Rebuttals to Altitude Analysis

Hi:

First let me say that your web-site is excellent!

 I too have looked at the Columbia trajectory in some detail and have noted that the flight path for the first 900 seconds after the entry interface (EI) is absolutely normal. Perhaps because of this I did not see any problem with the debris field or conclude that the shuttle had to be much lower than the ~ 200,000 ft altitude quoted by NASA for the LOS point, which I assumed also had to be close to the break-up point. The data I have put together show that the normal trajectory, which Columbia would have followed for the final 15 minutes or so before landing (i.e. the time after the LOS point), involved a more rapid rate of descent than for the first 15 minutes after transiting the EI. So, I am not convinced that a linear extrapolation of the trajectory WITH A FIXED ANGLE OF DESCENT ~ 1 degree is a valid approximation for Columbia's entire re-entry. In addition, you, yourself, have suggested that early, light weight, debris could have "fluttered" down almost directly below the LOS point while other debris could have followed a ballistic trajectory for a 100 miles or more if it was heavy enough. This more or less corresponds with the observed debris field, so I am not convinced the claimed 200,000 ft break up altitude is a problem. Anyway, interesting stuff...............

Hi again:

Just something more specific about the Columbia debris field:

Let's accept the official LOS altitude as 200,767 ft = about 60 km and the forward velocity at LOS to be Mach 18.16 = 5.6 km/s.

As a very simple approach to calculating the point of impact of debris let's start with the limiting case of a heavy streamlined fragment which experiences negligible drag or lift. This will simply fall under gravity while also moving forward at a velocity to be determined.

The time to fall to earth from an altitude of 60 km is given very simply be the equation s = 1/2 g t^2. Substituting 60,000 m for s, and 9.8 m/s/s for g, we find a fall time of about 110 seconds.

Now the forward velocity of the shuttle is normally retarded by about 0.9 km/s in 100 seconds at a 60 km altitude so we will take the average forward velocity of the streamlined fragment during its 110 second descent to be about 5 km/s. Hence, in 110 seconds the fragment would have moved "forward" (i.e. in an approximately east- south-easterly direction) by about 550 km or 340 miles from the loss point in north-central Texas. Looking at the normal ground track for a space shuttle descent this puts the impact point for our hypothetical fragment a little south west of Alexandria, Louisiana; this is almost precisely where the observed debris field ends. Since no space shuttle debris could travel further east than the calculated "free-fall" fragment, unless very light and carried by the wind, all other Columbia debris should be west-north-west of Alexandria, La, as is the case.

 Hence, I would have to conclude that the Columbia LOS altitude and the observed debris field appear to be consistent.

Hi,

I have tried a few more calculations on Columbia's trajectory and I thought I would pass the results on to you....

I have used a method published in the American Journal of Physics for the motion of a projectile in a gravitational field. Once again the formula I have used is for trajectories IN A VACUUM. All that is required for the calculation of the distance to impact is the initial altitude, velocity and angle of descent. I have used 61 km and  5.5 km/s for the altitude and velocity of Columbia at the NASA -reported LOS point. The angle of descent for Columbia was about 0.4 degrees just before LOS which is consistent with a value of 0.35 degrees I have seen for a standard shuttle trajectory 900 seconds after EI. The result of the calculation is an impact point 838 km or 521 miles from the LOS point. This is a very interesting result because it would put the main shuttle debris impact point near Baton Rouge which is about 100 miles further on from the most easterly observed debris. If you include the effects of atmospheric lift on the descent of the Columbia after LOS my result suggests that the observed debris field for shuttle breakup at 200,000 ft is too far west , as you are proposing !!! The only way to adjust this result to match the observed debris field is to assume that the altitude of Columbia was much lower than 200,000 ft at the LOS point; also as you suggest...

Rebuttals to Original 8 Questions

From an e-mail dated 07/29/2004:

I'm Terry Wilson ( http://aftercolumbia.tripod.com ) and have done my own detailed studies of the STS-107 disaster (primarily with an eye on improving the safety of spacecraft concepts that I work on, especially after Columbia's Delta Sprint (http://aftercolumbia.tripod.com/deltasprint) but also for personal interest (technically it is all for personal interest because Delta Sprint is mostly there for personal interest.)

