Columbia: One Year Later: NASA's cautious re-entry

St. Petersburg Times ^ | February 1, 2004 | DAVID BALLINGRUD,

[XBob]

bump

[bonesmccoy]

Have you retained any documentation of your conversations with Wiltech?

In a legal sense, if you were working for NASA, you probably can escape blame (point the finger to the other guy mentality). If you were working for the contractor, then you're out of luck (NASA always points the finger at the contractor).

The loss of Columbia was the first time that I heard NASA managers openly admitting they made the mistake.

Still, they haven't publicly admitted the problems with the freon.

I haven't reviewed the subsequent volumes from CAIB. Did CAIB miss the freon issue?

[snopercod]

Hmmmmmm....

We may not be talking about the same solvents and uses here. I know that Wiltech used a whole lot of freon to clean parts and flush piping systems.

Freon was used in the GCU cooling systems on the MLP. I know they swapped that out for something more "enviornmentally friendly" that they had to weigh in and weigh out during S0008. The additional work changed a 1 hour task into an 8 hour task for a crew of people.

But to the best of my knowldege, "freon" was not used to to clean things on the orbiter or SRBs - I thought that they used Trichloroethylene for that. (They might have used freon in the crew module where there were special requirements - not sure.)

So was this "freon replacement committee" just replacing the freon that Wiltech used to clean parts and plumbing, or were they involved in the replacements of the solvents used on the orbiter/SRBs?

Recall that it was Marshall Space Flight Center that came up with the new specifications for the cleaners and adhesives on the SRBs.

Just tossing this in from the EPA site:

Why is Trichloroethylene being Regulated?

In 1974, Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act. This law requires EPA to determine safe levels of chemicals in drinking water which do or may cause health problems. These non-enforceable levels, based solely on possible health risks and exposure, are called Maximum Contaminant Level Goals.

The MCLG for trichloroethylene has been set at zero because EPA believes this level of protection would not cause any of the potential health problems described below.

Based on this MCLG, EPA has set an enforceable standard called a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL). MCLs are set as close to the MCLGs as possible, considering the ability of public water systems to detect and remove contaminants using suitable treatment technologies.

The MCL has been set at 5 parts per billion (ppb) because EPA believes, given present technology and resources, this is the lowest level to which water systems can reasonably be required to remove this contaminant should it occur in drinking water.

These drinking water standards and the regulations for ensuring these standards are met, are called National Primary Drinking Water Regulations. All public water supplies must abide by these regulations.

[XBob]

43-There were numbers of 'cycles' in cleaning up the environment implemented by the EPA and NASA, as they moved progressively to less and less 'hazardous' materials.

In the mid-late 80's things really got rolling, and they started banning just about everything. The corrosion control specialists were pulling their hair out when just about every method to protect the steel gantries in the highly corrosive salt laden atnomsphere of Cape Canaveral. They had to collect every grain of 'sand' and 'paint' when sand blasting the giant gantries at the Cape, and had to set up tarpaulins around the bases of these giant gantries, to collect the droppings, which were then treated as hazardous waste.

The Montreal Protocols, signed in 1987, called for stopping production of any Freon in the US by 1994 and switching from any freon use by 1995.

I went to work at the space center in 1988-1992, when they had already banned MEK as a cleaner and then they started banning Trichloroethylene, so they were down to Freon, which was being used to clean everything. There were open cans of freon and spray cans all over the place. I used to clean my tie with freon solvent at work.

The Freon Replacement Committee was the local KSC chapter of the national Freon Replacement Team(?) and was to replace ALL freon usage, from Air Conditioners, Refrigerators, Cleaners, etc.

The biggest problem with the other cleaners, including the (citrus smelling one), was that while some of them worked as cleaners, upon testing, they found that the cleaners left a residue which was very hard to remove. It seems to me that the citrus smelling one, they gave up on after 'rinsing' for 32 or 38 hours, they still couldn't get the cleaner residue off the parts.

It became so ridiculous that for a while we had to turn off the lawn sprinklers, because we could not put the 'polluted' tap water on the ground. I used to say that the US was going to be either 'the cleanest broke country in the world.' or the 'brokest clean country in the world'.