The Near Tragedy of STS 1
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- Опубліковано 27 тра 2024
- In 1981, NASA launched the first flight of the Space Shuttle, designated STS-1.
There were several issues during the flight that could have led to the loss of the vehicle and two astronauts. - Фільми й анімація
Thanks for this! I knew from back in 1981 about the SRB overpressure knocking tiles off and pushing the body flap, but the RCS oxidizer tank issue and body flap aerodynamics problems were new to me over 40 years later! You might also want to have a look at STS-9, John Young's next Shuttle flight, where they had a hydrazine leak in one of the OMS pods that caused a fire during reentry and landing that was only discovered days later during maintenance.
There's a more in-depth report of the RCS tank issue here: commdocs.house.gov/committees/science/hsy29949.000/hsy29949_0.HTM
They also had an issue with the computer system that delayed their deorbit on STS-9.
Don’t totally understand it, but this almost lead to the total loss of vehicle and crew
The rudder actuators on some shuttles had components installed upside down.
Just read the book “into the black”
That "professional drawing" almost killed me 😂
But seriously: Until today I always assumed the water was only injected for sound suppression reasons. So thanks for this interesting new information!
Many people are in awe of my artistic talent...
The water is for sound suppression, but to prevent vehicle damage from the sound rather than keep it quieter farther away.
Yeah that overpressure is sound, just on the louder side of the scale
I was doing some of the early work on Orion prior to the cancellation of Constellation. When we were assessing development flight instrumentation requirements, one of the greybeard structures guys from NASA was helping us iron out sensor needs. He said we came close to losing STS-1 just on that body flap issue.
Thanks. I love to have verification from people with better sources than me.
I'm learning a ton from this upload ...the in depth analysis of the numerous problems aside from the O ring issues on Challenger, the foam strike on Columbia, and the issues with the capsule design of Apollo 1
They also had a very serious issue on reentry, a improperly installed tile gap filler ducted heat into the left hand wheel well and it casued some damage. Luckily it did not damage the tires.
Great information. You did leave out one detail about why STS-1 had to fly crewed. Since shuttle had no go-around capability on landing, the systems needed to retract the landing gear were eliminated from the design. Since that meant the gear could not be retracted in the event they were accidentally lowered early, the system was designed so there would be no computer control over the landing gear deploy system. Having no computer control meant that the only way to lower the gear was for someone in the cockpit to push the deploy button--this meant there had to be a crew onboard.
I've heard that explanation, but I don't buy it. If you can build software that can fly the shuttle into landing, you can easily have it properly time when to drop the landing gear - there is no "accidentally" in avionics software.
Shuttle could easily have landed by itself. Buran did in 1988.
I think it was more about a "we need astronauts" attitude in NASA.
It's also probably true that one of the early flights might have crashed on landing, because the auto-land was tested and it had some... issues...
@@EagerSpace Later in the program they developed a wiring harness that would have effectively "hot-wired" the landing gear and air data probe deploy switches. If in-flight inspection of the thermal protection system revealed damage that required launch of an emergency mission, the crew would have installed the wire harness and returned on the rescue mission. The damaged Orbiter would be de-orbited from the ground and if it somehow survived entry then the gear and air data probes could be deployed for a landing attempt. It likely would have landed at VAFB to avoid overflight of populated areas during entry.
@@EagerSpace Mars Climate Orbiter
@@EagerSpace I agree with your conclusion regarding the manual landing gear control. There are thousands of ways flight computer errors could destroy the vehicle (and crew).
Glad you mentioned the landing gear that the crew had to ARM and DoWN the gear themselves by pressing those buttons at approximately at or below 50,000 ft or so
I’ve also read that there was a leak in a portion of the TPS that allowed a jet of high temperature gas to blow on structure near one main landing gear. The structure was damaged by the heat and was repaired during refurbishment. But, the damage significantly reduced the load carrying capacity of the structure.
I was in high school on a band trip to FL in 1981, and happened to be there for the delayed STS1 launch.
