Window damage on Atlantis threatens 6 month delay to STS-129(Worst case:Shuttle may never fly again)

NASA ^ | 6/24/09 | Chris Bergin

[prisoner6]

Dremel vari speed moto tool with flex shaft?

Oh, and a very tiny very sharp bit.

prisoner6

[BallyBill]

Dremel is my bet too.

Is there anything they can't do?

[6SJ7]

What’s disturbing is someone was sloppy enough to drop a knob off a work light while working inside the shuttle, then the person failed to report it.

[raybbr]

Six months to change a window? MUST be a union job.

[Dixie Yooper]

What’s disturbing is someone was sloppy enough to drop a knob off a work light while working inside the shuttle, then the person failed to report it.

The subcontractor with the lowest bid doesn't always bring the best people to the table...

[naturalized]

Wow. Must have some experienced mechanics here. My thought immediately - cut that sucker in half and the stress would be relieved immediately. I have worked with too many engineers that say “do you really think that will work?” The best engineers are former flat-raters.

[McGruff]

A knob? You would think they'd have electric windows like any car does nowadays.

[N. Theknow]

What’s disturbing is someone was sloppy enough to drop a knob off a work light while working inside the shuttle, then the person failed to report it.

UAW - United Aerospace Workers perhaps.

Reminds me of my first car. A Chevy Corvair.

Had an intermittent "clunking noise" in the driver side door. Removed the door panel and found a screwdriver.

[Right Wing Assault]

What’s disturbing is someone was sloppy enough to drop a knob off a work light while working inside the shuttle, then the person failed to report it.

It happened in orbit, so it was one of the astronauts.

[Dixie Yooper]

The best engineers are former flat-raters

The best engineers are busy working hard on problems know-it-alls can't solve, instead of wasting their time posting nonsense on FR.

[Eye of Unk]

Thats nothing, one of my yard workers left a $250 Bosch rotary concrete drill inside a concrete septic tank which was sold, installed and is now full of crap.

[tanknetter]

It happened in orbit, so it was one of the astronauts.

Yup, there's all sorts of loose stuff in the Orbiter cabin during flight. Including liquids.

Note that the knob isn't wedged between panes, but between the pane and the dashboard panel. I remember when I was a kid and I managed to spill a box of Good&Plentys onto the dashboard of my Mom's 75' Buick Century station wagon. A couple of them ended up, visible, in the area where the dash met the windshield but we couldn't reach them (even with tweezers) and we never could get them out. The candy shell ended up disintegrating leaving the chewy core.

The knob in the Orbiter window is going to be a good deal harder than a Good&Plenty, and since the pane and panel expand/contract during flight there's a substantial risk of it causing unacceptable damage in a situation where a calk & duct-tape solution isn't really an option.

[Roccus]

If I read the article right, the knob got there during orbit, not on the ground.

[Roccus]

Guess I should have hit “refresh” before I hit “view replies.”

Need more coffee....

[N. Theknow]

If I read the article right, the knob got there during orbit, not on the ground.

You've been a FReeper for nearly 5 years and you actually read an entire article before posting?

I'm impressed.

[Roccus]

I make up for it by sometimes not reading the whole thread.

[Fichori]

So, shrinking the knob didn’t work, why not stretch the shuttle?

They already admitted that it expands while in orbit, and the only thing I can think that would cause that is the internal/external pressure difference.

Just pump the sucker up and go pull the offending knob out.

I mean, that is how it got in there, isn’t it?

[LibWhacker]

Presumably, this happened during Atlantis' last flight. In addition to thermal expansion, expansion caused by differences and changes in pressure, weightlessness, vibration and shaking of reentry can all contribute to a foreign object working its way down into a tight space like the one between the window pane and dashboard and getting hopelessly stuck.

I'd guess that even attitude changes when banking for landing, etc., could contribute.

And if all this happened on a previous mission (which I hope is impossible as an earlier post-flight inspection should have caught it), you've got g-forces and the added shaking and vibrations of liftoff, etc.

To replicate all those forces, in reverse, you'd have to pick the shuttle up, shake it, heat it, pressurize it, cool it, depressurize it and bang it on the table to get that damned thing out of there. Like my kid would do if he were trying to get a quarter out of a piggy bank.

You'd think they wouldn't design a shuttle that had cracks and crevices that foreign objects could get into and cause problems. The other day, I was looking at some pics of the astronauts working outside the space station and noticing all the sharp edges and corners that could puncture a spacesuit. Incredible!

[swarthyguy]

Don’t think its the worst case, may well be the best.

The Shuttle is beyond its safe life expectancy operating schedule. Witness the myriad issues over the past few years.

Because the past few administrations and NASA and the lack of urgency have stymied any efforts at a replacement, the chickens have come home to roost.

Better not to risk the lives of the Astronauts, kludge some solutions with the Russian Soyuz and decide do we want to be in space at all.