Posted on 04/05/2005 6:16:40 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
SPACE CENTER, Houston - After a two-year struggle to keep big chunks of foam from coming off the shuttle fuel tank during launch, NASA acknowledged Tuesday even marshmallow-size pieces could doom the spacecraft under the worst circumstances.
Shuttle systems engineering manager John Muratore said it is a risk NASA and the nation must accept for flights to resume anytime soon.
It would take years and a total redesign of the fuel tank to completely eliminate foam loss and to ensure the 2003 Columbia tragedy would never be repeated, Muratore and other officials said.
NASA expects pieces of insulating foam no bigger than one or two marshmallows to break off the fuel tank when Discovery blasts off next month. Depending on where and when the pieces hit, they could cause catastrophic damage during re-entry, Muratore said.
By contrast, the size of the foam that shattered Columbia's left wing was the size of a carryon suitcase.
Muratore told reporters he was "trying to be scrupulously honest with you about what the potential is — but that doesn't say that's what we expect to happen." He likened the situation to trying to predict the chances of being in a fatal car accident while driving to the airport.
"If we have that worst day, and the tire is worn and you have a flat tire in the wrong place in traffic, next to a truck going 90 mph, could you get killed? Yes, you could. Is that a reasonable set of assumptions to plan your trip on? Probably not."
Muratore said assessing the danger from foam and other launch debris is an extremely complicated engineering problem made even more uncertain by the fact that computer models show little pieces of foam could cause catastrophic damage. NASA's flight experience over the decades has proven otherwise.
What NASA has to do to get smarter, Muratore said, is to stop relying on computer models and start flying the space shuttle again.
Discovery is scheduled to blast off in mid-May on the first shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1, 2003. NASA plans to move the spacecraft to the launch pad Wednesday.
NASA will fly five types of repair kits aboard Discovery for the astronauts to test in space, but the rudimentary patches will accommodate holes no bigger than 4 inches. The gash that brought down Columbia was an estimated 6 inches to 10 inches in size.
Steve Poulos Jr., a shuttle project manager, said a repair kit to fix that big of a hole should be available in two years.
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On the Net:
NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov
One of my toys when I was a little kid was an old 20 guage shotgun that the firing mechanism removed. When I say little I mean 6 years old or so.
(2) The risk involves every civilian, mother and child, man and boy under the flight path. We were incredibly fortunate that the last Shuttle crash did not end a single innocent live on the ground -- parts fell in inhabited areas!
(3) This is a jobs program that quells more space-related endeavor than it enables. Better to put that sinecured ossified bureaucracy to work scanning luggage. Combine the Shuttle program with the baggage shuttles.
My experience has been, the engineers want to fix everything, but the managers think it costs too much.
"we" were accepting the risks previously (AND using a different, more durable, kind of foam - environmentally-unfriendly though it was) and there were HOW many successful landings?
Since the wings don't matter on launch (with the rockets essentially 'shoving' it into orbit) how about some kind of sheathing to, if not totally protect the surfaces) at least mitigate gouging? Lose the sheathing in-orbit or let it burn-off on reentry.
Ping.
On one hand, I can safely work as a government engineer for life, and retire to obscurity,
or,
tell me up front there is a 90% chance of being a well known, celebrated, roman candle, and for having big brass ones.
Hmmmm,
10% chance for success, or 100% chance of bordom.
easy...
Kick the tires and light the fire!
That's the price that must be paid in order to remain enviromentally correct. NASA went green and the space shuttle went down.
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