Space Shuttle Columbia -- 2/2/03

by Kirt R. Poovey

All indications at this time are that the space shuttle Columbia sustained damage to some of the heat shield tiles on the left wing at takeoff from a piece of insulation that broke loose from the main fuel tank and struck the wing.  While a single missing tile is not critical, upon entering the atmosphere severe turbulence of supersonic velocities occur around the spaceship. 

At this point it seems that additional tiles were stripped off in this "shake, rattle, and roll" portion of the descent which caused a structural compromise of the wing from the massive heat generated in the descent.  Loss of controls and the structure of the wing then changed the angle of descent and the orientation of the protective tiles of the heat shield, and resulted in the breakup of the shuttle as it literally burned up at an altitude of about 200,000 feet and a speed of 12,500 mph.

There will be those who claim sabotage or terrorism, but this appears to be nothing more than a freak accident that now holds the nation's attention.  The explosion heard by and reported by many is nothing more than the normal sound barrier noise that routinely occurs on shuttle re-entry.  The shuttle is, after all, traveling at about Mach 18 or higher.  Sonic booms are occasionally so powerful that they actually break windows. 

NASA now is indicating that there was an inordinate amount of drag on the left side of the shuttle which the automated controls were trying to correct for.  This is indicative of a loss of multiple tiles and an increasing friction load.     

Indications are that tiles were possibly peeling off as far back as California where at least one observer who was looking through a telescope at the shuttle reentry said that he observed pieces coming off the shuttle.  His reports were at first discounted, but now NASA is investigating that possibility as they search the path under the shuttle as it crossed California, New Mexico, and Arizona.  Interestingly, on closer analysis of the telemetric data, there are indications of problems showing up when Columbia was over California. 

There will be much speculation in the weeks and months (even years) to come about what could have, should have, might have been done differently; but the truth of the matter appears to be that 80 seconds into the flight of Columbia the fate of the seven astronauts and their ship was already sealed.  The insulation, ice, or combination of the two that struck the underside of the left wing of Columbia damaged insulating tile(s) which upon reentry failed and caused an escalating event that lead to the tragic but unpreventable destruction of Columbia and her crew.

Investigation and analysis must proceed and all possibilities carefully scrutinized.  Perhaps, a solution for a future similar problem may be forth coming, but remember, there are always hazards in every day life and even more so in space travel.

There are no guarantees and sometimes accidents happen – uncaused and unplanned by anyone, and not because of incompetence, stupidity, lack of money, terrorism, a devious government, or any other easy target of blame.  Sometimes, the unimaginable, the unthinkable, the worst case scenario happens.

In this time of national mourning of still another tragedy, our hearts and prayers go out to the families of the astronauts.  To the brave men and women of NASA and their families – SALUTE!

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003 13:55:46 -0600 "Marc Todd" <mtodd55@kc.rr.com> writes:

I read your article and I had a couple of comments. I do not know your background, etc so I am not familiar with your familiarity with the space program or procedures. When the Challenger exploded over the Atlantic it was later revealed that engineers at the company that build the engines warned their superiors and the flight managers at NASA not to fly. The two were so disturbed when the order was "GO" they went to their offices and refused to watch because they knew what was going to happen.

When Columbia took off in mid-January it had no tile repair kit - normally on board. It had no EVA suit in order to perform a space walk to investigate or repair possible injury to the shuttle. Nor did the spacecraft have sufficient fuel to reach the space station should something go wrong and abandoning ship become necessary. The injury to the craft on take off was ignored. NASA administration did nothing to help those astronauts even though they knew the shuttle was damaged on liftoff and would only return by sheer fortune.

NASA administrators dismissed an entire safety board who said safety was never worse. That board predicted a catastrophic event for every 78 missions. Suggestions were made to provide an escape pod to save the crew should this happen, that too was ignored. This was not a "freak" accident. This is sheer preference of money over human lives. "The program must go on." Bush cut the budget, safety was compromised and twelve children are now without one parent and 6 spouses are without a companion. Seven families lost a child, nephew, niece, and this country lost 6 of the best and brightest. The money wasn't there to provide the redundant features that got the Apollo 13 crew home. Please do not insult the memory of those lost or the intelligence of those who warned of this event many times prior to its occurance (sp). It simpy (sp) is not right.

2/4/03

Marc,

Regarding the tile repair kit -- it does not exist.

RE: EVA suit -- any space walk over the side of the shuttle could possibly lead to additional damage to the tiles and was determined to be detrimental.  Even if damage was ascertained, there is no tile repair kit because it was determined that trying to repair damaged tiles might actually damage more tiles and lead to a greater problem.

RE: fuel to get to space station -- they had no way of docking with the space station.  Weight is always a critical criterion on every mission and not everything can be carried with them.

