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Posted on 07/27/2005 3:52:13 PM PDT by holymoly
NASA officials are grounding the entire space shuttle fleet, after reviewing video of damage done to the heat-shield tiles of Discovery during Tuesday's launch.
Officials are still working to determine just how severe the damage is. It appears a small piece of the tile was chipped-away by a falling piece of insulation foam from the orbiter's external fuel tank. NASA engineers say now it's a matter of determining if that piece was a "chip" or a "chunk".
Discovery's sister ship Atlantis was set for a September launch to send astronauts to the International Space Station. Atlantis was also on standby to be used as a rescue vessel in the event that Discovery is unable to return to earth. That option is now in limbo as NASA officials decide how next to proceed.
PING what do you think?
Great. Now NASA can get TWO crews stranded in space.
Ah well...it's not that serious. UNLESS YOU HAPPEN TO BE IN SPACE WHEN YOU GET THE ANNOUNCEMENT!!!
Your screen name says it all Holy Moly!!!!
Ping!!
It broke on FR 20 minutes ago
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1451862/posts
It broke on FR 20 minutes ago
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1451862/posts
Chip or chunk, I'd just want them to get my rear home.
Do the astronauts up there know this yet???
If you want on or off my aerospace ping list, please contact me by Freep mail not by posting to this thread.
Sad bump.
There is already a thread.
Crap. Searched for "shuttle", didn't see it.
NASA Says Loose Debris Was Foam Insulation
By MARCIA DUNN
AP Aerospace WriterSPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) -- NASA said Wednesday that the mysterious object that came flying off the shuttle Discovery's fuel tank during liftoff was a sizable chunk of foam insulation - the very thing that doomed Columbia.
But this time, fortunately, it didn't hit the spacecraft.
Space agency officials also said that a chipped thermal tile on Discovery's belly does not appear to be a danger, and it cautioned the public against overreacting to every speck of damage sustained by the shuttle during liftoff.
NASA expected some debris to fall off during launch. The big question is whether any of it will mean a risk to the crew. The answer is still a few days away, NASA said one day after the ship blasted off on the first shuttle mission since the Columbia tragedy 2 1/2 years ago.
Flight director Paul Hill said it is understandable that people inside and outside the space agency might be alarmed by any hint of damage to Discovery's thermal shielding.
"The last flight ended in catastrophe and we lost seven friends of ours because of damage," Hill said at a news conference. But he added: "We don't make decisions in spaceflight based on that type of emotion. We make decisions in spaceflight based on the data, and we're looking at the data."
And based on what they have seen so far, NASA engineers believe the broken tile is "not going to be an issue," Hill said.
Imagery experts and engineers expect to know by Thursday afternoon whether the gouge left by the missing 1 1/2-inch piece of thermal tile needs a second look or, in the worst case, a repair, Hill said. The astronauts have a 100-foot, laser-tipped crane on board that could determine precisely how deep the gouge is.
The tile fragment broke off less than two minutes after liftoff Tuesday and was spotted by a camera mounted on the external fuel tank. It fell off a particularly vulnerable spot, near the set of doors for the nose landing gear.
Multiple cameras also captured the chunk of foam flying off the tank but missing the shuttle. It broke away from a different part of the tank than the piece that mortally wounded Columbia by striking its wing. After the accident, the tank was redesigned to reduce the risk of foam insulation falling off.
If NASA decides to use its new inspection tool to get a 3-D view of the tile damage, the astronauts will examine the spot on Friday, a day after docking with the international space station.
On Wednesday, Discovery's astronauts spent nearly six hours using the boom to inspect Discovery's wings and nose cap for launch damage. The wings and nose are protected by reinforced carbon panels capable of taking the brunt of the searing re-entry heat.
Hill said he saw nothing immediately alarming during the laser inspection, which had been planned long before any damage to Discovery was detected. But NASA's experts have yet to fully analyze the images.
The inspection was conducted in extra-slow motion, a mere three feet per minute, to give engineers a good long look. The boom came within five feet of the shuttle's wings and nose cap.
The astronauts had to be careful not to bang the equipment into the fragile thermal panels and cause the kind of disaster the boom was designed to prevent. The task required such precision that three of the astronauts took turns performing the grueling job.
NASA should have a better grasp of the tile damage after the two space station residents photograph the approaching Discovery on Thursday. Discovery will do a slow back flip 600 feet out, so the station astronauts can zoom in on the shuttle's belly. This unprecedented maneuver was also planned long before the flight.
The photos taken from the space station should be so good that "you will almost be able to read the serial numbers on the tiles," Hill said.
After that, if the imagery experts and engineers want even more data on the broken tile, Hill said, "then by God we're going to take the (boom) down and we're going to get them more data and that data are going to look like they were sitting right there in front of the tile with their hands on it, it's going to be so good."
NASA does not expect to make a final decision until Sunday or so on whether Discovery can safely return to Earth. That is how long it will take to analyze all the data from the more than 100 cameras that tracked the liftoff, scores of sensors embedded in the shuttle wings, the laser inspection, and pictures from space.