Several years later I was in college, in my astronautics class, the day after the Challenger disaster. Dr. Seversike who was one of the NASA analysts who were overnighted video and telemetry for analysis, shared his preliminary analysis with us. His initial conclusion was that NASA had no business putting people on solid rockets. They're too difficult to make really safe. To quote him, "NASA has no business man-rating solid rockets."
Your video discussing the startup overpressure shock is just another reason why he was right.
NASA really wanted liquid boosters for shuttle but the development cost was too high and they were under significant pressure to keep the total dev cost under $6 billion (or $5 billion depending on the source). "The shuttle decision" (available online) talks about that era and how cost kept pushing decisions that NASA didn't really want.
Challenger was really a failure of management rather than engineering. Thiokol knew there was only single redundancy in the initial design and they had a new design but NASA didn't want to use it. "Truth, Lies, and O Rings" is a great book that dives into the details.
Great video, very informative and well presented. I still remember the thrill and amazement I felt as a young kid watching Columbia’s first liftoff on TV. Of course I had no idea at the time how dangerous that first flight really was or how close it came to ending in tragedy.
The body flap angle on entry was only one of the STS-1 near-misses due to the blunders made in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Inexplicably, NASA had used CFD which treated air as a "perfect gas," i.e. one which didn't consider all of the effects of high temperature on air properties and chemistry (specifically, density and ratio of specific heats). NASA even fooled itself by "anchoring" its entry CFD models with data taken in a high Mach number wind tunnel, where the "wind" was helium gas. It was the only way to achieve the various flow conditions needed, but helium doesn't have anything like the aerothermodynamic properties of air. In fact, the atmospheric chemistry dependence of entry is such that heat shields designed to slow down in the Earth's atmosphere are actually shaped differently from those for Mars, Jupiter, etc entry vehicles. But getting to the higher engineering level, the launch load on the body flap was so startling that Young later said that had he and Crip known about it, they would have flown to a safe altitude, and then ejected. Crippen and Young were two of the bravest test pilots to have ever made a first flight in any aerospace vehicle - and I've run flight test programs myself, and have known and been friends with many astronauts (from Gemini through today). Those two really had guts.
Boy, YT, you are something else! Less than 40 seconds into the program and two commercials! Great work!
Utterly unimaginable how you would go about and predict the flight characteristics of the shuttle reentry, design the shape correctly and have it go mostly as planned the first time without any prior full scale tests, all with just primitive computers.
I was standing right outside the Launch control center when sts1 was launched. My father in law was an engineer at the space center. When they ignited the boosters the blast was so strong because they weren’t sure how much boost it needed that the concussion was blowing us back and the wind was pushing our clothes back. We were 3 miles from the launch pad and the effects were incredible! I can’t imagine what John Young and Bob Crippen felt.
I never new that...great info and comment. The first comment on this clip said the shuttle wasn't worth the trouble... I'm not sure, maybe, maybe not. I'd like to see cost vs revenue generated. As tragic as the deaths of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia were, all knew the risks involved as have all explorers from Columbus to Everest, etc. This is a great, informative upload. Thanks for sharing your comment.
I am in awe of all of these astronauts from all nations who took the risks that they did. John Young and Bob Crippen here had balls of steel to launch in an an entirely new space vehicle that had only been flown like a glider in earth's atmosphere. I don't believe there has ever been any other launch of an entirely new spacecraft where it was crewed on the first flight. Maybe the USSR did, but I think maybe theirs had a dog as the commander. Lol
Yeah, they were a bit nuts, but that's what test pilots do.
If you look at the early Mercury flights they were flying on poorly testing missiles.
NASA did actually want to test the Return to Launch Site abort mode first before doing a full orbital test, but John Young was pretty strongly opposed, stating that "RTLS requires continuous miracles interspersed with acts of God to be successful" and "Let’s not practice Russian roulette, because you may have a loaded gun there." Given his reputation and that he would be the one who would be flying the thing, NASA deferred to him, and RTLS was never tested in the real world.
@@DaWolf805 it does seem pretty insane that it took John Young to abandon that ridiculous plan. It’s a wonder their weren’t more disasters during the Shuttle era.
Shuttle Buran was uncrewed on its first and only flight.
