Dziś 65. urodziny obchodzi
Joe Frank Edwards.
Wszystkiego najlepszego
Był pilotem podczas misji wahadłowca 25 lat temu.
https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=800.msg181448#msg181448369. człowiek w kosmosie.
Jego lot trwał 8d 19h 46m 54s.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/edwards_joe.pdfhttp://www.spacefacts.de/bios/astronauts/english/edwards_joe.htmhttp://www.astronautix.com/e/edwardsjoe.htmlhttps://www.worldspaceflight.com/bios/e/edwards-j.phphttps://mek.kosmo.cz/bio/usa/00369.htmhttps://www.kozmo-data.sk/kozmonauti/edwards-jr-joe-frank.htmlhttps://www.astronaut.ru/index/in_pers/13_032.htmhttps://www.april12.eu/usaastron/edwards369ru.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_F._Edwards_Jr.
https://weebau.com/astros_us/edwards_joe.htmhttps://www.nasa.gov/history/SP-4225/documentation/mission-summaries/sts89/biographies/biographies.htm#edwardshttps://news.va.gov/85918/veteranoftheday-navy-veteran-joe-f-edwards-jr/WP
https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5004.msg181396#msg181396Rescue of Columbia A Hindsight Dream
By David S. Hilzenrath March 16, 2003
Driving home from the funeral of Columbia astronaut Michael P. Anderson, former space shuttle pilot Joe Frank Edwards Jr. reflected on one thing NASA didn't do, one thing that might have made a difference.
While Columbia was still in orbit, NASA management rejected the urgings of its own engineers to seek high-resolution images of the shuttle to assess whether it had been damaged by debris during liftoff. That decision became a focus of the board investigating the disaster even before last week's revelations that NASA also spurned offers from the nation's top-secret spy satellite agency to provide just such images.
Edwards said he's baffled.
"This was a stone left unturned, and it is very un-NASA-like to leave stones unturned," said the former astronaut. "To not have pointed an asset at Columbia to try to ascertain if any damage had occurred to it during ascent I think is unconscionable."
The breakup of the space shuttle as it plunged through the upper atmosphere on Feb. 1 has confronted NASA with a searing question: Had it foreseen disaster, could it have done anything to save the seven astronauts aboard Columbia? Several astronauts and engineers emphasized in interviews that any improvised effort to get the crew home safely would have required NASA to quickly diagnose the problem.
NASA's decision to forgo potentially pivotal information seems to reflect tensions inherent in the agency's mission and culture, in which the acceptance of deadly risks goes hand in hand with a never-say-die spirit, and a concern for safety is balanced against budgetary and technical practicalities.
Many people in NASA hew to the can-do attitude reflected in the movie "Apollo 13," based on the story of the engineers and astronauts who improvised their way out of a potentially fatal crisis during a flight to the moon in 1970. In Hollywood's version, a NASA flight director declares, "Failure is not an option." The agency identified so deeply with the credo that visitors could find it inscribed on key chains in a NASA gift shop.
Yet there was little of that determination in the sober assessment that Ronald D. Dittemore, the space shuttle program manager, gave at a news briefing hours after Columbia disintegrated. If the shuttle's protective tiles were damaged when Columbia reached orbit, Dittemore said, "there was zero that we could do about it."
For that reason and others, Dittemore said, NASA decided against asking for military telescopes or intelligence satellites to try to assess the damage.
Other NASA officials said that instead of accepting defeat, NASA would have gone into an Apollo 13 mode of intense troubleshooting if it realized the shuttle was in peril.
"I fundamentally, absolutely reject the proposition that there was nothing that could have been done on orbit," NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe said. "There is positively nothing that would have been spared to try to find out what to do to avoid catastrophe."
NASA spokesmen declined to make officials available to discuss how the agency might have tackled the problem.
"The cause of the accident is not yet determined, so I don't want to put someone in the position of speculating on what could or couldn't, should or shouldn't have been done," NASA spokeswoman Eileen Hawley said.
Though the answers to the question of whether the astronauts could have been saved may be unknowable, more than a dozen former astronauts and engineers described the kinds of desperate solutions NASA might have considered.
