Posted on 02/03/2003 4:43:52 PM PST by Wolfstar
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:02:01 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Released Monday morning, a high-speed NASA engineering film shows a piece of debris falling from the large external tank on the space shuttle Columbia's liftoff and hitting the orbiter's left wing. Bear in mind that these are extreme close-ups of a high-speed event. In the top couple of photos, you see only the top of the broken-off piece. Most of it is in the shadows. Depending on which clip you see and how slowly it is run, to the uninitiated person's eye, it can look either like the debris strikes the wing hard enough to pulverize the debris, or the debris strikes a glancing blow and bounces off in the direction of the main and booster engine exhaust.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Also, losing a tile here and there has not proven to be a problem in the past.
What's it look like beneath the tile?
No problem.. Cut it to fit.
You mean we can't do that?
Here is the rest of what they said; you might as well have it all so you can give him the facts, since he doesn't know what he's talking about:
To: Howlin
20X16X6, weight 2.67 pounds.
Size determined in two ways: looked at film and estimated.
Secondly, utlilized information from 112 -- they had the film the flight crew took as the ET separated from the orbiter.
288 posted on 02/03/2003 5:16 PM EST by Howlin
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the lockheed skunkworks would be the model in a chuck yaeger world... but even back then, we lost a lot of good test pilots.
Accidents happen. More accidents will happen in the future. I am dismayed more by the fact that we've had only two fatal accidents in the last 20 years. We should have had many, many more manned space flights.
I'll gladly volunteer to go up in the next shuttle.
I'm not saying anything. Its just that everyone seems to think that if there was a serious problem there was nothing that could have been done about it. That's baloney. I think they must have underestimated the problem. There are those who claim that they knew the problem was significant, yet they didn't try to mount a rescue because they couldn't do it.
If there was a problem, they would have found a way to fix it. That is the way America operates. But if in fact they knew it was serious and didn't try to mount a rescue, that is unforgivable. Obviously they didn't think it was a big deal. They were wrong.
I can guarantee that the next time they send up a shuttle they will have another one ready on the launch pad just in case something goes wrong. They won't assume things are ok next time. They will launch a rescue immediately.
In fact I would be willing to bet that the next two shuttle missions will be staged for a practice rescue. They are not going to send up any more non-military missions until they know they can get a crew out of a damaged ship.
I see it as a peanut glancing off a anvil.
I think this is a red herring and the cause is likely not discovered yet. I think space junk is more likely. A marble sized nut at 20,000 MPH would certainly cause the requisite damage and would not even be felt by the crew.
I think error tolerances must have been smaller in the Apollo era. There is an often told story about Mercury software: there were no bugs, because everyone understood that no bugs could be tolerated.
What were the NASA shuttle contingency plans for failures once in orbit, if any existed? Anyone know?
My idea is a small, cold-gas powered flyer with a camera. Teleoperated from inside the orbiter. By cold-gas, I mean a tank of compressed helium or nitrogen and teensy thrusters. Maybe weigh 20 kilograms max. It could fly all around the vehicle and let people see in real-time what the condition is.
It would probably cost $100 million to develop, knowing NASA, but it might save lives.
--Boris
Now, can you answer a question for me?
What kind of time frame, that is, what is the elapsed time over which this event spans?
We have one poster who is insistent that NASA personnel, in real-time (without benefit of studied frame by frame analysis) could have deduced that an object/material dislodged from the main fuel tank and struck the orbiter, doing damage.
That the object takes on the speed of the air is very dependent on its size and weight. A dense, small object will tend to hold its speed in air much longer than a light object with much surface area. (think rock -vs.- feather in an atmosphere, or leaf vs. acorn if you prefer). If the object is moving at the same speed as the shuttle as this one was until it came loose, its rate of deceleration will be related inversely to its weight. So, a stone with little wind resistance would tend to slow down much more slowly than would a light piece of sheet material with its large surface area.
The loose piece of insulation wasn't a hood, nor is a space shuttle a windshield. It is designed to withstand a great deal of abuse from space debris, asteroids and such. This would be particularly true of the the leading edge of the wing structure. It inherently is strong in that direction as the structure is behind it, much like a knife blade, but without the sharp edge.
Look at the debris that followed the shuttle as it entered the atmosphere - it was much smaller than the main fuselage, but it held its speed almost lock-step with the ship while in the atmosphere. It almost looked like a squadron of sorts, flying in unison formation. It was inside the atmosphere, though in a thinner part of it. Still, it kept up with the ship.
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