 I have also flown the simulator at www.orbitersim.com. The "CNN" animations (which are actually STK animations...you can tell from the www.stk.com watermark) can be painstakingly recreated in Orbiter, although the county/parish/state borders and town names would need to be added in postproduction.  So far, no one has done this.

 Anyway...while I like the extreme detail of

www.columbiassacrifice.com, I've found my own analysis disagreeing with yours primarily for two reasons:

1. I've read a lot of books, crunched a lot of numbers and flown a lot of sims to gain an intuitive, as well as knowledge-base sense of how entries work.

2. I've read far more current information than your site concludes upon (i.e. the Crew Survivability Report, Early Sightings Assessment Team Report, and the Rev. 19 Master Timeline, all of which are CAIB report appendix material.)

I've come to conclude that the CAIB proper does not have any interests to protect, and have striven as far as possible to present the truth.  I've also concluded that incomplete information is primarily because of NASA's Shuttle interest (Read Greg Klerkx' "Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age" by Pantheon Books 2004 to best understand the Shuttle interest.)  In a nutshell, the Shuttle interest is that NASA wants to maintain control of piloted spacecraft operations indefinitely in order to protect an ego belief of the Shuttle as an ideal spacecraft...NASA does not want to admit that the Shuttle should never have been built.  This, strangely, is not the desire of any particular individual (except perhaps George Abbey, as nobody really knows what's going on in his head, and at several points in NASA's administration, has wielded more power than the Administrator by manipulating astronaut flight assignments...this is from Bryan Burrough's "Dragonfly.")

 It took a hell of a lot of research to come to this conclusion, and I think that myself and Greg Klerkx may be the only people to come to conclusions like these without ever having worked for NASA, Boeing, or Lockheed Martin.  I had just come to the conclusion a couple of weeks prior to picking up Lost in Space...at the time, the "Shuttle Interest" conclusion was tentative in my own eyes...reading Lost in Space, followed by confirming over a dozen of his references has cemented it in my head to the point of making my http://aftercolumbia.tripod.com/id7.html introduction a heck of a lot more forceful (offensive?)

 In order to fill the holes in the NASA data, I did my own analysis and looked to other sources (www.nasawatch.com and www.astronautix.com being the main two.)

 First...I'll answer the original eight questions in my own terms, then respond to those presented by Columbia's Sacrifice:

1. "If the shuttle's skin was exposed to high reentry temperatures why didn't the temperature sensors register much higher readings than they did?"

V09T9895A, a MADS sensor behind RCC Panel 9 in between the WLE spar and Cerachrome insulation, and referred to in the CAIB Report Chapter 3 as "Sensor 4" screamed to its off scale high at 450degF and stayed there for several seconds before dropping to off-scale low, indicating that the sensor was destroyed or cut off from the recorder by a widening hole in the WLE spar just inboard of it.  There is an error in the CAIB Report's graph that puts off-scale-low in the wrong spot (the CAIB Report has a number of irritating graph glitches.)

 The answer as to why this was the only sensor to do this is pretty simple...it was the only sensor smack dab in the breach plume before its wire was lost.  Everywhere except the wheel well, the plume had better access to the wires than the sensors, and burnt up the wires before the sensors could notice (i.e. the hydraulic return temperatures discussed on the Flight loop.)  Why the temperatures go up only modestly despite the breach in the wheel well that the CAIB and the NASA working group "contracted" to analyse that situation has two factors:

1. The low density of upper atmosphere air.  While hot, an estimated 6000degF, the breach plume is thin and narrow at the leading edge, and gets diffuse and wide inside the gear well interior, especially after bouncing around all the trusses and stringers in the wing interior.  The actual heat is probably about the same as a garden hose spraying boiling water at each sensor.

