When needed again, it can be summoned back in the blink of the eye. Through some Applied Phlebotinum, this helmet can usually fold into the armor as if no longer existing. And then they reveal themselves with an unbelievably cool helmet that just slides, clicks, folds and does all manner of other mechanical origami. Picture the scene, the hero (or indeed villain) is wearing their Powered Armor or other such suit. For them, there's a simple solution: the Collapsible Helmet. “If you don’t learn from it,” he said, “what a tragedy.Heroes or villains who avert Helmets Are Hardly Heroic still rarely want to bother about putting it on, or removing the helmet and carrying it along. “It will make an important contribution,” he said, adding that the most important thing was to understand the accident and not simply grieve. Clark, Commander Clark’s husband, said in an interview that he was pleased with the investigation, which he worked on as a former NASA flight surgeon. Anderson of the United States Air Force Kalpana Chawla, an aerospace engineer and two Navy doctors, Capt. Besides Commander McCool, the crew included Ilan Ramon, a colonel in the Israeli Air Force Lt. The commander for the Columbia’s last flight was Col. The report was released over the holidays, she said, so that the children of the astronauts would not be in school, and would be able to discuss the report with their parents in private. Knowing that the astronauts had lost consciousness before conditions reached their worst, she said, “is a very small blessing but we will take them where we can find them.” Melroy noted that those who died aboard the Columbia were friends and colleagues, and that many on the study team believed that “learning the lessons of Columbia would be a way for all of us to work through our grief.” At the same time, she said, “this is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, both technically and emotionally.” Pressure suits will have helmets that provide better head protection, and equipment and new procedures will ensure a more reliable supply of oxygen in emergencies. NASA has called for upgraded seat hardware to provide more restraint, and individual radio beacons for the crew. After the accident investigation board report came out, NASA also appointed the crew survival study group, whose report can be found at The shuttle fleet is set to be retired in 2010. It criticized managers as complacent and too tightly focused on scheduling and budgetary pressures.Īfter the accident, NASA redesigned the shuttle’s external fuel tank and greatly reduced the amount of foam that is shed during launching, among other physical changes to the shuttle. In a scathing report issued in August 2003, an investigative board later found that a “broken safety culture” at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was largely responsible for the deaths. The managers, however, held firm to the then-common belief that foam strikes were relatively harmless and constituted a maintenance problem, not a fatal risk. The impact of the foam was obvious in videos taken at launching, and during the Columbia’s 16-day mission, NASA engineers pleaded with mission managers to examine the wing to see if the blow had caused serious damage. The foam punched a hole that would later allow superheated gases to cut through the wing’s interior like a blowtorch. While many details of the Columbia’s last flight have long been known, this was the most extensive study ever performed on how the astronauts died and what could be done to improve the chances of survival in a future accident.Īlthough the shuttle broke up during re-entry, its fate had been all but sealed during ascent, when a 1.67-pound piece of insulating foam broke away from an external fuel tank and struck the leading edge of the craft’s left wing. They added, “There is no known complete protection from the breakup event except to prevent its occurrence.” “The breakup of the crew module and the crew’s subsequent exposure to hypersonic entry conditions was not survivable by any currently existing capability,” they wrote. 1, 2003, as the Columbia disintegrated after re-entering the atmosphere on the way to its landing strip in Florida. Investigators state bluntly in the 400-page report that better equipment in the crew cabin would not have saved the astronauts on the morning of Feb. While the astronauts’ upper bodies flailed, the helmets that were supposed to protect them ended up battering their skulls, the report said, and “lethal trauma occurred to the unconscious or deceased crew due to the lack of upper-body support and restraint.” Seven astronauts slipped into unconsciousness within seconds and their bodies were whipped around in seats whose restraints failed as the space shuttle Columbia spun out of control and disintegrated in 2003, according to a new report from NASA.