Disaster Training
During thousands of hours in a flight simulator, Edwards trained on disaster scenarios -- with names such as "Terror" and "Nightmare" -- that included engine failure, the loss of hydraulics, electrical short circuits, fire, and unusual heating in the landing-gear wheel well. He even practiced changing the angle at which the shuttle entered the atmosphere to compensate for damage to the orbiter's heat shield.
But attempting to bring a presumably crippled Columbia back to Earth would have taken him into uncharted territory, Edwards said in an interview.
"I don't believe that we ever trained for anything that was this severe -- anything that appears to be as severe as this was," he said. "If it's a scenario where . . . there's no possible way you could get back to Earth, where's the training value in that?"
"You assume the integrity of your vehicle," said Winston E. Scott, a former test pilot who flew on shuttles in 1996 and 1997 and has a background in engineering. "You don't train for a wing falling off. Likewise, you don't train for a whole bunch of tiles missing because . . . there's essentially nothing you can do about it."
The closest they came, some astronauts said, was anticipating what to do if the payload bay doors didn't close or an antenna wouldn't retract automatically. They were prepared to jump out of the shuttle and parachute to safety in a life-threatening emergency, but only during an aborted ascent or once the shuttle reentered the atmosphere and was flying "slow, low and under control," as Scott put it.
Acceptable Risks
Like the NASA administrator, astronauts invoked the spirit of Apollo 13, saying that despite the odds NASA would have rejected fatalism or defeatism.
They also emphasized that they signed up for space flight knowing that their jobs could kill them.
"We're people that will accept this kind of risk," said neurologist Roberta Lynn Bondar, payload specialist on a 1992 flight. "We're not the average earthling here."
While walking in space, astronaut and physician J.M. "Jerry" Linenger said he didn't dwell on the possibility that micrometeorites traveling 18,000 mph might strike and kill him, because there was nothing he could do about it. The threat was more immediate when he was in the Russian space station Mir in 1997 and fire broke out. Linenger recalled thinking: "I'm not going to make it back, but that's okay, Jerry, it's okay to be moving on to another world."
Linenger had said his goodbyes on the ground, when he parted from his pregnant wife and son. "And, you know, what a way to -- if you got to die, that's probably dying for the right cause, in my mind."
The same attitude colors Linenger's reflections on Columbia.
"You look at all of the things you can control. But part of the calculation is, okay, what if, you know, worst-case scenario is we do have tile damage that is going to be critical during reentry. If there's nothing you can do about it, it's probably not worth spending too much time concentrating on it."
Yet a conflicting impulse threads through Linenger's reflections. Given the near-miracles NASA performs to fly the shuttle, "there's probably someone who might be able to figure out a way to get a crew back when you've got a problem."
Finding the Problem
Those interviewed agreed almost to a person that in hindsight they would have wanted whatever images they could have gotten of the damage to Columbia using telescopes or satellites.
"Surely to goodness they would want to know what the characteristics were" of the damage caused by the debris, Bondar said. Seeking available imagery, she said, would have been all the more worthwhile because the camera that would have given NASA the best view of the debris strike during the launch produced only blurry images.
"You've got to find that there is a problem before you can attack it," said Edwards, a veteran fighter and test pilot who flew to Mir in 1998 and lost six close friends on Columbia.
Even if the images couldn't have saved Columbia's crew, they might have helped spare future astronauts a similar fate, and they might have helped investigators figure out what destroyed Columbia, a puzzle that has grounded the rest of the shuttle fleet and delayed work on the international space station, astronauts and engineers said.
Dittemore said on Feb. 1 that, based on experience, "we didn't believe the pictures would be very useful to us."
What's more, NASA officials have said, the agency didn't think the crew was in jeopardy.
The Columbia astronauts did not have a ready means to inspect the damage themselves. Columbia lacked the mechanical arm that a space-walking astronaut might have used as a platform to reach the shuttle's underside. Without any handhold, such a space walk would have been difficult.
But former astronaut Mary Ellen Weber, who flew in 1995 and 2000, recalled preparing for a somewhat similar contingency. If doors underneath the shuttle failed to close over a set of special connections after the external fuel tank fell away, astronauts planned to sling a tether around the orbiter so an astronaut could go out and manually close the doors, Weber said.
Had NASA concluded that the shuttle was in danger, the agency could have bought time by directing the astronauts to conserve air, power, the propellant used to maneuver the spacecraft, and other "consumables," some astronauts said. To reduce respiration, the astronauts might even have tried to sleep more.