2. High heat capacity of the parts and fluids in the wheel well.  On just the outboard tire:  The temperature had a 2 bit flips up on

V51T0574A, the outboard left hand wheel at 13:54:53 (EI+644 or 10:44) It's an aluminum wheel with a steel belted tire that weighs somewhere on the order of 700 pounds and maintains a 300psi pressure.  The working group on this basis concluded, and reported to the press, that plasma had to have been blowing right at it.  In the debris, they found what was left of the tire, but never identified the wheel.  Unlike on the almost intact right main landing gear, the left gear tires were almost bald. (This is from looking at debris pictures.)

 So, you have a diffuse hot plasma with a very low volumetric heat capacity probably ablating everything it hits, keeping its enormous temperature from reaching the sensors, so those sensors read seemingly benign 60-80degF, rather than a "realistic" 6000degF.  To illustrate the principle (if you have big enough balls and promise not to sue me for suggesting it), you can get a stove burner red hot, dip your hand in cold water, and very gently and briefly smack the burner, creating an angry hiss and a cloud of steam, and not feel the heat on your hand. (I must confess that I do this only by accident and it scares the crap out of me every time...when I touch a burner with a dry hand,

I get burnt.) Another thing you might notice is that when you boil a pot of hot water on the stove, the bottom of the pot never glows, even when the burner does...this is because the water is sucking the heat out of the bottom of the pot.  On a school field trip when I was a kid, a scientist demonstrated the principle by dipping his hand in liquid nitrogen...we were not invited to try.

 "This has never been satisfactorily explained by the official investigation and it has never been determined if the shuttle crew was alerted to the increased temperatures.  It has been concluded here that those sensors were not exposed to a high temperature environment as stated in the official final report."

Responding to: "It was never alerted to the Shuttle crew that they had increased temperatures.  The control surface positions were visible, so they could have known that funny things were happening aerodynamically.  Nothing happened to sufficiently alarm the crew to talk to mission control prior to the first BFS tire fault message.  This is a satisfactory answer to me.  Even after the tire fault messages, no further messages are related to temperatures!"

2. "If hot plasma entered the wing or wheel well, again, why didn't temperature sensors respond to the problem?"

They did, as above.  I had assumed you meant by temperature sensors in the wing that you included wheel well temperatures.  There aren't very many OI temperature sensors in the wings aside from the wheel wells.

Responding to: "The idea of the super heated plasma entering the wing of the shuttle is virtually impossible due to the nature of the boundary layer which exists at the surface of the orbiter during hypersonic flight."

The breach put the boundary layer inside the WLE cavity.  There is also radiant heat from the plasma going into the breach in the RCC.  Once the WLE was breached, plasma begins to flow freely through the wing, burning itself an exit in the dorsal surface.  The shockwave advances towards the breach, putting a shockwave interaction inside the RCC WLE cavity...there's your 6000degF+ plasma.  The shockwave caused the "knife edge" erosion seen in Panel 8/9 debris.

Responding to: "The wing leading edge RCC material on the space shuttle has frequently been observed to developed pinhole and larger openings during normal operation of the orbiters."

These pinholes have never penetrated completely through the RCC, not allowing air to flow freely through.

3. "Why did witnesses see debris coming off the shuttle so early during reentry?"

Telemetered (aerodynamic) and MADS sensor indications show the WLE spar was breached between about EI+485 and EI+487, roughly one minute before she crosses the California coast.  Debris events start happening as the breach plume burns holes in the dorsal surface of the wing.

Responding to: "Excessive reentry heating after EI+203 caused by a grossly unsafe sink rate probably caused the loss of thermal tiles while the shuttle was passing over California where the debris shedding was witnessed."

The flight characteristics of the Shuttle are known and fairly close to normal until just prior to loss of signal. Columbia's Sacrifice conclusions about guidance failure are incorrect due to a misunderstanding of the beta angle concept.  Altitudes can be confirmed visually by the amateur tracking observations.  Angular passage rates for the stated altitudes in the videos would be far higher than seen, and the horizons for the videos would also be far closer, resulting in reduced coverage (on the basis of a 30,000ft altitude, amateur entry coverage would be almost nonexistent.)

4. "Did the shuttle have strain gauges or other stress sensors attached to critical structural members, as do many military and civilian aircraft, to detect structural damage?"

