Timeline for Could Dick Scobee have flown a RTLS on Challenger 51L
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 14, 2022 at 7:49 | comment | added | user47287 | @reirab now keep in mind, the SRB's only real jobs was to get the darn thing off the ground and get it going a little bit. | |
| Sep 7, 2022 at 19:38 | comment | added | PearsonArtPhoto♦ | @DekoRevinio The analysis presumes the SRBs could have somehow been safely ditched prior to their damaging the main body of the Space Shuttle, meaning that no fuel from the external tank would have been lost. | |
| Sep 6, 2022 at 16:42 | comment | added | user47287 | @PearsonArtPhoto If there was no fuel leaking, the shuttle Challenger would not have exploded. | |
| Sep 20, 2018 at 21:20 | comment | added | reirab | According to Wikipedia, the SRBs were 69% of the stack's mass at liftoff. Without the SRBs, even before draining any center tank fuel at all, that leaves a weight of 'only' about 1.17 million pounds, so T/W ratio would indeed be > 1 with 3x 500,000 pounds thrust and no SRBs. | |
| Jul 30, 2018 at 17:07 | comment | added | Challenger Truth | I agree the shuttle was a compromise, I disagree that this was a condition where abort was not possible. I think the difference between the NASA of Apollo 13 and the NASA of Challenger was the contractors were in charge of much of the engineering and "failure become an option" because it was not profitable to explore ways to address off nominal conditions. The belief that shuttle was an airliner negated that possibility. MTI engineering's complete failure to gain a physics based understanding of the SRB joint dynamic is only the most prominent example. | |
| Jul 18, 2018 at 12:10 | history | edited | Machavity | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Improved formatting
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| Jul 18, 2018 at 7:31 | comment | added | GdD | The shuttle was such a compromise, it had so far too many conditions where an abort was not possible. | |
| Jul 18, 2018 at 2:44 | comment | added | Challenger Truth | Thank you, that was my concern as well, my guess was the STS stack was not really capable of flying with the tank 87% full, the loss of the SRB thrust at that low of an altitude would close out most reasonable RTLS options. It would have been a jump ball as to whether the leak combined with the fuel flow would lighten the stack enough for it to avoid disaster. | |
| Jul 18, 2018 at 2:31 | history | answered | PearsonArtPhoto♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |