Keep those people in your prayers.
Discussed here:
Back in 1997, a report on shuttle wear and maintenance by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., stated that shuttle vehicles’ fragile insulating tiles were suddenly sustaining many more scrapes and dings during missions. The damage was occurring during the launch: Chunks of hard protective foam were coming loose from the shuttle’s fuel tank. Why? The engineers suggested that it was because the formula for making the tank insulation had been changed. For the sake of environmental "friendliness," NASA had stopped using Freon in the insulation’s production. This was in deference to a politically correct but factually unproven theory that aerosol cans on earth were depleting the protective layer of ozone around the earth. The propellant in the cans contained Freon, which reacts with ozone.
After the Columbia disaster in 2003, Robert Culp, a "space debris and re-entry expert" at the University of Colorado told space.com, "Taking the Freon out made that stuff more brittle and created what became known as the 'popcorn effect,' with pieces of the insulation popping off and knocking chunks out of the tiles. They did not have problems with that insulation before they made that change," Prof. Culp said.
According to engineers, the insulation made without Freon peels off the shuttle and hits the tiles at a rate about 11-times greater than the Freon-based insulation. At the time, even such environmentalist stalwarts as The New York Times made the same point. But for some reason, NASA has not put Freon back into its formula, and has not even mentioned the "F-word" since Discovery was found to have lost insulation over its fuel tank last week.
The old U.S. Space Program, fighting a war against the Soviets for the high frontier, would not have troubled itself over Freon ethics. The military ethos is actually more respecting of human life than the civic-minded one, because at least it is about life: saving the people in your own civilization against invaders. At today’s civilian NASA, you would think being Environmentally Correct were more important than the lives of the crew.
It is too bad they are grounded. It would have been cool to have a running thread on missions because NasaTV had some kick butt video feeds.
When, exactly, is the re-entry ?
This reentry is going to set a record for strangled sphincters.
Godspeed Discovery!