Posted on 07/28/2005 8:57:02 AM PDT by InvisibleChurch
Thursday, July 28, 2005 9:27 a.m. EDT Shuttle Foam Loss Linked to EPA Regs
As recently as last month, NASA had been warned that foam insulation on the space shuttle's external fuel tank could sheer off as it did in the 2003 Columbia disaster - a problem that has plagued space shuttle flights since NASA switched to a non-Freon-based type of foam insulation to comply with Clinton Administration Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
"Despite exhaustive work and considerable progress over the past 2-1/2 years, NASA has been unable to eliminate the possibility of dangerous pieces of foam and ice from breaking off the external fuel tank and striking the shuttle at liftoff," the agency's Return-to-Flight Task Force said just last month, according to the Associated Press. But instead of returning the much safer, politically incorrect, Freon-based foam for Discovery's launch, the space agency tinkered with the application process, changing "the way the foam was applied to reduce the size and number of air pockets," according to Newsday.
"NASA chose to stick with non-Freon-based foam insulation on the booster rockets, despite evidence that this type of foam causes up to 11 times as much damage to thermal tiles as the older, freon-based foam," warned space expert Robert Garmong just nine months ago.
In fact, though NASA never acknowledged that its environmentally friendly, more brittle foam had anything to do with the foam sheering problem, the link had been well documented within weeks of the Columbia disaster.
In Feb. 2003, for instance, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
"NASA engineers have known for at least five years that insulating foam could peel off the space shuttle's external fuel tanks and damage the vital heat-protecting tiles that the space agency says were the likely 'root cause' of Saturday's shuttle disaster."
In a 1997 report, NASA mechanical systems engineer Greg Katnik "noted that the 1997 mission, STS-87, was the first to use a new method of 'foaming' the tanks, one designed to address NASA's goal of using environmentally friendly products. The shift came as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was ordering many industries to phase out the use of Freon, an aerosol propellant linked to ozone depletion and global warming," the Inquirer said.
Before the environmentally friendly new insulation was used, about 40 of the spacecraft's 26,000 ceramic tiles would sustain damage in missions. However, Katnik reported that NASA engineers found 308 "hits" to Columbia after a 1997 flight.
A "massive material loss on the side of the external tank" caused much of the damage, Katnik wrote in an article in Space Team Online.
He called the damage "significant." One hundred thirty-two hits were bigger than 1 inch in diameter, and some slashes were as long as 15 inches.
"As recently as last September [2002], a retired engineering manager for Lockheed Martin, the contractor that assembles the tanks, told a conference in New Orleans that developing a new foam to meet environmental standards had 'been much more difficult than anticipated,'" the Inquirer said.
The engineer, who helped design the thermal protection system, said that switching from the Freon foam "resulted in unanticipated program impacts, such as foam loss during flight."
The hair net idea sounds like a good one actually. That would at least catch the big chunks like the one that hit the Columbia.
More and more, the EPA is dragging this country down. Death by a thousand cuts.
Explains a lot. Just last night I was thinking that I couldn't believe after hundreds of shuttle flights this all of a sudden became a problem.
It explains why it *has* just become a problem.
I'm sure the President has no idea. Too many government drones are afraid to speak-up for fear of being un PC.
We are still paying for LBJ's disastrous "Great Society" programs and his gross mishandling of Vietnam.
IF you do some more checking on this issue you will find that the Clinton adminstration ordered the change, via the green tree enviornmentalists who operated out of teh White House.
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Bill Clinton and has EPA friends caused this problem. Just check the records back in 1995 or 97. The green tree huggers were worried that the foam would not be bio degradable on the center fuel tank. So, a change was made in the compound of the insulation on the tank.
Check it out.
from a very helpful anti-PC site, http://junkscience.com:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,77832,00.html
and from Capitalism Magazine
http://capmag.com/articlePrint.asp?ID=2942
All in all a good yield of burnt offerings to Gaia.
I go through more brake pads for my car now that there is no asbestos in them.
The gravity vector component is minuscule. In civilian talk, it wouldn't make a measurable difference.
Negative Gs.
Actually, I'm thinking more of a distribution of forces thing than a saftey net effect, but yeah.
Ignorant of this stuff, yes. PC, no. If Freon works better, go back to Freon. The shuttle can fly right through the ozone hole/sarcasm.
And the use of non-freon based foam is Bush's fault how? He has nothing to do with the idiotic PC crap involved here. Nice stretch but it won't fly.
That's for sure. For disastrous policy, Jimmy Carter is only be a pimple on Lyndon Johnson's butt. For that matter, "Jimmy" is a pimple, wherever he is.
Can anyone present empirical proof that freon causes global warming, or did a discredited theory murder the crew of Columbia?
Sounds like they got hoisted on their own petard, to me.
Can anyone explain to me how a molecule composed of atoms all heavier than either oxygen or nitrogen finds its way to the top of the atmosphere?
Wait, is that a trick rocket science question?
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