Posted on 08/04/2005 9:19:47 AM PDT by anymouse
space ping
Completely and utterly insane.
If Columbia's ET was indeed a legacy CFC-11 tank,
this EPA/PC issue may well be a red herring.
I suspect that fixing this involves embedding a
light Kevlar mesh in the foam, with a thread
pitch that ensures any popcorn stays below the
target "safe" size.
"I have tried to please every one, but I have pleased no one, and now my father is gone and my donkey is gone."
A lesson most of us know.
"If Columbia's ET was indeed a legacy CFC-11 tank,
this EPA/PC issue may well be a red herring.
I suspect that fixing this involves embedding a
light Kevlar mesh in the foam, with a thread
pitch that ensures any popcorn stays below the
target "safe" size."
Agreed. They did improve shedding considerably on this tank. I expect post flight data to show Discovery to be the cleanest to return yet. Gene Kranz believes there has been great progress made. it is not unresaonble to expect a test flight or two to prove things out. Thats what test flights are for.
from the Jerry Pournelle web page: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view372.html
What ought to have been done with NASA's billion and a half was: (1) Hire a dozen smart people to design a condom for the Shuttle Tank. Peter Glaskowsky and I discussed this last night: surely the right material for the condom would be America's Cup sailcloth which isn't a cloth but a reinforced carbon fiber film, as light as anything made for its strength. Make a condom of that, encase the tank in epoxy and that condom, and foam chunks won't fall off. It might weigh a few hundred pounds, and so what? (2) use the remaining funds -- a billion at least -- to pay a bunch of small companies out there to work on SSTO, recoverable first stage rocket boosters, and air drop. Get each to build the best X project flying hardware they can build incorporating their approach for the $333 million each will get. Fly those ships. Observe the results and decide which concepts to encourage.
Now none of this is going to happen. NASA has no competence at much of anything, even at political manipulation, and doesn't have the confidence of the public, but it can still prevent large sums from going to real rivals. NASA will instead try to get any development money pipelined to the big aerospace outfits because NASA knows they aren't much real competition.
But we all know that NASA, having spent billions since the Columbia disaster without any visible return on that investment, isn't going to get us to space. Sometimes some NASA teams can still do things right. Sometimes. But no one can count on that any longer.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3295555
NASA's greatest risk is to give in to timidity in space
Wrong to retreat from giant leaps to tentative baby steps
By EUGENE F. KRANZ
To read and listen to the coverage about the space shuttle, you would think NASA's mission team has taken careless risks with the lives of the seven astronauts who went into space on the Discovery last week.
During the launching, foam fell off the external tank. For the risk-averse, the only acceptable thing to do now is retire the shuttle program immediately and wait for the divine arrival of the next generation of spacecraft. I am disgusted at the lack of courage and common sense this attitude shows.
All progress involves risk. Risk is essential to fuel the economic engine of our nation. And risk is essential to renew American's fundamental spirit of discovery so we remain competitive with the rest of the world.
My take on the current mission is very straightforward. The shuttle is in orbit. To a great extent mission managers have given the spacecraft a clean bill of health. Let us remember that this is a test flight. I consider it a remarkably successful test so far.
The technical response to the Columbia accident led to a significant reduction in the amount of debris striking this shuttle during launching. Mission managers have said that the external tank shed 80 percent less foam this time than on previous launchings. Only in the news media, apparently, is an 80 percent improvement considered a failure. Rather than quit, we must now try to reduce even more the amount of foam that comes off the tank.
The instruments and video equipment developed to assess the launching and monitor debris falling from the tank worked superbly. For the first time, the mission team knows what is happening, when it is happening and the flight conditions under which it occurred. This was a major mission objective, and it is an impressive achievement.
Having spent more than three decades working in the space program, I know that all of the flights of the early days involved some levels of risk. Some of those risks, in hindsight, seem incomprehensible by today's timid standards.
If we had quit when we had our first difficulties in Project Mercury, we would have never put John Glenn on the Atlas rocket Friendship 7 in 1961. Two of the previous five Atlas rockets test-fired before Friendship 7 had exploded on liftoff.
On Gemini 9, 10 and 11, all in 1966, we had complications with planned spacewalks that placed the astronauts at risk. Rather than cancel the walks, we faced the risks and solved the problems. These set the stage for Gemini 12 later that year, during which Buzz Aldrin spent more than five hours outside the capsule and confirmed to NASA that spacewalks could be considered an operational capability.
Eventually, this ability enabled astronauts to retrieve satellites and repair and maintain the Hubble space telescope; and during the current mission, spacewalks were used to repair a gyroscope on the International Space Station and allowed the crew to fix some of the damage that occurred during the launching. These are the rewards for the risks we took on those early Gemini flights.
