re shuttle oxygen was budget astronaut henry zoo toronto edu henry spencer writes there is an emergency oxygen system that is capable of maintaining a breathable atmosphere in the cabin for long enough to come down even if there is something like a cm hole in the wall that nobody tries to plug josh hopkins jbh uxa cso uiuc edu replied wow double wow can you land a shuttle with a cm hole in the wall personnally i don t know but i d like to try it sometime programmatically yes we can land an orbiter with a cm hole in the wall provided that the thing which caused cm hole didn t cause a crit failure on some of the internal systems there are a few places where a cm hole would cause a bad day especially if the cm hole went all the way through the orbiter and out the other side as could easily happen with a meteor strike but a hole in the pressure vessel would cause us to immediately de orbit to the next available landing site ken jenks nasa jsc gm space shuttle program office kjenks gothamcity jsc nasa gov nasa turns dreams into realities and makes science fiction into fact daniel s goldin nasa administrator
