Viewed 8k times. So what was the procedure, had the Space Shuttle had to do an aborted landing? Improve this question. TildalWave Burhan Khalid Burhan Khalid 2 2 silver badges 6 6 bronze badges. A flying brick is much closer to the truth. Not even sure they can successfully fire at normal atmospheric pressure! The Shuttle was not is! A falling brick with no fuel.
Landing the Shuttle was a one-shot event. It either worked, or it didn't. If it didn't work, that would have meant landing somewhere other than the runway.
One way or the other, the Shuttle was going to land, period. On the way down, didn't the Shuttle do some S-turns, presumably starting with excess energy for the required approach, and S-turning as required and by the way it had a split rudder style air brake to correct onto the proper approach glide path?
Yes I said glide path; compared to any other aircraft it may have been a brick but its final descent still qualifies as gliding. Show 4 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Not one thing. Improve this answer. David Hammen David Hammen Add a comment. More information here And, you can read the bailout flight rules here Paragraph A Organic Marble Organic Marble k 8 8 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Now there's a bad day! The runway also was long enough that if they landed midway too long they had enough room to stop.
This prevented "normal" runways to be used for the shuttle. The only time the commander takes control and flies it is during the last couple of minutes of the flight. The rest of the time, it's the orbiter's guidance computers that are handling it, guiding it through those S turns. I like that question, Dave, because it makes a lot of sense to ask that.
The reason is, there's two reasons really. The first thing is, we need to get up into orbit and verify that everything is working, from the Shuttle's robot arm to all the other mechanisms on board the orbiter, make sure they come through the launch A-OK and nothing is troubling the orbiter. The other reason is, if you're going to get space sick, it usually happens in the first 24 hours. And the last thing we want is nauseous, ill-feeling astronauts trying to do a very critical maneuver like coming in and just barely docking with the International Space Station.
It has to be done very very precisely, and if you're not feeling well, you're nauseous from getting space sick -- and close to half the astronauts do get space sick - we don't want you doing that. So we launch, we take our time, we check the orbiter out, we make sure the astronauts are all checked out and they're A-OK too. Ian from Burbank Why does Endeavour have a 'u' in it? Did Webster miss this one? Author, harbor and color, to name a few, don't have a 'u'.
Well, Ian, you've been looking at the wrong book. You shouldn't have been looking at your dictionary, you should have been looking at your English history book. Endeavour is named after one of the exploration ships of Capt. James Cook of the English Navy. He did his exploring back around the time of the American revolution, in fact he discovered New Zealand, and also the Hawaiian Islands, in fact he was killed when he discovered Hawaii.
Had a problem with the natives there. So it's named after the English ship Endeavour. And by the way Capt. Cook also had another ship, in one of his previous times, that was called Discovery. So that's where two of the names of our orbiters come from. Don from Waycross Why is liquid hydrogen allowed to escape from the main fuel tank? We have to do that.
The reason is, the hydrogen is very very cold and boiling off. And if we don't let it boil off, we can't keep it sealed in that container and eventually that container, called the liquid hydrogen tank, will explode. So we have to allow that gas to escape so we have the hydrogen vent arm, the HVA we call it around here, that allows that gas to escape.
We want to keep a certain amount of pressure inside the tank, but we don't want it to build up too much. And if you're thinking perhaps, say, just filling the tank up a little bit, and let it boil off, well then you wouldn't have enough liquid. You've got to have enough liquid and it's got to be filled up to nearly the percent point, and at the very very top there's a small amount of hydrogen gas we call our ullage pressure and we're letting our ullage gas bleed off to keep the tank at the right pressure.
Tiffani from Beverly Hills What sort of weather is required for launch? Under what circumstances do you have to cancel, and why? Good question. I was out in Beverly Hills last week, where you always have good weather.
There's an awful lot of things that can cause you not to launch. Today you may have seen, if you watched the launch, we did have a lot of cloudiness in the area, but it was high, thin clouds. Those are OK. If the clouds are maybe a little bit lower, or maybe if the clouds are a little bit thicker, I think somewhere around 4, feet -- there's a number that was being thrown around today -- if they're that thick, you can't fly through clouds that are that thick.
You have to look at what temperature is freezing inside the clouds. And things like that. You have to look at winds, last week we had a big concern that the anvil clouds, if you've ever seen a thunderstorm, at the top of it you might see the very top of the thunderstorm shearing off in one direction, well those can actually cause hail and can trigger lightning, so even though the thunderstorm is 20 miles away, if the anvil is being blown over the launch pad, we can have adverse weather.
We also have to worry about landing weather because we can do what's called a Return to Launch Site. So you have to verify that the winds at the Shuttle Landing Facility here at the Cape are not out of limits.
We can't have too much crosswind or even too much headwind. It'd be pretty hard for us to get too much headwind or tailwind but the crosswind is something that the orbiter is only certified to a certain landing speed, and that's another reason we'd have to scrub the launch and not go for it that day.
But the Launch Commit Criteria for weather is, I'm not kidding, probably about two inches thick. It's an awful lot to take into consideration. Noah from Weatheford, Oklahoma How long does it take for the shuttle to reach supersonic speeds? Just to give you a couple of cute little things here, the orbiter goes from zero to 60 in about two seconds, but it's acheive supersonic speed in about 45 seconds.
So the orbiter is accelerating straight up faster than the fastest stock car you can buy anywhere. Corvette, you name it, Ferrari, it's accelerating faster straight up than those cars could. It's quite a ride, if you're up on the flight deck! Earl from Hirst Why do most space shuttles go to the East and not the West? Earl, they never go West. They only go East. First, the orbiter must be maneuvered into the proper position. This is crucial to a safe landing. When a mission is finished and the shuttle is halfway around the world from the landing site Kennedy Space Center, Edwards Air Force Base , mission control gives the command to come home, which prompts the crew to:.
The orbiter is covered with ceramic insulating materials designed to protect it from this heat. The materials include:. These materials are designed to absorb large quantities of heat without increasing their temperature very much. In other words, they have a high heat capacity. During re-entry, the aft steering jets help to keep the orbiter at its 40 degree attitude. The hot ionized gases of the atmosphere that surround the orbiter prevent radio communication with the ground for about 12 minutes i.
When re-entry is successful, the orbiter encounters the main air of the atmosphere and is able to fly like an airplane. The orbiter is designed from a lifting body design with swept back "delta" wings. With this design, the orbiter can generate lift with a small wing area. At this point, flight computers fly the orbiter. The orbiter makes a series of S-shaped, banking turns to slow its descent speed as it begins its final approach to the runway.
The commander picks up a radio beacon from the runway Tactical Air Navigation System when the orbiter is about miles km away from the landing site and , feet 45, m high. At 25 miles 40 km out, the shuttle's landing computers give up control to the commander. The commander flies the shuttle around an imaginary cylinder 18, feet or 5, m in diameter to line the orbiter up with the runway and drop the altitude.
During the final approach, the commander steepens the angle of descent to minus 20 degrees almost seven times steeper than the descent of a commercial airliner. When the orbiter is 2, ft m above the ground, the commander pulls up the nose to slow the rate of descent.
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