I understand the tragedy inherent in risk-taking; I witnessed the fire aboard Apollo 1 in 1967 that killed three crew members. It filled us with anger at ourselves and with the resolve to make it right. After the fire we didn't quit; we redesigned the Apollo command module. During the Apollo missions that followed, we were never perfect. But we were determined and competent and that made these missions successful.
I see the same combination of anger, resolve and determination in the space shuttle program today. These people are professionals who understand risk, how to reduce it and how to make that which remains acceptable.
Most important, the current mission has demonstrated the maturity of the shuttle team that endured the Columbia disaster and had the guts to persevere. This is the most important aspect of the recovery from the Columbia accident, and is a credit to the great team NASA now has in place, headed by its administrator, Michael Griffin.
There are many nations that wish to surpass us in space. Does the "quit now" crowd really believe that abandoning the shuttle and the International Space Station is the way to keep America the pre-eminent space-faring nation? Do they really believe that a new spacecraft will come without an engineering challenge or a human toll?
The path the naysayers suggest is so out of touch with the American character of perseverance, hard work and discovery that they don't even realize the danger in which they are putting future astronauts — not to mention our nation.
Kranz, author of "Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond," is a former Apollo flight director.
Instead, NASA made the change as part of an ongoing bid to meet U.S. and international environmental bans dating to the 1990s.
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Agreed that this was political insanity. The impact of such panderinging to the enviro-whacko movement was obvious -- it cost lives. The foam issue most likely would not have happened if the recipe had not been changed. At least to the extent we saw in the first missions which went very well.
This does not say that the foam does not age, with usage but the change was still a massive technical error and any change by NASA should have been completely qualified before it was flown.
Tell me if I am wrong. The old foam worked but it didnt suit the envirowhacko's. So they tried new stuff and it didnt work . The bird was destroyed because of it.
So now instead of going back to the old foam that worked they are still experimenting with another new foam that doesnt work either, endangering the lives of the astronauts. Crazy. Completely nuts. Especially since the flight they are on now is so important.
All the tanks shed foam.
Columbia Accident Investigation Board.........
http://caib.nasa.gov/news/report/volume1/default.html
"Page 51 and page 129 discusses the general fact that the change in blowing agent only affected areas where the foam was mechanically applied, not hand-sprayed like the bipod ramps or PAL ramp."
The Bipod ramp is what got Columbia. The PAL ramp is where Disoverys mission shed foam.
If the use of some industrial process is proven to have harmful effects on the environment, I can see regulating or banning it's use in non-defense or non-space related applications, but how much actual damage to the environment has been prevented by NASA's conformance? There are a handful of shuttles - I don't think the ozone layer is going to go away because they are safely heat-proofed. Pure lunacy, and lives may have been lost as a result.
They should indeed go back to the old bonding techniques. Columbia's loss ultimately is the result of the insanity of the bureaucratic mindset. Was no one at NASA man enough to call the EPA requirements absolutely crazy? Think about it. they are what, at most 4 launches per year? What amount of damage could that amount of freon based adhesives have done to the f**king fragile ozone layer? the Freon - ozone link hasn't been proven definitively anyway Whatever leftist at the EPA that pushed the decision on NASA should be hung. It makes as much sense as forcing Ferrari to have pollution controls (wow, what about 400 Ferrari's a year are produced... that will really help the environment making them have pollution control. Most government is a waste and irrational. I absolutely despise the bureaucratic mindset. I pray all bureaucrats go to Hell.
I lived in Florida in the 80's and some idiot leftist Science professor was quoted as saying the Shuttle would destroy the Ozone layer. She said by the 100th launch the ozone layer would be gone. Since I worked on the Shuttle program, I had an interest in keeping such pronouncements. I filed the article away. Some day I will have to dig it up and post an image of it. She was a lunatic.
Peter Glaskowsky and I discussed this last night...
Hey, name dropper (not a Big Name; but, a Name): people BOUGHT most of the books because of NIVEN.
Good idea; if they have data on how the foam ablates during the tank's use (since the tanks splash into the Indian Ocean have they ever analyzed any?), so they'd know how deep to put the mesh (so it wouldn't aerodynamically affect the surface).
Two things. First, I'm guessing that stuff like the latest foam shedding always happened on old launches, we just didn't have the capability to see it. Same with the "strips" on the underside. You get to the point where the fixes are almost as risky (if not more so) than the original problem.
Second, while it's much too late now, the whole problem stems from wanting to reuse/refurbish the main engines. Otherwise, the orbiter would be on top of the stack and the engines would be on the back of the tank. Then, there would be no foam to shed because the orbiter would be on top of everything. Furthermore, it would be much easier to design an Apollo-type escape system for the orbiter.
Just my two cents worth...
Unrelated?
Are they suggesting that the old formula foam came off in chuncks and we were just lucky no disaster occured sooner?
I don't believe it.
Spacegeeks rejoice that no one will understand a word they speak within a year.
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