Posted on 06/25/2002 1:20:24 PM PDT by GeneD
The American space agency Nasa has grounded its space shuttle fleet indefinitely after finding small cracks in fuel pipes in the main engines of two shuttles. The cracks, discovered on shuttles Atlantis and Discovery, will delay the scheduled 19 July launch of Columbia, due to carry the first Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, into space.
The cracks were found in metal liners used to direct fuel flow inside the main rocket motor's fuel pipes on shuttles Atlantis and Discovery.
"The concern is that ... if a piece were to crack off and go down into the engine, would that damage the engine and cause it to shut down," said Nasa spokeman James Hartsfield. "Whether that is something that could actually happen, we don't know yet."
Safety concern
"These cracks may pose a safety concern and we have teams at work investigating all aspects of the situation," said Ron Dittemore, NASA's shuttle program manager. "This is a very complex issue and it is early in the analysis. Right now there are more questions than answers."
Engineers found the first crack during an inspection of "flow liners" - thin pieces of metal that aid the flow in fuel pipes - as they were installing engines in Atlantis more than a week ago.
Subsequent testing found other cracks in both Atlantis, which is 17 years old, and Discovery, which is 19. Columbia, the oldest of the four shuttles in the fleet at 21 years old, is to be inspected.
Because it takes a week or so to remove a shuttle's engines and the same amount of time to reinstall them, Columbia's forthcoming mission on 19 July has been delayed indefinitely.
NASA engineers will try to determine if the problem is a flaw introduced at the time the flow liners were installed in the shuttles or whether the cracks are a problem of age.
The liners act as sleeves inside the hydrogen fuel line in the plumbing for the shuttle's engine. NASA is working to determine whether the problem is limited to that one liner, which was in a bellows, where the fuel line bends.
"We've never seen these (cracks) before," said James Hartsfield. "The flow liners have been in the shuttles since day one. We have begun an analysis to try to understand it."
It does mark the first attempt at a reusable engine and that was my point.
Plenty of real engineers believe they could come up with reasonable transportation to LEO. The problem is that no accountants want to try, largely based on NASA's ham-handed attempts.
The business case simply does not close with even very optimistic mission revenue, capital, and operability costs. The business is just not out there- ask Boeing with their Delta IV and Lockheed Martin with their Atlas V both nearly ready to fly. The accountants and even a few rocket scientists like myself understand this.
Who knows what we could have learned from that program. :-( I am greatful we all don't have you driving curiosity.
And my point is that the "reusable" part of that attempt took a back seat to attaining maximum possible ISP. They chose a design for bleeding edge performance, then decided to reuse it. It wasn't so much an attempt at a reusable engine as an attempt at reusing an engine for which that was never the primary technical goal, even if it was a program goal.
The business case simply does not close with even very optimistic mission revenue, capital, and operability costs. The business is just not out there- ask Boeing with their Delta IV and Lockheed Martin with their Atlas V both nearly ready to fly. The accountants and even a few rocket scientists like myself understand this.
The business case stinks because there is no market. There are two reasons there is no market. Number one is cost. Number two is that we just don't have any idea what space is good for, especially at the cost to access. But even if a ticket to space was $1, nothing other than tourism presents itself.
But that doesn't address my point, which is that the cost of access to low earth orbit is a lot more expensive than it is currently technically possible to make it. Occasionally a company will consider the market risk, until the NASA flying monkeys show up and present the Shuttle as the answer to the technical challenges.
I guess I outgrew sci-fi in my teens. We aren't going to the stars and we aren't going back in time and we aren't going to evolve into a super race.
WOW did I write all that??? All I said was who knows what we may have discovered. A new power source possibly? What about the spinoffs from such science. Like the computer you are using. Without the study of QM and theoretical physics, you computer and FR would not exist.
I'm not willing to spend 5-15 billion dollars because someone says we might discover a new power source. My computer is a product of decades of sweat and profits not the space program.
Can you describe how a semiconductor works? Do you know how this was discovered? Do you know how much money was invested in the basic research that allowed the concept and creation of a transistor? Do you even know that the microprocessor in your computer contains millions of transistors?
If you don't know this, then you should investigate it. You might be surprised at how important basic research is to our standard of living today -- and the things we take for granted.
See my post #34 and any by cogitator. You are either not listening, clueless, or both.
I will not agree that putting man on the moon invented the transistor. Military and commercial uses of local space would have done just fine.
Man has walked upright since the beginning of the universe 6000 years ago. The idea of evolution is what drives too many of NASA's projects. Most astronomical projects and the collider and even exploring the planets is all an effort to prove evolution, which didn't happen. Waste!!!!
I will not agree that putting man on the moon invented the transistor. Military and commercial uses of local space would have done just fine.
I didn't say or imply that putting a man on the moon invented the transistor. My comment was directed at your comment, roughly remembered as "I don't want to spend $5-15 billion dollars just because someone says they might discover a new power source."
When scientists were investigating the properties of electrons in the early 1900s, I don't think they said to anyone that they might discover a way to put a system capable of performing millions of computations a second in a space the size of a fingernail. But if they hadn't performed that research with no real application goal in mind or envisioned, then we wouldn't have the computers on our desks today. The point is: basic research performed for the sake of knowledge acquisition can result in unforeseen and even unexpected (Teflon) applications that have very significant benefits. Part of the reason for those benefits is that the process of creating systems that can elucidate data that is difficult to acquire frequently results in diverse applications other than those for which the systems were built. As an example, nuclear magnetic resonance systems were initially built to investigate molecular properties. The medical imaging uses of NMR are an entire outgrowth of basic organic/physical chemistry research using NMR.
And pure research. It is unfortunate that you do not understand the implications of killing off research. BTW, 6000 years? How does starlight get to us then from other galaxies?
What a genius you are. I suppose you are unhappy with the advances in medicine that are direct spinoffs from places such as Fermilab. Better hope you don't get prostate cancer, you just might have to refuse treatment because taxpayer dollars were spent on the research to develop such powerful tools. Or perhaps you'd like to forgo the ECG or telemetry used to monitor your heart after having an MI (myocardial infarction or "heart attack" to the uninformed)...they were both refined as a direct result of the space program.
It was created with the galaxies. When God made Adam anyone would have sworn that he was 20 or 30 years old that same day that he was created.
Actually, the Russians still have the capability of putting men in space, and bringing them back safely. In fact, they are even pioneering cosmo-capitalism, and selling Soyuz seats.
Quoth the Cat in the Hat, "What a shame, what a shame what a shame." Would you also be pre-millenial, and committed to doom-monger Hal Lindsey's bleak apocalyptic despair? Are you not just a little ashamed by the fact that the only major writer in the science fiction genre who honors Jesus Christ is a Mormon?
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