Fascinating video! We travelled from the UK to watch the launch of STS-1 and began to wonder if we might not get to see it when the launch was scrubbed on 10 April 1981. Luckily they were able to reset everything and launch just two days later and it was spectacular!
Fantastic content as always!
I remember my Senior year our Art Teacher allowed myself and another Student to go into the Library to watch the Shuttle take off. I was so preoccupied with graduating I didn't realize the issues the Shuttle had.
Very good educational video.
Wasn’t it a Sunday???
This video makes me think that Starship safety issues aren't that bad after all.
I'm starting work on a video about abort modes and talking about Starship, shuttle, and dragon. Not sure what the conclusion is going to be yet.
@@EagerSpace Looking forward to it!
@@EagerSpace Starship is going to have all the problems of Saturn V, Shuttle ans Falcon 9 combined. Those guys at SpaceX are good, but this time they've bitten off on way more than what they can chew in one piece. I mean the way it lands is 100x more dangerous than the Shuttle and it has no abort to take a crew capsule to safety. Yeah yeah, where have we seen that before, how that ended?
@@srinitaaigaura How did you determine that the landing approach is 100x more dangerous than shuttle?
The general way to do that would be to do a probabalistic risk assessment or - better - to collect flight history through testing.
A greate video with very clear and informative description! Thanks from Sweden
Great presentation! Thanks for dumbing it down for us normal folks. Very clear. I’d like to see more.
Great video, very detailed!
Thanks.
I remember being worried about the missing tiles. Didn't realize there were all these other issues where they just got lucky.
Very interesting, I always just assumed the maiden flight was a success or had very little problems.
It was! and it did have very little problems
@@chriscushman6580 It was a success.
John Young certainly never mentioned the flight as being a big problem in hisbook "Forever Young". On the other hand, his heart rate never peaked in the most dire situations.
You just assumed it was a success? What does that mean? You didn’t know it was a failure? No you see it was a success like very few others in history of manned space flight and don’t let anyone tell you differently.
@@Ghostshadows306 Yes, the shuttle was cool af but calm down.
The Shuttle was always on the razors edge of disaster. Luckily, they built more than one. It was more trouble than it was worth.
It's technology was almost obsolete almost soon as it started, and it didn't help NASA was complacent with launches after awhile, added up it wasn't a great recipe for success. Losing 2 out of 6 space shuttles not great %, I know only 5 were used in space but Enterprise was built first and used for atmospheric flight so deserves to be mentioned too
@@vintvarner16Yeah but 2/135 is a better percent success, especially concerning space flight, a known risky thing.
Well apparently it was worth it
Otherwise they wouldn't have flown it for 30 years :p
Also what you said above is just wrong
@@vintvarner16 Obsolete? The fuck are you talking about?
Space flight will always be dangerous. It's the nature of the beast.
Very interesting and informative presentation!
One nit: 18:40 Euler should be pronounced "oiler."
This is an amazingly done video. I had actually known of the body flap deflection and the body flap reentry trim issue but not until I saw the heating profile did I realize all the ways the body flap tried to kill them.
John Young actually said that had he known about the body flap deflection he would have ejected on ascent and taken his chances with that fiery hell than risk reentry.
They got so lucky on the body flap. It should have broken, but it didn't.
The especially annoying part is that this could have been tested ahead of time without putting a crew at risk.
@@EagerSpace
One of the rough things about such matters as this is that it instills a little too much confidence in how robust the system is.
So when there is a problem that should have destroyed the orbiter - but didn’t - it ends up creating the expectation that other problems that should have destroyed it will also be okay.
Normalization of deviance sets in.
The diagram you used to show control surfaces pictures a drawing of an S-3, I worked on those for a few years, pretty cool.
Man, lots of good content on this channel!
Thanks.
👍Thank you for the explanation what the Body-Flap does.
I initially thought that this Body-Flap is just a protection shield for the engines during reentry. Now I know! 😉
This is a really great video.
Amazing how Bob Crippen commanded two Shuttle missions in 1985!
1984
They did the aerodynamic analysis but there is always some discrepencies because for high Mach numbers they worked with a reduced model and/or with numerical CFD...
