When I was in school getting a bachelor's degree in engineering (1995-2000), I remember in 1997 two of my professors talking about NASA, which is significant because they both worked for NASA before (they were both currently doing work for Utah State's Space Dynamics Lab). They were complaining that NASA's management was reverting back to the way things were before the 1986 Challenger loss. They were saying that NASA management was getting too political and too arrogant to listen to the engineers.
Heinsight is 20/20. Why are folks thinking they are qualified, to study data analysis, from brief quips of pictues off the web?
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Tuesday, February 04, 2003
SPACE CENTER, Houston — Space shuttle Columbia may have been doomed from the start.
NASA engineers are focusing on the theory that a flyaway chunk of insulation broke off from the shuttle's external fuel tank during liftoff, severely damaged several thermal tiles on the underside of the shuttle's left wing.
If that theory is correct, then there was nothing NASA could do to prevent the shuttle from breaking up and killing the seven astronauts aboard when it reentered the Earth's atmosphere 16 days later.
NASA is now taking a second, harder look at video, computer data and everything else that led them to conclude — perhaps wrongly — that the flyaway chunk did not harm the space shuttle.
"We are completely redoing the analysis from scratch," shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said Monday, exactly one week after engineers assured him that any damage to the shuttle's thermal tiles was minimal. "We want to know if we made any erroneous assumptions. We want to know if we weren't conservative enough. We want to know if we made any mistakes."
The wrenching duplication of work to determine what doomed the shuttle Saturday morning was to be temporarily halted Tuesday so employees could take part in a memorial service at Johnson Space Center with President Bush.
Practically from the start, investigators have zeroed in on a piece of foam insulation that fell off the shuttle's big external fuel tank during liftoff Jan. 16. The impact by the 2 1/2-pound, 20-inch fragment may have damaged the heat tiles that keep the ship from burning up during re-entry into the atmosphere.
"We're making the assumption from the start that the external tank was the root cause of the problem that lost Columbia," Dittemore said. "That's a fairly drastic assumption and it's sobering."
While Columbia was still in orbit, NASA engineers analyzed launch footage frame-by-frame and were unable to determine for certain whether the shuttle was damaged by the insulation. But they ran computer analyses for different scenarios and different assumptions about the weight of the foam, its speed, and where under the left wing it might have hit, even looking at the possibility of tiles missing over an area of about 7 inches by 30 inches, NASA said.
The half-page engineering report — issued on Day 12 of the 16-day flight — indicated "the potential for a large damage area to the tile." But the analyses showed "no burn-through and no safety-of-flight issue," the report concluded.
High-level officials at NASA said they agreed at the time with the engineers' assessment.
"We were in complete concurrence," Michael Kostelnik, a NASA spaceflight office deputy, said at a news conference Monday with NASA's top spaceflight official, William Readdy.
"The best and brightest engineers we have who helped design and build this system looked carefully at all the analysis and the information we had at this time, and made a determination this was not a safety-of-flight issue."
No one on the team, to Dittemore's knowledge, had any reservations about the conclusions and no one reported any concerns to a NASA hot line set up for just such occasions.
"Now I am aware, here two days later, that there have been some reservations expressed by certain individuals and it goes back in time," Dittemore said. "So we're reviewing those reservations again as part of our data base. They weren't part of our playbook at the time because they didn't surface. They didn't come forward."
On Monday, Readdy said the damage done by the broken-off piece of insulation is now being looked at very carefully as a possible cause of the tragedy.
"It may certainly be the leading candidate right now — we have to go through all the evidence and then rule things out very methodically in order to arrive at the cause," he said.
Monday night, searchers found the front of the shuttle's nose cone buried deep in the ground near the Louisiana border. But even more valuable in trying to piece together what happened would be to locate any tiles from Columbia's left wing.
"That's the missing link that we're trying to find," Dittemore said.
The shuttle, covered with more than 20,000 thermal tiles, broke up 39 miles over Texas and fell to Earth just as it was experiencing maximum re-entry heat of 3,000 degrees.
NASA said temperature data showed that the shuttle's left side — the same side hit by the debris — heated up sharply just before Columbia disintegrated.
The foam that covers the shuttle's 154-foot external fuel tank is hard enough to damage the shuttle when the spaceship is hurtling into space at high speed.
Dittemore said he knows of at least two other shuttle launches in which foam came off and damaged the shuttle, though nowhere near to the extent suspected in the case of Columbia. One of the shuttles — Columbia, in 1992 — had tile damage on the wing.
Engineers relied heavily on the fact that the previous damage was so minor.