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.

"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."

Here's an article from 2 years ago concerning the problem with the envirofriendly foam that also happened to be responsible for the deaths of American Astonauts.

Cause of Two Shuttle Disasters: Enviro Dogma
Hannes Hacker
Friday, July 11, 2003
Editor's note: Also see Clinton Environmental Policy Sabotaged the Shuttle.
Now that a dramatic new test has confirmed that a piece of thermal insulation flaking off of space shuttle Columbia's external tank during launch was the most likely cause of its destruction during re-entry, the typical second-guessing in the press has focused on NASA engineers, asking: "What did Mission Control know, and when did they know it?"

Somehow, NASA engineers should have guessed about the damage done to Columbia's thermal tiles and pulled an Apollo 13-style rabbit out of their hat. The implication is that they should have been omniscient and omnipotent.

Having heroes like NASA's mission controllers around to quietly brave the world's criticism certainly serves to divert attention from those who have done the most to contribute to this disaster, and who regard themselves as omniscient and omnipotent enough to command the entire American economy and the lives of its citizens: the environmentalists.

Why did the shuttle's foam insulation flake off? In response to an edict from the EPA, NASA was required to change the design of the thermal insulating foam on the shuttle's external tank. They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster.

But it was the elimination of the old foam that led to a real disaster for the shuttle program.

The maiden flight with the new foam, in 1997, resulted in a 10-fold increase to foam-induced tile damage. The new foam was far more dangerous than the old foam.

But NASA, a government organization afraid of antagonizing powerful political interests, did not reject the EPA's demands and thoroughly reverse the fatal decision. Instead, they sought a compromise by applying for a waiver from the EPA that allowed them to use the old foam on some parts of the external tank.

NASA notes that it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether it was the old or the new foam that caused the recent disaster, and environmentalists will no doubt say this means that we can't pin the disaster on them. But any unnecessary increase in risk in an enterprise so unforgiving of error, is unacceptable.

P.C. Junk 'Science' Trumps Engineering

The bottom line is that NASA took a much greater risk to comply with EPA demands. Environmentalist junk science trumped sound engineering.

This is not the first time that has happened. The cause of the 1986 Challenger explosion is officially established as hot gases burning through an O-ring joint in one of the solid-rocket boosters. NASA was roundly criticized for its decision to launch in cold weather over the objection of some engineers, but there was a deeper cause that was not as widely reported.

In 1985 NASA had switched to a new putty to seal the O-ring joints. The new putty became brittle at cold temperatures, thus allowing Dr. Richard Feynman to teach NASA a famous lesson. At the congressional hearing investigating the accident, he simply placed some of the O-ring putty in a glass of ice water and crumbled it in his fingers.

NASA had changed the sealant because its original supplier for O-ring putty stopped producing it for fear of anti-asbestos lawsuits.

No Lessons Learned From the Challenger Disaster

Had NASA not run out of the original putty, the Challenger disaster would not have happened. Indeed, when the Air Force ran out of the same putty and replaced it with the same brittle substitute, their Titan 34D heavy-lift boosters suffered two sudden launch failures, after a string of successes that had lasted as long as that of the space shuttle.

These accidents are not primarily the fault of careless engineers, nor are they merely the unintended consequences of bureaucrats blindly following federal rules. They are the result of a philosophy that hold human needs, such as the need for a safe shuttle launch or re-entry, as less important than a concern to preserve the purity of nature from the products of industrial civilization, such as CFCs and asbestos insulation.

Al Gore's Twisted Dream

Had 2000 presidential candidate Al Gore had his way, Columbia's last mission would have carried a spacecraft called Triana into space. Triana was meant to beam continuous images, via the Internet, of a very small Earth as seen from a point between Earth and the sun.

The idea was to convey the message of how small and fragile the Earth is, and consequently how small man is, compared to the vastness of space.

That's the theory: Man is small and should sacrifice for vast nature. The practice? Fourteen dead astronauts.

Analysis by Hannes Hacker, an aerospace engineer and former flight controller at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He is a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Send comments to reaction@aynrand.org

The NASA people who made this choice are responsible for the loss of the Shuttle Columbia - because there was ample evidence before its loss (starting in 1997) that the new style foam caused problems. Rather than fixing the problem by going back to what worked ... they ignored it!

This is a good point, but NASA and other defense contractors were not really "exempted". Their management were told that if they could not find a more environmentally friendly process then the old process could be kept by filing a petition to the EPA that would say in plain language: " We are too dumb or we don't care for the environment, or we are just too lazy so can we keep our old process?" It is not surprising that companys took the approanch that no petitions would be sent.

The last thing is that materials scientists were the ones who suggested alternate compounds. Like for example using ethanol (alcohol) as a degreaser/cleaner in place of Methyl Ethyl Ketone. (MEK worked a h*ll of a lot better but with patience and scrubbing it was considered that alcohol would work as well.) This was the dumb logic of the time. It also removed some safety hazards from the manufacturing areas and the companies benefitted from lower workers compensation costs as a result. But material scientists were not the same engineers responsible for the safety of the shuttle, (or in general the engineering specifications of the design). Often the adhesion requirement was not a well understood by the materials scientists as the mechanical engineers who had to use approved processes even when they did not understand the degree of testing and control that the process required. In the case of many of these processes, the technician doing the job had a huge influence on whether the process worked or not. I.E. what works in a lab may not work on the manufacturing floor.

But the fact is that NASA could have petitioned for their process but did not. In fact defense contractors made great PR by claiming they were 100% compliant with these new environmentally friendly regulations, and the PC government awarded gold stars while program after program suffered losses and failures as a result. The Colombia was simply a higher profile disaster so it got our attention.

I'm not a professional mechanic or engineer, but I do virtually all my own mechanical work on my vehicles. I've done bodywork, rebuilt engines and transmissions, etc. In other words, I'm no expert, but I also am not devoid of mechanical ability.

My primary vehicle is a 2000 GMC pickup. When I went to replace the pads, which originally were semi-metallic, GM offered a ceramic alternative, which they recommended as a replacement.

I installed them and noticed no downside or lag. They work just as well, if not better than the originals (hard to tell since I bought the truck used, so I was comparing used semi-metallics to new ceramics), and with markedly less dust.

I haven't noticed any appreciable wear on the rotors.

Since I installed them, I've noticed that the aftermarket has now come online with ceramic replacements as well. I looked up my truck and there are several flavors of both ceramic and semi-metallic available from several sources, including Raybestos, no-name, and Delco.

I've been running them for about a year and the pads and rotors have worn minimally. Although I mostly put freeway miles on the truck, I do put around 30k a year on it.

The ceramics tend to be more pricey, but IMHO, over the course of several years, its worth it alone to not have to constantly scrub brake dust off the wheels and tires.

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