I’m surprised that nobody seems to have asked the obvious question: “Since you knew that there had been an incident at liftoff, why didn’t you have the shuttle stand off close to the ISS and have the ISS crew film and observe the underside of the shuttle?”
4 Replies to “By the way…”
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As I understand it, Columbia didn’t have enough fuel to make it to the space station. Columbia was not only the oldest but the heaviest of the shuttles and with the payload they were carrying they couldn’t put enough fuel in the boosters to get it in high orbit.
Ah. My understanding was that they visited the ISS. Apparently I was incorrect in that assumption.
I wanted to double check so here’s a link to the mission presskit. It makes no mention of rendezvous with the space station.
http://www.shuttlepresskit.com/STS-107/STS-107_SPK.pdf
Actually when you mentioned that the first time, I realized that they had been saying all along that Columbia wasn’t capable of getting to the ISS (in reference to the loss or imagined loss of cargo capacity for the ISS), so I should have realized that from the start. Thanks for the link.