and they identified very early on and got images early on and everything went about perfectly, just maybe there could have been a rescue mission. but it s questionable whether you could get the other orbiter, which would have been atlantis in this case, processed and out to the pad in time without putting that crew at serious risk. we would have had to pull together this huge effort in the eleventh hour to figure out how to fly one shuttle next to the other to conduct an operation that you d never trained or prepared for. it was not in the art of the possible given what we knew. -the one tool we could have tried to look at was changing the way entry is done, trying to change how it enters the atmosphere. you can change the angle of attack coming in so you can lessen the heat in certain areas
all of that data pointed to a problem at rcc panel 8. something very different happened in this location on the orbiter. and so, let s go see if we can understand what that was. -ok, so, as the vehicle is entering the atmosphere, these black tiles are protecting the structure, the aluminium of the vehicle, in high-heat areas. and the grey is the wing leading edge reinforced carbon-carbon, rcc panels. those protect the vehicle from the highest level of heat, those 3,000 degree temperatures, so that you don t get metal melting. but we had never had any experience in breaking a panel.
-what was starting to join up was you ve got video analysis that says the strike on the orbiter created a hole in the wing. and you can see that there had been some sort of penetration against the rcc panel. hot gas had entered in, the shuttle had lost aerodynamic control and crashed. but i think the challenge for a lot of folks at nasa was believing that foam had done that. they would say foam can t break reinforced carbon-carbon. there were a lot of people that said there s something else that explains this. -we decided to ask nasa about the history of foam strikes, which had never been done. -i was asked by the accident investigation team to help find that type of information.
I hear from Launch Control he vehicle has exploded. Thats the orbiter itself. The Shuttle Challenger has exploded. We must assume that the crew is not alive. This is unheralded in the history of the space program. Ladies and gentlemen, i have covered Space Shuttle launches since the very first launch, since before the first launch itself, going way back, and nothing like this has ever happened. [ woman screams ] it was a sad day for all americans. This was our space program. This was our national space program. And here they lost their lives doing it for our country. When i thought about challenger, i talked to michael. I said, you know what . Youre doing what youre doing, and im glad youre loving it and liking it, but you got a wife and two little kids here if something happens
Well, they came to the conclusion that the best way to deal with that was to arrange a system of tiles to cover the shuttle. All of the black here shown is all tiles. And these tiles are made of a Silica Fiber Material which is very heatresistant. I can show you. This is a test tile. There are about 31,000 of them all together, and we hope those tiles will stay on when the orbiter comes back into the atmosphere, because otherwise the craft itself could be damaged. During the development of the Space Shuttle in the 1970s, there was quite an effort to develop a way to repair damaged tiles on orbit. It was a huge effort. And it was an utter failure. They could not develop anything, and that was one of the accepted risks of flying in space