Shuttle Columbia Rescue Mission?

[Hotdog]

A great article on NASA's review of how it might could have saved Columbia with a bold and seemingly impossible rescue mission. I'd love to see Hollywood take this one on!

Imagine an alternate timeline for the Columbia mission in which NASA quickly realized just how devastating the foam strike had been. Could the Columbia astronauts have been safely retrieved from orbit?

During the writing of its report, the CAIB had the same question, so it asked NASA to develop a theoretical repair and rescue plan for Columbia "based on the premise that the wing damage events during launch were recognized early during the mission." The result was an absolutely remarkable set of documents, which appear at the end of the report as Appendix D.13. They carry the low-key title "STS-107 In-Flight Options Assessment," but the scenario they outline would have pushed NASA to its absolute limits as it mounted the most dramatic space mission of all time.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/ ... -columbia/

[p51]

They actually had a mission ready just for this exact situation...

[SpaceCanada]

They actually had a mission ready just for this exact situation...

STS-300 (standard) and 400 (HST) series missions? They were designed after Columbia and they were designed for a 40-day turnaround with ISS docking, and this situation required 30 days, no possibility of ISS docking, and assumes they knew about the problem within 48 hours of launch.

Was there another immediate rescue mission plan from pre-Columbia?

[p51]

I'll have to go back and review the documents I still have, but I worked with NASA on a US Special Forces Command (SOCOM) counter-terrorism exercise in the late 90s, and one of the NASA people told us that there was a mission where they could have launched another shuttle to go rescue the first if needed. This was in answer to a stupid question a staff guy from the JFK school at Ft Bragg asked about launching two shuttles at the same time, "Like they did in Armageddon"...