• Question: what would happen if the space shuttle broke down and all comunication with earth was gone?

    Asked by 327nch48 to Simon, Julia, Delma, Andrew, Alex on 9 Dec 2015. This question was also asked by 475nch35, spotty unicorn.
    • Photo: Andrew Winnard

      Andrew Winnard answered on 9 Dec 2015:

      Hi 327nch48! I am really pleased you asked about the space shuttle as it my favourite spaceship ever! There are lots of things that can go wrong when travelling in space. The astronauts have a lot of training to prepare them for all these things.

      So the space shuttle… and what happens if it goes wrong…

      So firstly there is launch! The last few seconds of a count and engine start up is all computer controlled. The shuttle would start its own smaller engines first and test them out for 6 seconds before lighting the BIG white boosters and lifting off. If the computers found anything wrong with the engines during those 6 seconds, they would automatically cut off. This happened a few times as you can see here:

      Once the shuttle boosters light, there is no turning them off, so you are lifting off! They burn for about 70seconds and then drop off to be re-used on another launch. Something going wrong during this period is very bad as you cant abort very easily. Saddly something once did go wrong during this period and the shuttle disintegrating resulting in the loss of all the astronauts on board 🙁 You can see this happening in this video:

      Once the boosters are off, it gets a bit better, because the shuttle engines could be turned off. So if something goes wrong after the boosters are dropped off, the shuttle can turn its engines off and land again. It could return to the launch site or it could land over here in Europe!
      An abort like this has never happened that I know of.

      Did you know a shuttle is travelling SO fast on launch, that if it had to abort to Europe, it could land in space just 20mins after leaving Florida! That normally takes us 6-8 hours in an aeroplane!!

      Should something happen a bit further into launch then they would abort to orbit, go once around the Earth and land back at the space centre in Florida. Sometimes the shuttle could abort to orbit and still do some mission goals before coming back. An abort to orbit has happened and you can hear the controllers raidoing the shuttle about this in this video (abort to ATO means “abort to oribt”)

      Once in space, the shuttle could come back any time it needs to. If something happened that preventing it coming back then NASA had a plan to launch a rescue mission. Provided they had another shuttle they could launch in time, they would do that. The rescue shuttle would launch and meet the damaged one in space. They had a big ball which the astronauts would use to travel through space from the damaged shuttle to the rescue one. Then they would land on the rescue shuttle. This never happened though.

      Finally, things can also wrong during landing. If the heat shield was damaged then the heat from the atmosphere during re-entry could damage or even destroy the shuttle. Sadly this did happen and also resulted in loosing the astronauts.

      This shows us that spaceflight is dangerous, but it is still worth doing. So long as we learn from the times when it goes wrong and make it safer for the future 🙂

    • Photo: Delma Childers

      Delma Childers answered on 9 Dec 2015:

      That would be very scary. Have you seen the movie Gravity? 😉

      As Andrew pointed out, there are a lot of automated systems to keep things from going wrong. But say despite all our best efforts, the shuttle broke and Earth can’t talk to them. Seems to me that Andrew’s rescue mission would be the plan, but they’d need to figure out how the orbit of the broken shuttle will change and get a new plan for sight-based communication.

      Now, if this happened with ISS, there is a crew return vehicle that can be used in an emergency to get the station astronauts safely home. I’m hoping they never need to use it.

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