Another one of the reasons why there were astronauts onboard Columbia during her first flight was because the shuttle *COULD NOT* land fully automatically the astronaut corps lobbied against full automation So somethings couldnt be performed without a crew onboard (until they developed the RCO IFM cable after the Columbia accident) these things were:
-APU start/run
-Air Data Probe deploy
-Main Landing Gear arm/down
-Drag Chute arm/deploy (irrelevant to STS-1)
-Fuel Cell reactant valve closure
And as another commenter said a improperly installed gap filler ducted heat into the left main gear well i think it caused the door to buckle
You should also cover STS-9 where John Young landed a shuttle which had a crashed computer and which was also on fire
Anyways the shuttle was an amazing flying machine that unfortunately has a bad reputation which it does not deserve
That's fair.
But it's also fair to note that the crew was trying to use the autoland software on STS-2 and it was not working, and the crew had to take over to avoid a crash.
Wayne Hale refers to this obliquely here: waynehale.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/breaking-through/
@@EagerSpace They tested the system during STS-3 but it was not complete at the time so a pilot would have to take over to perform the touchdown even if everything went okay
During the final approach the autopilot couldnt decide if it wanted to open or close the speedbrake Lousma actually left it on despite this to gather data on its behavior resulting in the fastest landing of the program
I don’t think it was an amazing flying machine. It was a flying death trap.
@@theonlymadmac4771 I don't know if you've seen this chart before:
www.thespacereview.com/archive/3785c1.jpg
I use it in one of my later videos. It's an probabalistic risk analysis NASA did much later in the program. They were happily flying people on shuttle when there was a 1 in 10 chance of losing the crew.
@@EagerSpace 1 in 10? I want to see that video because I don't believe it.
Try and find a space flight where something unusual DIDN'T happen. I'll have to look into that.
First flights are test fights with a lot of unknowns. Unfortunately with something like the shuttle there are no incremental tests -- it is all up and dangerous. I never really trusted this thing, there was no way out for the occupants if something major went wrong or those incredibly fragile tiles were knocked loose or damaged.
The shuttle has a wing reat on esch side to help hold the weight of the shuttle on the pad. Check out any video or picture. It is not just hung from the fuel tank.
Great channel
I remember the first flights the Shuttle was going to have to face the Sun at all times to keep the Tile glue from cracking.
But they came up with a better glue before that would an issue.
Professional drawing caught me off guard. lol
That's a pure miracle if STS-1 landed safely.
12:20 - Question for ya - can this “overpressure” also occur with lightning strikes within a certain proximity?
it can produce overpressure but I expect that the amount would be much, much lower than the pressure from the solid rocket boosters starting.
Amazing that you didn't even bring up the tile damage/loss!!!!
Tile damage wasnt that problematic and the only lost ones were some of the undensified tiles on the OMS pods
Famous mathematician Euler's name is pronounced 'oiler'... yeah, I know... German.
Yep I remember that famous team of mathematical geniuses, the Houston Eulers.
He was actually from Switzerland.
@@francishunt562 Look it up... 60% of Swiss speak German.
John Young said that if he had known what happened with the body flap, he would’ve ejected thus destroying the first orbiter
The bottom line here is that the Shuttle was dangerous from the very first launch. I don't get nostalgic about it. It should have been shut down way earlier than it was. It never delivered on what was promised from the beginning. The Shuttle system trapped us in LEO for over 30 yrs. NASA did the best they could with the budget they were handed to design and operate it.. Unfortunately, it killed way too many astronauts in the process.
1981 press kit only the cover if anything would of been printed in colour - you forget just how much of the printed world was in B&W back then
It's common sense that they wanted the shuttle back. I highly doubt that there was any talk about a water landing.
The more we hear about these birds, the more wonderous it is that ANY made it back to earth in one piece.
Or made it to orbit in one piece
Can I see a show of hands if all of all those who were there for this day? I was there a friend of mine in college his father was in launch control and I got to be in the VIP section which was only I think 2 1/2 to 3 miles away from the pad. Just say it was spectacular and I remembered it all my life
I never heard of this problem until now. Nothing was ever spoke of the RCS.