RE: injury to spacecraft on takeoff ignored -- expert engineers analyzed all aspects of the occurrence and determined that any damage done was probably minimal and would cause no serious problem -- as in the first launch of Columbia.  Obviously, they were wrong, but it was due to a lack of information, and possibly there was no way to actually ascertain at any time that the event at takeoff would lead to the eventual end.

RE:  NASA administration did nothing to help...astronauts -- there really was very little they could have done at that time.  It pretty much was a situation that offered no other alternative other than to reenter and pray that no catastrophic event would occur.  A similar situation occurred with Apollo 13.  No one knew what would happen, but there was no other alternative.

RE:  NASA...dismissed an entire safety board -- actually it was about 1/2 of them.  Should those people have been listened to and would it have made a difference?  Perhaps, but sometimes you take calculated risks.  Some people would like to shut the whole manned space program down because it is too risky, etc.  The astronauts themselves know there is a great risk, but they chose to take it.  Life will always have inherent dangers in it.

RE: provide an escape pod -- it is doubtful that any escape pod could have survived reentry at that speed either.  In Challenger an escape pod most likely would have saved all of the astronauts.  Was a compromise made between safety and money with Challenger?  Yes, but also, they were trying to make a simpler, less complicated, and therefore, safer shuttle with, of course, some built-in additional risks.  However, all of those astronauts knew the risk when they climbed into Challenger and Columbia and Apollo 13 and Apollo 1.  Improvements are made in retrospect that are easy to second guess.  In retrospect, Challenger should have had an escape pod.

RE:  redundant features that got Apollo 13 crew home -- actually there are many redundant features on the shuttle also.  However, when a catastrophic event such as befell Columbia occurs, no amount of redundant features will save you.  The redundant features all burned up with the rest of the ship.

RE:  insult the memory of those lost or the intelligence of those who warned -- If someone warns everyone about the dangers of a collision while driving their car and that people could die from that collision; when that happens, it does not insult the memory of those who died, nor does it insult the intelligence of the person that warned it would happen for me to say that it was a tragic accident, or even a freak accident. 

Life is full of tragedies, dangers, and heartbreaking occurrences.  There is an inherent risk in life itself.  Flying into space incurs a greater risk.  For those willing to accept those risks it is not a dishonor to talk about the accident that led to their deaths.  Did concern about budgets play a role?  Do you buy the biggest safest vehicle to protect yourself if you have an accident?  If you don't drive a semi-truck, then you aren't driving the biggest, safest vehicle on the road (to be in if involved in an accident) and you have chosen to take a greater risk every time you drive on the roads.

 Are there safety concerns with the present design and operation of the space shuttle?  If there is, then they will probably be explored in depth and determined to see if it is feasible to fix the concerns.  It will never be 100% safe -- there will always be a large risk factor.

 My background regarding the space program is extensive and I am very familiar with it.  I grew up with the infant space program and have been an avid watcher of it ever since.  I have mourned every astronaut we have lost over the years, and each time it was with horror that I watched the news reports.  Have mistakes been made?  Absolutely!  Were some because of budget?  Absolutely!  Would I go on a Space Shuttle tomorrow if offered the opportunity?  Yes!  I understand the risks and I am willing to take them -- as were the astronauts of the Columbia. 

 I salute them!

Kirt R. Poovey

PS -- regarding the warning not to fly the Challenger, I believe that was because of the temperature of the night before and concern over ice build up and the resultant danger of ice breaking off during launch, and shrinkage due to the cold temps that might affect the seals.  Would waiting for warmer nighttime temperatures have prevented the Challenger explosion?  Perhaps, but perhaps not.  It is impossible to say.

2/5/03 -- Was Columbia "zapped" by an electrical discharge?  http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30889 

2/10/03 -- HAARP AND SPACESHIP COLUMBIA

http://www.brojon.org/

-- THAT COLD SATURDAY MORNING

What happened to the Columbia Space Shuttle and why NASA is mis-leading the public with easily hoaxed information.

A Scientific Explanation

The partly-university and partly-military HAARP facility has very lax security, as shown by the pictures and text on their own website. It is only just a very large shortwave radio transmitter in Gakona, Alaska used for university research, isn't it? That's what they say.

For several years, beginning about 1998, HAARP is normally turned on during the summer months, starting several hours before midnight. They are doing atmospheric auroral zone research for several hours each night when the sky is very dark, during that part of the month when the bright moon is below the horizon. That is the "University Research" mode. The shortwave transmitter pulses may have both long and short pulses with about equal-length spaces in between, and the pulse lengths may vary, depending on the academic research experiment, from 3 to 30 seconds.

