germanbird writes:
"ArsTechnica has published a story taking a look at NASA's theoretical rescue plan for the space shuttle Columbia. The ambitious yet plausible plan was included as part of the report prepared during the investigation after the shuttle was lost during re-entry. I appreciate the author's perspective and his analysis of things as a sys-admin at Boeing he was much closer to the situation than most of us were. I for one would have liked to see the men and women at NASA given the chance to try to pull this one off, but I'm not sure it would have been worth the risk to the rescue team or even possible given the compressed schedule."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by emg on Friday February 28 2014, @08:43PM
A few ideas:
1. They didn't have enough shuttles to dedicate one to a standby.
2. Most failures were expected to be catastrophic (Challenger) or survivable (the single engine failure during launch). Being stranded in orbit was expected to be a rare occurrence.
3. The launch rate earlier in the program was high enough that there probably would be a shuttle close to being ready for launch at any moment. If I remember correctly, the record turnaround between flights for one shuttle was about eight weeks.