And strangely now, SpaceX will be attempting to catch Booster 7 return with the chop sticks. As far as sts1, I had heard some of these rumors, wasn’’t sure about them, thanks for the clearing up.
The also had the apu getting too hot. The cooling system malfunctioning caused some excitement on the flight while they were still in orbit about 20 min before their de-orbit burn
I wonder why the launch pad wasn’t equipped with the sound suppression water system during STS 1.
The issue with acoustic chock waves was no news even back then. For instance, Apollo 4 had previously been launched without it and nasa knew very well the consequences of that.
The NASA engineering model said that it wasn't required.
that was fantastic!
On one video it mentions this shuttle launch barely missed part of the tower itself (6M). Can anyone expand on why this happened?
I went back and looked at NASA's mission reports for STS-1 and didn't see that listed as one of the significant anomalies on that flight, and since they listed "difficulty locking doors on some storage lockers" in that list, I think a close miss on the tower would have shown up.
They had in Young the most experienced astronaut (2 Gemini flights 2 Apollo moon missions Apollo 10 and walk Apollo 16 , as well as Skylab)
Eventually the "Water barriers (sausages) in SRB holes" were used as well. I'm not sure if they were used on STS-2, though.
You mentioned the possibility of the RCS oxidizer contaminating the atmosphere if it escaped its system. But is that really possible since it would have to leak the wrong way across a 14.7 PSID pressure? I realize this may be bit naive since many parts of the ECLSS penetrated the pressure vessel, but, anywhere else in the system (outside the pressure vessel) the same fundamental issue still exists (and at much higher pressures, to boot)
I didn't make my thoughts very clear.
Nitrogen tetroxide is a really nasty chemical; it wants to burn or corrode many common materials on contact. That could lead to the corrosion of the orbiter pressure vessel itself or the numerous air-tight fittings that allow wiring to pass into the pressure vessel where the majority of the avionics live. If this happened early on ascent there would have been no pressure differential between the cabin and outside, but even if it happened later any significant air loss may be problematic. Escaping air will also have moisture in it and that will result in nitric acid, which will also want to eat up many materials.
Because of the design of the orbiter, there's no access to the front wall of the pressure vessel; if there's a leak there you can't seal it and if there's significant damage to the avionics you may not be able to return.
Pressure also doesn't work that way. Gases diffuse across _partial pressure_ differentials, which is the pressure the gas would exert if all other gases were removed. The partial pressure of NTO inside a safe habitable space is always going to be zero, so there is always a driving force for NTO to worm its way into the cabin, absolute pressure differential notwithstanding.
The only way the absolute pressure differential would help is if it set up a flowing stream of air that outpaced the diffusion speed of the NTO, but I wouldn't consider that a reliable safety mechanism
These are new to me. I always thought it was ceramic tile loss on ohms pods that was the concern.
The tile loss was a definitely a concern, as they had spent so much development time trying to fix it, but the tiles they lost didn't turn out to meaningful in terms of the safety of the vehicle for this flight.
It still surprises me that the soviet Buran is claimed to be a copy of the shuttle. They managed a fully automated craft, including the landing controls software and hardware apparently much better than the shuttle and used landing engines compared to the shuttle's glider. Considering the Soviets success in its space programs I wonder now who copied whom?
It's pretty clear that the basic design and airframe is a copy, which saves a lot of time when it comes to aerodynamic testing.
The system architecture is better, with liquid boosters and IIRC Energia has a two-wall tank and doesn't have external foam that can come off during flight. It is a bit weird that they went with a side-mount like shuttle, as a top mount would have been easier. And - of course - you could use Energia to launch payloads by itself without shuttle.
The weirdest part of Buran is that is was a meaningless vehicle - they spent a ton of money developing Energia and Buran and flew them twice and once.
A pickup truck looks like a pickup truck. Even halfway around the world. Even if the people don't know of each other.
The jet engines (also used for take off!) were on their prototypes, but not the space vehicle. It was a glider same as the Shuttle.