Top NASA managers have stressed for months that they would probably see more debris than usual falling from Discovery simply because they would be looking harder this time.
Hill also reminded reporters that space shuttles have frequently landed with tile damage over the past 24 years. The seriousness depends on how deep the gouges are and how thick the tile is in the affected area, he said.
Deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale portrayed the current analysis as vastly superior to what took place during Columbia's mission in 2003. A chunk of fuel-tank foam insulation pierced Columbia's wing at liftoff and left a plate-size hole that proved fatal during re-entry two weeks later.
"A few people looked at the pictures, a few people ran some small analysis that wasn't grounded in much real science and came to the wrong conclusion," Hale said. This time, he said, hundreds of people are examining every frame of the video, and NASA management is focusing on whether the shuttle is safe to return.
How about a fiberglass jacket laminated over the insulation on the main fuel tank? Or have they done that?
How about they go back to the foam they used to use - the stuff they ditched to be more "environmentally sensitive?"
by Hannes Hacker -- Capitalism Magazine (July 11, 2003)
Summary: These accidents are not primarily the fault of careless engineers, nor are they merely the unintended consequences of bureaucrats blindly following federal rules. They are the result of a philosophy that hold human needs--such as the need for a safe shuttle launch or re-entry--as less important than a concern to preserve the purity of nature from the products of industrial civilization, such as CFCs and asbestos insulation.[www.CapMag.com] Now that a dramatic new test has confirmed that a piece of thermal insulation flaking off of space shuttle Columbia's external tank during launch was the most likely cause of its destruction during reentry, the typical second-guessing in the press has focused on NASA engineers, asking: "What did Mission Control know, and when did they know it?"
Somehow, NASA engineers should have guessed about the damage done to Columbia's thermal tiles and pulled an Apollo 13-style rabbit out of their hat. The implication is that they should have been omniscient and omnipotent.
Having heroes like NASA's mission controllers around to quietly brave the world's criticism certainly serves to divert attention from those who have done the most to contribute to this disaster--and who regard themselves as omniscient and omnipotent enough to command the entire American economy and the lives of its citizens: the environmentalists.
Why did the shuttle's foam insulation flake off? In response to an edict from the EPA, NASA was required to change the design of the thermal insulating foam on the shuttle's external tank. They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, in order to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster.
But it was the elimination of the old foam that led to a real disaster for the shuttle program. The maiden flight with the new foam, in 1997, resulted in a ten-fold increase to foam-induced tile damage. The new foam was far more dangerous than the old foam. But NASA--a government organization afraid of antagonizing powerful political interests--did not reject the EPA's demands and thoroughly reverse their fatal decision. Instead, they sought a compromise, applying for a waiver from the EPA that allowed them to use the old foam on some parts of the external tank.
NASA notes that it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether it was the old or the new foam that caused the recent disaster, and environmentalists will no doubt say this means that we can't pin the disaster on them. But any unnecessary increase in risk in an enterprise so unforgiving of error, is unacceptable. The bottom line is that NASA took a much greater risk in order to comply with EPA demands. Environmentalist junk science trumped sound engineering.
This is not the first time that has happened. The cause of the 1986 Challenger explosion is officially established as hot gases burning through an O-ring joint in one of the solid-rocket boosters. NASA was roundly criticized for its decision to launch in cold weather over the objection of some engineers, but there was a deeper cause that was not as widely reported.
In 1985 NASA had switched to a new putty to seal the O-ring joints. The new putty became brittle at cold temperatures, thus allowing Dr. Richard Feynman to teach NASA a famous lesson. At the congressional hearing investigating the accident, he simply placed some of the O-ring putty in a glass of ice water and crumbled it in his fingers.
NASA had changed the sealant because its original supplier for O-ring putty stopped producing it for fear of anti-asbestos lawsuits.
Had NASA not run out of the original putty, the Challenger disaster would not have happened. Indeed, when the Air Force ran out of the same putty and replaced it with the same brittle substitute, their Titan 34D heavy-lift boosters suffered two sudden launch failures, after a string of successes that had lasted as long as that of the space shuttle.
These accidents are not primarily the fault of careless engineers, nor are they merely the unintended consequences of bureaucrats blindly following federal rules. They are the result of a philosophy that hold human needs--such as the need for a safe shuttle launch or re-entry--as less important than a concern to preserve the purity of nature from the products of industrial civilization, such as CFCs and asbestos insulation.
Had 2000 presidential candidate Al Gore had his way, Columbia's last mission would have carried a spacecraft called Triana into space. Triana was meant to beam continuous images, via the Internet, of a very small Earth as seen from a point between the Earth and the Sun. The idea was to convey the message of how small and fragile the Earth is, and consequently how small man is, compared to the vastness of space.
That's the theory: man is small and should sacrifice for vast nature. The practice? Fourteen dead astronauts.
| About the Author: Hannes Hacker, an aerospace engineer and former flight controller at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, is a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. |
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