Preface.

I my work I have done lots of contingency planning, the ‘What if this, whatever it is, happened?  Then what will we do?’ And I enjoy doing it so much I do it in my writing. In ‘Christy’ I ask some serious questions about NASA’s contingency planning.

It is unlikely that any level of contingency planning could have saved the Challenger airframe after the SRB’s (Solid Rocket Boosters) were ignited but proper planning would have given the crew a good chance of survival. Challenger was destroyed, not by a failure of technology but by management malfeasance – they ignored the O-ring warning to an extent I would call criminal. The o-rings burned through on a previous cold weather launch but the hole and hence the jet of hot gas was away from the vehicle. The crew was alive after the explosion and died on impact with the ocean.

An escape system, an ejectable and airtight crew lifeboat would have given them a chance. Mercury and Gemini had a rocket called an escape tower to pull the capsule away from the rocket. Although we all KNEW that some portion of the shuttle lifting system WOULD FAIL and WOULD EXPLODE if used often enough the escape system was proposed and then omitted. The crew rode the lasgest flying bomb ever built. Check out my short story Drunken Astronauts? if you want a description of the shuttle. 

Management action or better inaction also doomed the Colombia crew. A fly-by photo that may have saved them was nixed by management as unneeded.  The loose foam was a known problem that was not addressed any more than the O-rings on Challenger.  If you like a little theroy on what happened read the fictional account The Crash of the Colombia, a Short Story for insight.

There was no contingency plan for Apollo 13. It was devised on the fly. Things on the shuttles went wrong too fast for anyone totake action to save them.  On Challenger the Flight Engineer did take actions that kept the crew alive, down to the water.

Let’s try another scenario. What would NASA do if an astronaut were badly injured or got seriously ill in orbit? Christy is a story of that explores such an event which is almost inevitable.  I have in the works a story called Donna that explores a serious medical situation on orbit.  But let us meet Christy.