Posted on 08/13/2004 3:36:38 PM PDT by ZGuy
..thats' what I had heard... :/
Oh!, I agree totally.
I don't know enough about it to have a serious opinion, but I've been told the same thing by some very, very well informed Air Force types. They blamed Kennedy for misdirecting the effort to the moon (for narrowly political reasons, of course) and setting the conquest of near space back for what is now two generations and counting.
The pieces of foam breaking off increased when the contractor (Lockheed Martin) changed to a government mandated "ozone friendly" compounds. This happened everywhere in the aerospace industry, and other industries. The government simply baned substances that leached Volatile Organic Compounds into the atmosphere as they dried. (Thus, you can't buy the kind of paint you used to be able to buy.) The new compounds allowable were not as good as the old coumpounds. (For example, MEK was outlawed, and it was the best cleaner-degreaser known. Ethanol alcohol was substituted, but does not leave surfaces as clean.) Less clean, means more stuff not stuck as well. The process changes were so widespread that engineers could not test them all well enough before the shuttle had to sly again, but the new processes were "certified" anyway.
The company had the option of petitioning the EPA for the old process if a new one could not be found that was good enough, but contractors like Lockheed, long a target of environmentalists decided to make a political gain by accepting all the changes and agreeing not to put out any challenges. Thus the shuttle foam process was changed and more debris were deemed acceptable.
I believe what NASA is trying to say is that the new compounds were just as good, but the process of application by hand does not yield repeatable results. This was my experience in working with hand mixed compounds as well.
Thanks for the illumination. :))
I wonder what the person or persons involved in making or forcing decisions such as this, where the ultimate "unintended consequence" is so catastrophic, think and or feel when death is the result.
Yeah, That is an issue engineers at all levels need to deal with. The decision to go totally ozone friendly was made at a very high level with the expectation that lower level materials and process people would check and verify that all the changed issues were OK. The problem is that the lower level engineers were resigned to the change, knowing that high management had endorsed it and so the tendency was to bulk copy a new spec in place of an old one. I.E. where it used to say clean with MEK it now reads clean with ethanol. This was done with manhy processess, in fact there were lists where you could look up the substitute process that was intended to replace the other process. So no one really had the responsibility at any level. I was not on the shuttle program to know whether additional critical tests were performed, I suspect they were because of the man rating, but the obvious result was that they moved to allow more debris rather than rethink the foam process.
On the program that I was on, a resin error was cleaned up with alcohol and the clean up was good to the naked eye but not good at a microscopic level. This problem cost us a test missile flight, because of the thin layer of goo on electric contacts.
I am not sure exactly what would happen. Would be a huge mess. IMHO, I doubt the "space elevator" will ever be built. Fun to contemplate (like project Orion), but will never happen in real.
Amen to that. Sigh!
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