Yup...and they were going nuts.  The erratic strain readings were caused by stresses due to thermal expansion.  I infer this from experience with throwing pop cans in fires and playing with candles as a kid.  One candle had its wick off center in its glass dish, and the flame impinged on the edge of the dish.  A few minutes later a piece blew off the side of the candle dish...it wasn't a shatter, but a single piece.  That corner of the candle dish was trying to expand, but the rest of the dish wasn't giving way, so it busted off instead.  In high school, teachers illustrated the concept by using strips and holding them over bunsen burners, causing them to bend.  I also recall one of my science teachers putting a pyrex test tube from the flame of a bunsen burner directly into a beaker of ice water, causing it to shatter.  I was also warned by a hotel I briefly worked at never to dust a lightbulb with a wet cloth for that reason.

 "Strain measurements are referenced in the official final report but none of the available literature indicates that this information is provided to the shuttle crew or Mission Control during normal flight." I concur.

5. "If the shuttle had sensors to detect structural damage why wasn't the crew or mission control alerted to this problem prior to the final breakup?"

It would seem to me that they don't monitor most of the sensors in real time (the temperatures are a dead giveaway, with all those elevated temperatures in the wheel well not even being mentioned by flight controllers.)  It may have been that so much attention was given to figuring out the sensors that dropped off, that they missed the elevated readings in the wheel well.  I can think of dozens of ways of presenting the information graphically that would have made it obvious they had a problem.  Most of these ideas, NASA did not even include in their sensor diagrams after release (A nice tactic would be to show a temperature sensor as a dot on a shuttle graphic in a color dependent upon where it reads in relation to its expected nominal value, with off-scales flashing.  Green would be normal, yellow and red would be hotter than normal, blue cooler than normal, flashing red is off-scale-high, flashing blue is off-scale-low, and flashing green would indicate an MDM failure (it has its own signature.)  For MMACS, this would have painted the butt-ugly picture of what was really happening on board, with greens in the fuselage and right wing nothing but blinking blues and solid reds and yellows in the left wing...it would have been so obvious!  In reality, it is presented as a list of numbers, with very little graphical output.

6. "What kind of protection does the shuttle have from collisions with space debris and would the crew be alerted to an impact serious enough to cause severe damage?"

NASA and Space Command keep track of lots of debris, and try to avoid it as much as they can...my guess is that unless it hit a window, assessing the location and damage of such an impact would have been nearly impossible.  I've heard tales of sounds on the ISS that no one could identify, which could have been orbital debris collisions of little to no consequence on ISS, but might well breach the Shuttle TPS enough for entry loads to destroy it.  Amazingly, the CAIB found that the orbital debris safety standards were higher for the Station than the Shuttle.

Responding to: "These occur during virtually every shuttle flight and are often caused by floating paint chips and other tiny debris from the Solid Rocket Boosters brought into orbit by the shuttle itself."

This is a glaring technical hole...the SRBs never make orbit...never have and never will!  The little debris are usually shed by expendable vehicle upper stages (I've observed some sheddings at http://www.rocketcam.com/ )  These debris usually do not last long.  An example of an orbital debris shedding of this type occurred during STS 107, when a piece titled 2003-B or "Flight Day 2 object" shed from Columbia herself.  It lasted only two days.  Longer lasting little debris are those that are shed on higher energy orbits, like GTO.

7. "How much damage would the shuttle have to sustain to cause a catastrophic failure of the thermal protection system during reentry?"

The answer is probably complex enough to fill a book, but I do know that in the RCC, the design intent of the current WLE system is to allow it to survive a 0.25in hole in RCC panels 8 and 9 (the hottest panels) and a 1.0in hole anywhere else in the wing leading edge.  It takes about a 10in hole through the entire ventral HRSI, including the

densified layer down to, but not including, the aluminum skin.  It takes about a 15in area of damage down to the densified layer.  I don't know what the specs are for the dorsal areas of the ship, but do recall that lots of tiles missing from the OMS pods on STS-1 had no effect on the entry.

Responding to: "On the Columbia before the hot gasses could enter the wing through the leading edge it would have to burn through at least 1/2" of solid aluminum and then make its way through several sealed sections within the wing before it could come close to attacking the avionics and other sensitive components, that scenario is unlikely."

Two technical holes...RCC is a great thermal protection material for keeping the hypersonic air away from your aluminum structure, but a lousy insulator.  The inside of the RCC panels glow yellow during entry, radiating an enormous amount of heat...enough to melt the WLE spar even without a breach!  The WLE spar is therefore protected by a bulk insulation material called Cerachrome (

http://www.thermalceramics.com/upload/pdf/514-100.pdf ) to keep this radiant heat away from the WLE.  A breach would need to burn through a couple inches of that as well.

 Second technical hole: There are no sealed sections in the wing, they are deliberately vented to prevent pressure gradiants that would stress the structure.  The closest sealed compartment to the breach was the outboard main landing gear tire, which was a small factor in protecting avionics and other sensitive systems.  The sensitive systems around the tire are its brake lines and wiring. Sensor's failed, indicating the wiring was vulnerable.  The hydraulics were normal except for the elevated temperatures until the end of the 4 second reconstructed period, indicating that a hydraulic line is thermally very tough compared to a sensor wire.

Responding to: "The space shuttle was never designed to fly in such an attitude and therefore would have broken up easily due to the aerodynamic forces."

I have crunched a lot (a hell of a lot) of numbers on this, and conclude that the aerodynamic loads as Columbia broke up were very weak compared to the thermal loads, so you have an environment dominated by thermal effects until well after break up.  Orbiter simulation supports this conclusion.  At the speed that Columbia was going at breakup, it would need about half the lift required to maintain altitude as it she would at subsonic speeds.  Increasing angle of attack increases the lift you can get from a given dynamic pressure (straight out of any basic pilot's textbook.)  The optimum angle of attack for Shuttle is a bit lower than 40deg (about 30deg, I think).  Delta wings are nearly impossible to stall (books about the CF-105 Arrow describe how they determined the stall speeds based on the landing sink rate rather than the wing actually stalling, as it is nearly impossible to fully stall a CF-105!!)  The result is that the dynamic pressure of the Columbia loss of signal flight regime is about one tenth that of the Challenger break up (which happened very close to ascent Max-Q, which is higher than it is on entry.)  Challenger's cabin was not destroyed by aerodyamic forces.

 Due to the thermal effects of having hot air blowing through the wing for 12 minutes, as the aerodynamic stresses built up on Columbia's left wing, the severely weakened wing could no longer handle the mechanical loads.  Trim changes and RCS firings from about 5 seconds prior to 4 seconds after LOS (the reconstructed telemetry) indicate that the area of the left wing in the Xo1040 to Xo1391 area is bending like Mackintosh toffee on a hot dog stick, causing a massive increase in lift and drag.  I believe, that as the Shuttle left commanded attitude at 13:59:38, that the wing actually stalled.  The reason for this is that as the Xo1040 to Xo1391 area shed, becoming Debris A seen on video a couple seconds later, the flat faced Xo1391 box spar became the leading edge, resulting in an angled flat spin and the angle of attack plummetting (Columbia nosing over.)

 Columbia's Sacrifice Answer: "This is generally unknown but research reports done by NASA early during the shuttle program indicated a few specific areas that if breached could result in "loss of vehicle and crew".  No shuttle mission has ever experienced significant damage at any of these locations."

 To me this answer does not connect directly to the question, as it does not specify specifically an entry environment.  It sounds like the definition of Criticality 1 in the Hazards Definition List or whatever they call it.  This list was made famous by the Roger's Commission when they discovered a change in the definition of the O- ring from 1R (redundant loss of vehicle/crew) to 1 (non-redundant loss of vehicle/crew)

8, "Why is it that other shuttle missions sustained moderate to severe damage to the heat resistant tiles that resulted in no heat damage to the skin of the orbiter?"

The question is moot because no other shuttle mission suffered damage anywhere near the level of STS-107, not even the analysis and testing of damage resulting to HRSI from a piece of foam that big.