"More time in space gives you more time to come up with solutions," Scott said.
Rescue Scenarios
On the ground, teams of troubleshooters could have worked on parallel tracks, several former astronauts and engineers said.
While one team studied ways to extend the crew's life through conservation, another could have worked to accelerate the launch date of the shuttle Atlantis, which had been scheduled to lift off as soon as four weeks after Columbia's planned return.
A third team could have explored ways to resupply Columbia in the interim by unmanned rocket.
"Now that's not an easy thing to do, because we don't have any modules built to do that, but under the circumstances I'm sure we would do our best to put something together," said Jeffrey A. Hoffman, a veteran of five shuttle missions who is now a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Several former astronauts suggested that another team might have studied ways to change the "profile," or angle, of the shuttle's reentry to minimize the damaged area's exposure to the intense heat that investigators believe penetrated Columbia's left wing. Jettisoning some of the shuttle's contents could reduce its weight and ease the stress of reentry, though some experts said that was unlikely to make much difference.
At the Feb. 1 briefing, NASA's Dittemore rejected the suggestion that changing the "angle of attack" could have saved Columbia if it was missing tiles. "We can't minimize the heating to the point that it would somehow not require a tile," he said.
NASA officials said seeking refuge on the international space station was not an option because Columbia could not have reached it.
Rushing a rescue shuttle into space, if it were physically possible, would involve cutting corners on safety, posing more difficult questions. "Is it the right decision to launch another shuttle before you understand what happened to the last shuttle and endanger, you know, five other people, or four other people, and another space shuttle?" Linenger said.
If a rescue shuttle reached Columbia, getting Columbia's crew to the rescue ship would be another challenge. A tether strung between the orbiters could break or cause the orbiters to collide, said Kathryn D. Sullivan, a veteran of three shuttle missions and a spacewalk. Sullivan said she was not sure that existing jet packs would give astronauts enough power and control to ferry others through the void.
At the end of the desperate brainstorming, would anything have worked?
Princeton University engineering professor Robert F. Stengel, who worked on NASA's Apollo and space shuttle programs in the 1960s and 1970s, said, "My feeling is, if there was a big hole in the heat shield or the tiles . . . at that point they were doomed."
But Wallace T. Fowler, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas and director of the Texas Space Grant Consortium, offered a more optimistic "guesstimate." If NASA had started working on solutions immediately after Columbia reached orbit, "my guess is . . . probably a 20 percent chance, or something like that, that we might have gotten those folks back alive."
Staff writer Eric Pianin contributed to this report.
Former astronaut Joe Frank Edwards Jr., left, salutes at the Arlington Cemetery burial of Columbia astronaut Michael P. Anderson. Joe Frank Edwards Jr., above, preparing to board the space shuttle Endeavour before a mission in January 1998. Edwards, after last month's loss of Columbia, said he could not understand why NASA didn't order pictures of the shuttle in orbit if a problem was suspected.Columbia breaks up in the upper atmosphere on its way to Florida on Feb. 1. Wreckage was scattered in Texas and Louisiana.Winston E. Scott, rear left, was on the Columbia crew in late 1997. Scott observed after the fatal flight last month: "You don't train for a wing falling off. Likewise, you don't train for a whole bunch of tiles missing because . . . there's essentially nothing you can do about it."
Joe Frank Edwards Jr., far right, joined Michael P. Anderson -- directly behind Edwards -- on a 1998 flight of the space shuttle Endeavour. Anderson died in the Columbia accident on Feb. 1.Astronaut J. M. "Jerry" Linenger, musing on whether another shuttle might have been sent to rescue the Columbia crew, said: "Is it the right decision to launch another shuttle before you understand what happened to the last shuttle and endanger . . . four other people, and another space shuttle?"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/03/16/rescue-of-columbia-a-hindsight-dream/6ade397a-fa11-4f0b-af8d-191e83395e9d/https://twitter.com/spacemen1969/status/16214043681081589793 février...
Joyeux anniversaire (65) à Joe Edwards 🎂🎂🎂
(1 vol : STS-89 comme pilote soit 8 jours 19 heures 41 minutes dans l'espace)
Wątek: JF Edwards, Jr. 03.02.1958 (Przeczytany 918 razy)