Honoring Columbia

By Jerry Pournelle

February 17, 2003

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Column 271

Fly Columbia

Over twenty years ago I devoted part this column to the problem of space suits: The United States did not have suits capable of serious work in on-orbit assembly. Space walks were unusual and had to be scheduled well in advance. Since the suits used pure oxygen at low pressure, their users had to spend considerable time in a low pressure oxygen environment. Pre-breathing, it's called, and it means a pure oxygen atmosphere for the whole Shuttle until after the EVA.

This affects the whole mission. At low pressure of pure oxygen—the Apollo 1 (Grissom/White/Chaffee) disaster demonstrated the known danger of high pressure pure oxygen—there aren't enough molecules moving over the equipment to provide adequate cooling. The Shuttle's computers, primitive as they were and still are, need all the cooling; many electronics panels have to be shut down.

The result is that we don't think a lot about astronauts going outside to inspect potential damage, much less to try to repair it. Despite the bad suits, Pete Conrad was able to take an unscheduled walk to fix Skylab's broken wing and that worked splendidly; but NASA didn't really learn from this, and to this day we don't have space suits that will allow the Shuttle crew to just suit up and go out to inspect and repair.

When I wrote that column, some of the firms involved in suit construction and maintenance tried to get McGraw Hill, then the owners of BYTE, to fire me, threatening among other things withdrawal of advertising from all McGraw Hill magazines. That didn't work. As Chairman of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy I made other attempts, both public and political, to get NASA to build decent space suits and train the Shuttle crews in going outside to inspect and if need be repair the Shuttle tiles.

We are now told that there may have been damage to Columbia's thermal protection system, and this was suspected while she was still in orbit. Without proper suits it wasn't possible for Columbia's crew to go have a look, but it would still have been possible to examine the ship through telescopes at nearest approach to the Space Station, or to use some of the CIA's very high powered telescopic assets to examine Columbia for damage.

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