Responding to: "The damage that was reportedly suffered by Columbia during launch on January 16th, 2003 was neither more or less than that incurred on any other orbiter during any other mission."

Only NASA management (not engineering) stated conclusions during the mission ever said this.  After the disaster, I never heard anyone anywhere say that the damage suffered by STS-107 during ascent was not extraordinary, way beyond anything that could be considered "in- family."  The CAIB specifically and repeatedly condemned the conclusions made by NASA management saying that this damage was in any way normal.

Responding to: "The location of the damage to the TPS system can also be a major factor if the exposed part of the shuttle is near a flight critical system."

More critical to the location of damage than flight critical systems (as structural damage resulting from a breach pretty much anywhere will cause breakup) is the thermal loading experienced by that location.  On the basis of flight critical systems, the worst place to put a breach is in the nose, where the plasma has easy access to the volatile FRCS, nose landing gear, landing radar, avionics, and crew cabin.  On the basis of thermal loading, the worst possible spot on the shuttle to put a hole is right where it was...in the Panel 8/9 area.  This is where the shockwave from the nose meets the shockwave from the wing, resulting in the hottest plasma temperatures and thermal loads anywhere on the Shuttle.  Also on the basis of flight critical systems, the OMS pods is a very bad location, where the plasma would have access to the OMS, aft RCS, MPS, and most importantly the APUs for the hydraulic system.  From a perspective of thermal loading, there are few places more benign than the OMS pods.  Observe TPS damage to STS-1 in this area.

Responding to: "The report also seems to suspect a secondary debris hit somewhere on the underside of the left wing."

I didn't read this anywhere in the Report or the appendix/interim materials that I've read so far, I'd need a specific quote to consider it credible.

Responding to: "This also has never been satisfactorily explained by the official investigation except in terms of damage done at the exact spot required to have fatal consequences."

The Report does describe some skin damage resulting from debris damage on previous missions, but no actual burnthrough.  The CAIB's answer as to how much damage done at that exact spot required to have fatal consequences (0.25in), that answer is buried well enough that I would have trouble finding it, so it seems a little odd to me that you've mentioned it.  The CAIB report concentrated more around how much damage was actually caused (6-10in hole based on sensor data analysis, corresponding to a 28-79in2 area.  The 2003-B debris object's radar signature would seem to indicate a large hole within this range.

Responding to: "No other shuttle mission has experienced the extent of damage that is claimed by the official investigation of STS-107."

This contradicts the first sentence in the commentary, so it is unclear to me what the conclusion of Columbia's Sacrifice is, and what these two sentences are trying to say.

 Thanks for reading through this marathon of an email.  I certainly hope that you haven't taken any offense.  I look forward to hearing your reply.

 Terry Wilson

aftercolumbia.tripod.com _________________________________________________________________

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Rebuttals to Various Conclusions
Some rebuttals are answered

Name withheld:

I have to admit to you I have always considered your theory to be 100% wrong and born out of wishful thinking by you. The times I go to your website get my blood boiling when you flat out deny that communications did in fact continue until Rick's final words "Roger, uh..buh.." I have his voice recorded from that morning. When you come up with the bizaar stuff about some electromagnetic pulse or something at some HAARP facility knocking out Laurel's camcorder from what 1500? 2000? miles away in Alaska, it's almost scary being at your site. Did this pulse effect anything else, like an airliner only 20 miles away? Would Columbia have even been above the horizon from this HAARP facility? Those are rhetorical questions. 

So they planted the OEX box to cover up some twisted experiment, yet they (NASA) all but laugh at the speculation that foam brought the shuttle down. Let me follow this: They need a fake cause for the crash, there is rather dramatic footage of a violent foam strike on the wing, there is public footage of debris coming off the orbiter 2000 miles before break up (I was there and I saw it with my own eyes) and they don't just grab the foam theory and run?

Stranger than that, according to you Columbia was far too low when she broke up south of Dallas, yet the professional cover-up guys at NASA who despite almost zero public discussion or doubt that ET foam was to blame, go to the pointless trouble to plant an OEX box...ok let's say they did. Then answer me this; Why would they then miss position the start of the break-up 65 miles too far to the east and not change it until EOC2-4-0018 videographer pushes for the change?  Something tells me you'll cook up something that fits your dark theory...wishful and blinding thinking.