@@EagerSpace The first test launch of Energia proved side-mounting being a little bit less effective and less simple: when the rocket with that black thing that is an experimental secret military space station thingamabob lifted off, it slightly dipped to the side. The second (and the last) launch had this margin corrected and Energia/Buran lifted straight up
Do you think they tell the crew about these analyses before the next flight
My understanding is that the answer is generally "no" - NASA was trying to get flights off quickly and that meant there was a lot of parallel work going on. The STS-2 crew would be deep in their training when the STS-1 crew was flying.
But I'd love to have a more definitive source for that...
The other reason that to e first flight was manned is because of how they needed the radiators in the payload bay, which might not open, this necessitating astronauts aboard, or if the payload bay wouldn’t close, they would need one of the astronauts to EVA out to close them so it could land.
I don't remember how long they can survive without radiators, but I'm wondering if they can go for a partial orbit and land back at their texas (?) landing site.
@@EagerSpace on STS-1 it was only able to sustain itself on its flash evaporators for about 5 orbits around Earth, and there was no guarantee that weather would permit an emergency landing on such short notice, with an untested automated landing system
It should also be mentioned that the automated flight landing system was untested and they would need to do a flight test with crew as backup before it could be fully certified
They also had to reboot (IPL) the computer shortly before launch.
kinda goofy that they annouce the "launch" of a SRB on the ground during a test like they would a launch
It's funny how the risk of one single shuttle flying over a populated area is looked at differently than the daily risk of airliners flying over communities full of thousands of pounds of fuel. If i had to choose which one id rather be honored to have a spacecraft smash my house into a crater than a pressurized tube full of passengers LoL
If it ever came to something like that, I highly doubt that feeling honored or not would be a big part of your feelings at that time.
By the time a jet liner is that low its been depressurized.
I remember eulers formula from college, Autocad has made me lazy at work
11:00 “let’s watch that one more time so I can show you “ “ 5,4,3,2,1,. Commercial!!!!!!!
I about threw my goddamn phone
Subbed.
The shuttle was really before my time but even so, I have to wonder what the hell they were smoking back then. Makes me wonder how many of them knew they were engineering a bad system and they all just kept going.
You might want to watch this video:
ua-cam.com/video/u-qUrV6Odrw/v-deo.html
@@BB-xx3dv I know the history to some extent - like I say, before my time but it's a popular subject - but there were so many failure modes, so many suboptimal scenarios, in a crazy Heath Robinson design.
Just taking one example, the angling of RS-25s to avoid them smashing into each other from startup transients is the kind of decision you make when the design is beyond your control (albeit as a software developer that's exactly the sort of hack I'd love to talk about it it was mine).
How many other places did people silently make bad choices?
Euler is pronounced like "oiler". Dude was German.
Correct: Euler sounds like Oiler, spoken with a German accent. Leonhard Euler was a Swiss mathemetician.
@@cdl0 Sorry, I always get him confused with Gauss, who *was* German, and whose name Anglophones always similarly mangle (it rhymes with "mouse", not "floors")
@@skonkfactory No problem. Both Gauss and Euler were amazing mathematicians.
@@cdl0 And people mispronounce both of their names!
@@skonkfactory Wikipedia has both phonetic spelling and sound recordings of these names, so nobody has an excuse to get it wrong now. ;-)
Didn’t they also lose a bunch of tiles and the environmental controls were messed up?
I LOST KIN ON THE COLUMBIA DISASTER. We built a chevy, could have built a Cadillac, should have built a Rolls Royce. Would you get on a airplane that killed all aboard every 65 flights?
It wasn't the fault of the Columbia Shuttle itself, the problem was how it was mounted to the external tank which made it vulnerable to impact damage from frozen tank insulation debris. It should have been mounted forward of the tank. RIP Columbia and Challeger
@@kevinhedspeth4303 What about exhaust from the 3 main shuttle engines?
@executivesteps There were designs that had different configurations where the Shuttle would piggy back on a larger reusable boost vehicle that would provide the primary thrust for launch .. the Shuttle only needing to have orbital maneuvering thrusters but this would take much longer to develop and be too costly so they compromised with Shuttle mounted to an insulated tank with solid boosters which unfortunately left the Shuttle vulnerable to debris impact...take a look at the Space Shuttle Atlantis Flight STS-27 in 1988....they almost lost that one to but nobody heard about it at the time because it was a classified DOD flight. The insulation falling off the tank problem was never resolved unfortunately. Elon Musks Starship design is a step in the right direction if it can be perfected. The Starship won't have a falling debris vulnerability like the Shuttle did.