During the "Navy Deep-Sea Communication" operational mode, the shortwave radio pulses are all, with military precision, exactly 6.25 seconds long with either exactly 15 or 30 second spaces between pulses. Those long and short binary spaces in between the pulses are actually the coded message. Something like the dits and dahs of very slow Morse code. In this mode, the power is usually at maximum. Unlike the research mode, which mostly runs at night, the US Navy communication mode can be at any time of the day or night, any month of the year. The transmissions may run continuously for about 10 to 30 hours, or from one to several days.

These communication pulses interact with the earth's magnetic field near the northern auroral zone. These very slow interactions, taking hours to send a short message, can be sensed by special magnetometer receivers in the US nuclear submarines miles deep below the ocean surface. This HAARP communication mode can operate far deeper into the ocean than any other nation can penetrate, so only US submarines are capable of long-term full-stealth mode, out of reach far below all other nation's submarines. All the while, still staying in communication with US Navy command headquarters.

Following the 9-11 World Trade Center attack, and just minutes after the President declared the highest Defense Condition Four (DefCon4), HAARP began transmitting at highest power for 18 hours in "deep-sea communication" mode. This is the only way to communicate the DefCon4 condition and updated battle commands to the US nuclear submarines on station miles deep in the ocean.

The "Air Force Missile Defense Shield" mode is usually heard as 4 or 5 second pulses about 20 seconds apart. The pulses also are modulated with circular polarization, changing in tone slightly faster or slower than the 1 Hz base frequency. This results in hearing sounds, which I call repeated "zooo-eep" sounds going upward or "zaah-oownd" sounds going downward. This causes very fast relativistic electrons or ions to be sprayed into outer space arcing from north to south magnetic pole, from the ionosphere, either upward to the magnetosphere, or downward from the magnetosphere to the ionosphere.

These particles, moving at nearly the speed of light, stay only in the vacuum of space and are stopped whenever they hit the atmosphere. The focused fast moving particles can penetrate and damage the electronics of an incoming nuclear missile warhead and cause the missile to spin out of control and burn up as it re-enters the earth's atmosphere.

The damage effect is similar to the strong radiation from a nearby nuclear explosion. Thus the "missile shield" mode can quickly destroy incoming missiles almost anywhere in the world even before they re-enter the atmosphere. The graduate student technical research reports on the HAARP website for the summer study programs of 1999 and 2000 reveal they have succeeded in producing particle flow along "certain magnetic field lines." This is a secretive or obtuse way of saying that they have finally implemented a "focused missile defense shield" mode.

The staffers at HAARP are several full time professional radio electronics operators and a number of part-time professors and graduate research students. They all have access to the facility which is the key to the back door of the small cafeteria/control room building. The HAARP facility does not even have a fence around it.

CAUTION: What follows contains speculative material.

One of the HAARP graduate students, Mustava Grufti, gets up in the middle of the night, and goes to work all by himself at 4:00 AM on a very cold Saturday Alaska winter morning. They usually don't work on the weekends, especially not in the frigid mid-winter. He turns on the cold diesel generators which produce the electrical power for the large radio system and starts up the transmitters. He plugs into the transmitter control computer the old research program he had worked on for testing the Air Force missile shield mode.

This fires a narrow cloud of relativistic particles into space from Alaska, above the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean along the western coast of the US, to the opposite magnetic mirror site just above the southern auroral zone near New Zealand. He leaves the transmitter running for 3 hours. Then, Mustava turns everything off and goes back home to sleep, in the dark of the long Alaska arctic-winter night. It was a very cold Saturday morning.

The University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where Mustava is a research associate assigned to the HAARP project, knows that he is in the US on a temporary F1 student visa from Pakistan. They do not know that he also is a member of Al-Qaida. Mustava was only told to turn on the transmitter to knock out a bothersome US communication satellite which had been broadcasting anti-Muslim TV programs and propaganda. Mustava doesn't follow the news and knows nothing about any space shuttle flight. He was only told the time and direction to transmit. It was 4:15 AM PST Saturday morning, Feb 1, 2003, just about 90 minutes before Columbia enters the atmosphere over California. Mustava, knowing he might be doing something wrong, makes no entry into the HAARP transmitter logbook.

Later, the US Navy, which administrates all HAARP operations, when asked about HAARP possibly transmitting while shuttle Columbia was landing, only says, "It wasn't us. We weren't even on the air." They check their logbook and show proof: there is no record of any HAARP transmissions on Feb 1, 2003.

(Note: I have been monitoring and logging all HAARP transmissions since the year 2000. HAARP was, in fact, transmitting from 4:15 AM to about 7:20 AM PST in missile defense mode on Saturday Feb 1, 2003. That was the first HAARP transmission since late 2002. Columbia re-entered the atmosphere over California at 5:53 AM PST, exactly in the middle between those two times.)

It's a cold Saturday morning over the dark Indian Ocean as Columbia fires its rockets to drop from orbit and begin its path into the atmosphere over California. About 5:40 AM, over the eastern Pacific Ocean nearing California, while still in space, Columbia enters into an invisible cloud of extremely high radiation spewing southward from Gakona, Alaska. The cloud of relativistic electrons penetrate deeply into Columbia, instantly causing strange heating on the northern or left side of the spacecraft toward Alaska, both on the left wing and even on the upper left side of the craft near the left cargo bay door. Because the radiation cloud is coming from the northern side, not from below, only the left side of Columbia is seriously affected at first.

Columbia's commander reports the anomalous low-level gradual heating of all temperature sensors on the left side of the craft to the NASA ground communicator. The NASA communicator acknowledges that they received the messages about the heating on the left side. And Commander Rick Husband, responds, "Roger, bu..."

Suddenly his voice and all radio communications with the shuttle are broken off in mid-sentence. The cloud of radiation shooting from Alaska continues to penetrate into Columbia. Over central California, numerous left wing temperature sensors all suddenly stop working. Just before they failed, the semiconductor temperature sensors did not show extreme high temperature or indicate burning up. They all suddenly went off-scale as if high radiation had simply shorted them out.

Minutes later, somewhere over Nevada, now safely below the radiation cloud above the atmosphere, the effects of the short but severe radiation exposure are now becoming apparent. The attitude control computer, which positions the spacecraft to glide like an airplane to a safe landing, starts showing signs of over-correcting. The control computer and its backup can no longer calculate a proper flight path. The data in the computer memories was corrupted by the severe radiation and Columbia begins to wander erratically left and right beyond its normal range.

Over northern Arizona, the effects of the radiation damage are now enormous, as Columbia seems to be following some mythical computerized flight path made up only from bad data bits. Then all data links are cut off, and most all on-board electronic devices cease to function. The spacecraft begins to slowly tumble and twist end-over-end out of control. Over eastern New Mexico, Columbia is no longer soaring as a glider to a welcomed soft landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is morphing into a flaming meteoric, billion-dollar fireball, streaking ever swiftly downward toward destiny in east Texas with seven human beings inside.

Marshall Smith

Editor, Brother Jonathan Gazette

Saturday Feb 8, 2003

. 

Note: Marshall Smith is a degreed engineer/scientist with degrees in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and physics. He worked as a NASA sub-contractor/consultant on numerous space shuttle projects during the 1980's. Mr. Smith has been a licensed commercial radio engineer since the 1960's and has been chief engineer at several US radio stations.

     He has researched and written papers in high-energy physics, radio-physics, and geo-magnetics. He built his first home-brew PC-type computer in 1976. He has designed and built computers and data-acquistion and control systems used in the NASA Space Shuttle project, the Navy Trident D5 submarine missile program, and the Air Force Titan IV program. Mr. Smith was lead designer for one of the "Star Wars" space laser-weapon targeting systems which had no publicly-known program name.

ADDENDUM and UPDATES:  

UPDATE 1. This is a replica of the BroJon logbook for Saturday February 1, 2003. Times are in PST (From BroJon.com HAARP Monitor running continuously from May 2000 to the present)

       Note: I cannot monitor the HAARP main beam directly since it is all aimed upward toward the overhead Auroral Jet or that section of sky where the Northern Lights are seen. I can only monitor the weak southern side lobe leaking off the edges of the large 148 antenna array. The side lobe signal must make two shortwave ionspheric skips around the curvature of the earth to reach me in California 3,500 miles away.

       There are three possible reasons for the signal I monitor being weaker than normal: (1) they are running at lower power. (2) There are poor ionospheric conditions for double skip propagation, but that usually produces a varying or erratic signal which did not occur, or (3) the full-power main beam was tilted or aimed southward toward me in California so the tilted side lobe would be pointing more into the ground resulting in a weak signal in my direction. I cannot determine which of the three occurred.

       Why is the shuttle note listed in the HAARP log? I was working on a computer project when HAARP came on at 4:15. I opened my logging program. I had set my clock alarm to set up my camera and watch the shuttle pass overhead. It was overcast at 5:45 and hoping for clearing I checked again at 5:53 and again at 5:57. I gave up and turned on Fox News Channel to watch Columbia land on TV. At 6:15, the scheduled landing time, mysteriously there was no Columbia. Where did it go? It was such a strange and momentus event, I wanted to document the time of the NASA announcement in the only scientific journal I had open -- the HAARP log. At the time, I made no connection between the two events.

In honor of the seven astronauts who tragically lost their lives on February 1, 2003.