Weightless debris
‘Could Ejection Seats Have Saved the Columbia Astronauts?’ asks a feature in Slate. The answer, on grounds of height and speed, is a fairly definitive ‘no’. But it is something Nasa has considered in the past. The trouble is any kind of escape mechanism would be prohibitively expensive to retrofit ($1bn for the fleet of 4 (now 3) shuttles, and a timescale of 18 months), and would have to be very, very light to save disrupting the careful balance of weight and thrust.
This whole weight issue is put into context in a piece published in yesterday morning’s Guardian… Before the Texan locals knew a shuttle had disintegrated above their houses, many of them were already being showered by some extraordinary debris:
Fragments were scattered over Louisiana, where one factory owner described watching a “giant ball four feet across float to the earth like a parachute”. “We put our hand above it and then we touched it and there was nothing,” he told the Herald Tribune. “We kicked at it a little bit; the thing doesn’t weigh as much as four gallons of milk. At first I was saying this is probably the coolest thing I have ever seen. Then we found out what it was and it was like, this is not the coolest thing I have seen anymore. It’s too sad.”
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