Ahh, so this must be why they were in such an unusually celebratory mood after landing ...
I remember some of the tiles fell off during launch and in orbit
Yes. I probably should have mentioned that - the SRB overpressure also broke a bunch of tiles. NASA said 16 tiles lost and 148 damaged.
My dad was chief program manager on the aft propulsion system - the two pods on each side of the vertical stabilizer.
We were on KSC for sts-1 (very cool btw!)
When the payload doors were opened and the missing tiles revealed, a team of engineers were around the clock calculating the risks and ultimately modified the entry attitude to take more heat off the APS pods. Why?
Inches below the missing tiles and protected only by a thin sheet of aluminum were the fuel tanks required for re-entry burn; therefore they must contain some fuel to function. Part of why the body flap was so extremely hot on reentry - the adjusted attitude would have been more nose up than planned.
Obviously the changes made worked (or at least they didn’t hurt) as the shuttle did land safely.
My dad was at Andrews for the Landing and was able to inspect the orbiter. By his report there were holes burned through the back side around the main engines due to unexpected heating, and he could place his fist inside freely.
I’ve not ever found photos or this or any mention by NASA, so I’d love to learn more about it. He was not prone to exaggeration.
Side note: while I was only in jr high at the time, I distinctly remember learning that either NASA was lying to the media about the risk, or the media did no due diligence to learn of this report was correct.
Start at 1:03:24 to view first look at missing/damaged tiles.
ua-cam.com/video/MjNWwy99Lss/v-deo.html
@@EagerSpace Luckily non of the more critical tiles and particularly non of the RCCs.
Tile damage wasnt that problematic and the only lost ones were some of the undensified tiles on the OMS pods
There were no ejection seats
Columbia had ejection seats for the commander and pilot. They were removed when the shuttle was declared to be operational after the fourth flight.
ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19800015008
I wish i could watch the whole video. It is just too much details and technical :(
The narration at the beginning states that the two astronauts were “strapped into their ejection seats”. The Space Shuttle had NO ejection seats.
For STS-1 through STS-4, Columbia flew with ejection seats. They were removed after that.
See page 9 here: spacepresskit.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/sts-2.pdf
Or Wayne Hale's excellent blog here: blogs.nasa.gov/waynehalesblog/2008/11/12/post_1226523744082/
Most of this information on why they flew manned is dead wrong.
Very interesting.
I would add that there _were_ ejection seats on the spacecraft (it was experimental). Not sure what the windows were for their use, but that probably factored into some of the decisions made in develo[ment.
engineer A: ‘Well, they’ll have ejection seats, so they can survive any failure.’
engineer B: ‘Uh sure?’ - thinking: ‘unless it’s at high Mach, low altitude, in space, or a catastrophic failure… so yeah, they can eject at any time… and survive in 1% of the interesting bits of the flight by doing so…’
Engineer C: Overhearing they can eject ‘Cool - so we can build anything, within reason.’
Yes. IIRC, the ejection seats where originally intended only for the landing phase if something went wrong there, but they were reworked to have some utility on ascent. I don't think any of the astronauts were confident in their ability to survive and ejection and they had a minor effect on the chance of the crew being lost; it went from 1 in 12 with the seats to 1 in 10 without them.
I think the name is extremely misleading. The actual nature of the STS-1 flight, the actual degree of effect the problems which occurred during the mission, seem to be dramatically overplayed to get people to watch this video. This was the very first flight ever of the Space Shuttle, which is why professional military-trained test pilots were used for the two-man crew. Problems were anticipated and professional test pilots are accustomed to dealing with them. For all of the "unknowns" which could have come up, the flight was uncommonly smooth and for the greatest degree, uneventful. In fact, it may have been too successful, as it created a false sense of overconfidence within NASA that did eventually lead to real problems - like Challenger.
Rockets are designed with small margins - typically around 1.2x to maybe 1.5x the expected load - because margin costs mass and that reduces payload. The overpressure on launch exceeded the margin that NASA had designed into the body flap, and it should have failed - if NASA had hit their margin goals for it, it *would have* failed. So they just got lucky that it was stronger than they designed it to be.
Similarly, the aerodynamic model error on reentry was only fine because they had enough margin built into the system. It was a significant mistake, though in this case they may have deliberately put in enough margin.
Neither of these were anything the astronauts could have done anything about.
What was the near tragedy? I couldn't find it in all of this.
If the body flap hydraulics were as strong as they were supposed to be, it would have been damaged and the shuttle could not be controlled on reentry. If the miscalculation of the center of gravity was more than could be dealt with by the elevons, it would have crashed on reentry. If the more tank structs were damaged, the tank would have broken free and the inside of the shuttle flooded with corrosive chemicals.
12:22 you got an email
The Shuttle was a mistake. Too much had to be sacrificed for a too expensive vehicle that promised too much, never lived up to its potential, killed 14 people, and ran a knife edge of disaster every flight.
A huge amount of extraneous material that (arguably) isn't germane to the subject claimed. And that which is is either speculative or trumped up.
If you have specific comments I'd be happy to discuss them.
Space shuttle was an absolute death machine
That's why it was a TEST flight Bro
This video could have been very interesting were it not for the clickbait title and the over dramatization of the issues you presented... None of which seriously place the shuttle in grave danger. The shuttle was conceived with triple redundant systems including the hydraulic... which was never in place as one fully interconnected system but a group of systems... The hydrogen tank braces were engineered in such a way if one cut loose the others still had the strength to deal with the system. We all know there were bigger monsters lurking underneath but not on this flight... by the way the tile loss not mentioned was the biggest concern during the flight and had a statistically much larger possibility for a bad day... and you didn't even bother. Again could have been great but please stop over stating for drama... it really takes away from what was an amazing moment in space history.
I guess we have different opinions. Mine is that, based on reading the detailed analysis of the anomalies and John Young's comment that he would have considered doing RTLS if he knew about them - is that NASA got lucky. The body flap hydraulics ended up being stronger than they were designed to be, which is generally a bad idea for spacecraft since that means it's heavier than it needs to be. The RCS struts stretched but did not fail. The aerodynamic miscalculation was small enough that it could be dealt with.
Remember what John Young said after the flight, that if he'd known about the body flap issue he would have considered doing RTLS abort, which the astronauts hated.
@@EagerSpace adding to that, John Young’s comment before the flight about STS-1 being a RTLS test, “let’s not practice Russian roulette”
@@Oklahomarailfan. Indeed.
The body flap would have been fatal it was completely pure luck it didnt fail... STS 1 per the crew had a 50% chance of being successful... Plus before STS one the booster issues were known I believe there was some O ring issues with STS 1 that was found out post Challenger... There were also missing tiles on STS1 it was again pure luck that none in critical areas... The redundancy in shuttle was overhyped and most astronauts knew this there were alot of dead zones and critical 1 parts that would be fatal and had zero redundancy... .. RTLS was unrealistic and I believe again post Challenger was found to be unlikely to work... Shuttle was an inherently dangerous vehicle mainly because it was a horse designed by committee and became a jack of all trades master of none... It was not the vehicle envisioned by NASA and was a compromise system that sacrifices safely for mission... In fact it was deemed so dangerous by the USAF that I believe post Challenger they never flew a .mission on it again instead relying on Delta, Atlas, and Titan..... This was a huge deal because the shuttle size was the result if USAF requirements...
So crap happened that you would expect from the first flight of such a complex aircraft. So not really worthy of the click bait title. Not really a "near tragedy"
Space shuttle was a complete waste of time orbiting the earth when we should be going to Mars
And all of this from Nassa who went on to kill 14 astronauts with their failed mentality!
Tbf 14 were killed in 2 accidents, if Soyuz carried as many people the Soviets would have killed 14 as well.
This may be the dumbest, most simple-minded, Monday morning quarterbacking analysis in the history of space flight. STS-1 was a test flight. And, in answer to why there were pilots on board, it couldn't land itself!
“Euler” is pronounced “oiler.” I refers to Leonhard Euler.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler