original return to flight or its follow-up mission. One of the key questions NASA would have to answer at the highest levels would be: Should we send another vehicle into space without fully knowing what happened to the shuttle in distress?

"You've come to one of the middle-of-the-night questions that people wake up and ask themselves," Wayne Hale, deputy manager of the shuttle program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, told the Sentinel. "This question and the answer are going to depend entirely on what the case is.... I think it will be a national decision."

Could Columbia Have Been Saved?

In the fantasy world of Coulda-Shoulda-Woulda, that question is the one that nags NASA officials even now. Shortly after the Columbia accident, the board appointed to investigate asked NASA if it indeed could have pulled off a rescue mission, had the Columbia crew realized the fatal danger that awaited them upon re-entry. A chunk of insulating foam which fell from the shuttle's external tank on lift-off January 16th, 2003, had punched a hole in Columbia's left wing. As the spacecraft re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, super-hot gas seeped into the damaged wing structure and tore the shuttle apart.

NASA answered the inquiry from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, saying, because the shuttle was flying a rather long mission -- 16 days -- there were enough supplies on board to last the crew of up to 30 days. The space agency might indeed have been able to stage a "snap" launch. Atlantis theoretically could have been hurried to the launchpad, provided that, by the fourth day of the emergency, the Columbia astronauts and Mission Control realized the damage to the shuttle was fatal.

What about flying to the ISS? Nope. Columbia couldn't have done it. The orbit was wrong for such a massive change and Columbia, the first shuttle put into service, was too heavy to make it up to the station's orbit.

The Columbia rescue mission would have meant that Atlantis would have had to match orbits with the stricken shuttle, flying in formation. The Columbia astronauts would have been forced to make a series of daring spacewalks from one shuttle to the other, before Atlantis itself returned to Earth.

The risks would have been mind-boggling. But Lindsey told the Sentinel, "I suspect there would have been a long line of astronauts, saying 'Send me. I'm ready to go.'"

Even so, said Hale, "Pulling off a successful rescue mission in the amount of time we have available is certainly not a guaranteed thing. If there is any other alternative that has a reasonable probability of a happy outcome, I think you would rather avoid that."

The STS-114 Rescue Plan

Assuming that a damaged Discovery could actually make it to the space station so that the crew could be rescued, Mission Specialist Sellers said making ready for a secure flight would be rather like getting ready for any other mission. "When you break down all of the things that you have to do, they're pretty much the same as for the flight you were going to do in the first place," he told the Sentinel. "The difference is in loading people up and transferring crew from the station to the shuttle and modifying the shuttle a little bit."

Atlantis would be modified to accommodate the rescued astronauts. Extra crew couches would be bolted in place. Then of course, there would be the possibility that the rescue shuttle itself might get into trouble. Precautions for getting the rescued crewmembers out of Atlantis in an emergency egress would have to be made. The shuttle would be lighter than normal, given that its projected payload would either not be on board yet or, if it had already been loaded, would be unloaded before the rescue attempt.

Sellers has no illusions about how easy a rescue mission would be -- nor about the likelihood of success. "I think the biggest challenges for STS-300 would be in terms of getting the vehicle [Atlantis] ready to go on time in good shape," he told the Orlando paper. "The people at the Cape have thought it through and say they can do it, but it would be a lot of hard work."

Perhaps tantamount to any rescue mission would be the ability of the stricken orbiter to make it to the ISS. There are, at this point, no plans to rescue a shuttle still in orbit all by itself.

FMI: www.nasa.gov