Re: HAARP

I've heard of HAARP for years. I don't know much about it. It classically fits into that type of high-tech cutting edge government research program that conspiracy theorist use for their evil or uncaring government plot theories. I finally went to their site today...pretty cool! Yeah, there's some kind of scary possibilities pertaining to something or someone that might get in the way of one of their big pulses or whatever they call them and I'm sure they conduct some wilder experiments that might raise some eyebrows if they were openly publicized, but come on!....

Re: OEX

How many people knew that the OEX box had been removed from Columbia? A 100? 500? Needless to say scores of people from agencies and facilities would be well aware that the OEX box was not riding on Columbia if that were the case. Furthermore, in the weeks after the accident, nobody is clamoring for the vital data from the OEX box. Yes, sure! It would be great to find it so that the "probably cause" of the accident can be a higher percentage probability. But in your theory, for some reason "they" need to plant the strong evidence that the wing was breeched. So they took an OEX box, somehow laced it with false data, put it in a bar-b-cue, then tossed it on a hillside in Texas. Then have dozens of techs look at the faked/baked and shaked data so that "they" (NASA?) look more assuredly dumb for not taking the foam threat seriously...huh?! They do this knowing full well that Columbia was actually felled by an ionospheric test or worse Columbia and her crew were "sacrificed" for some twisted reason. Thousands of NASA folks just bend over and take one for the team!...If you believe that, you're in "O.J. Land".

They would have been seriously risking a "letting the cat out of the bag" by planting. Think about it. Nobody is questioning...then they get busted planting an OEX box that hundreds of people can testify WAS NEVER ON THE SHUTTLE!  

Common sense again... It didn't happen! 

Re: Foam strike video

I had saved one Space.com post and several replies to that post which were from about 2 or 3 days after Columbia launched. I haven't found them yet and I'm trying to get in contact with the guy who made the original post (works at KSC aka "shuttle_guy"). In this post he voices concern for the crew because a video showing a large piece of foam strike the orbiter left wing, has been reported.

The foam strike really happened, but still see references on your site expressing doubt that it is real. If they faked it, why didn't they go all the way and show before and after strike images of the wing that display damage. You read and saw the CAIB report there were before and after pictures and you couldn't make out a difference. Go ahead run with that as evidence there was no damage (see: accept data that works/dismiss data that doesn't), but again why did the cover-up artists leave the wiggle room? 

Re: Debris "A" adjusting

What seems the major cog to your theory is that Columbia according to your numbers was at only 1/6th the altitude it should have been at when break-up occurred. That somehow Columbia passed by Dallas at the correct the correct time, which would mean the correct speed. When I last saw it, it was where it was supposed to be when it was supposed to be there...what happened over E. New Mexico? W. Texas? Did it suddenly veer downward? Wouldn't a shuttle traveling at 14000mph burn up very quickly if it were at say 100k ft?

This all begs the question, why would they go to all the trouble of all the cover-up and move the first break-up event almost 65 miles to far to the east?

They know Columbia was far far to low because HAARP rendered Columbia a helpless chunk of TPS. It burns up killing the seven astronauts, because it's screaming through the lower atmosphere and should this fact slip out all bets are off as far as hiding the real reason.

If anything if they held true to your cover-up theory they'd move it too far west, but no it's way too far east.

Response:

This site does not claim that absolutely no voice transmissions were made to Mission Control from the Columbia after 13:47:32.  The short transmissions from Rick Husband are acknowledged.  The statements regarding voice transmissions between the shuttle crew and Mission Control are in UPDATE: 12/21/2003.

All the questions regarding HAARP are answered on the HAARP page and especially if one takes the time to read the U.S. Patent for the system itself.  And yes there is a rather large No-Fly zone around the HAARP facility just for the purposes of avoiding possible damage to a nearby airliner.

Columbia's Sacrifice stands by its theory regarding the OEX recorder, see Observational Analysis G1