Posted on 02/28/2003 7:49:07 AM PST by dead
NASA officials are looking into whether workers at a NASA plant used an adhesive on the shuttle Columbia's external fuel tank after the adhesive had already aged and become ineffective, a worker at the plant says.
NASA investigators are concerned that employees may have mistakenly used the adhesive because its container had a handwritten label that misstated the deadline for using the material, which had to be applied to the tank, said the worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
He said this batch of adhesive was used in the area of the 15-storey tank where the shuttle's front is mounted - the area that has become a focus of the investigation. The adhesive bonds a silicone-based heat shield to the tank's aluminum surface.
The investigative panel did not confirm or deny the inquiry. "We're interested in learning more about the situation," a spokeswoman said.
Officials are trying to determine whether three pieces of debris that flew off the external tank and slammed into Columbia's left wing about 80 seconds into lift-off could have critically damaged the wing and set off a chain of events that led to the shuttle disintegrating on re-entry on February 1, killing its seven crew.
In recent days, NASA investigators at the plant where Lockheed Martin makes the $US43 million ($71 million) tanks for NASA, had discovered that at least one flask of adhesive used in the bipod area was apparently wrongly labelled by an employee, possibly leading to misapplication, the plant worker said.
On Thursday the NASA administrator, Sean O'Keefe, defended the agency's handling of emails from engineers about catastrophic scenarios facing the space shuttle Columbia.
The concerns were considered at the operational levels, he said.
"Pretty senior people were making the judgements," Mr O'Keefe said, adding that the decisions "had the benefit of a lot of knowledge ... It certainly appears that the right discussions at the right levels ... were engaged."
The emails, including ones from William Anderson, a NASA contractor, and Jeffrey Kling, a NASA flight controller, warned that damage in and around the shuttle's wheel well could cause the shuttle to break apart during re-entry.
Under a barrage of questioning by legislators, Mr O'Keefe said that he probably should have taken part in the decision to cancel a Defence Department photographic survey of Columbia's heat-reflecting tiles just days before the spacecraft disintegrated over Texas.
In another development, officials said that a shortage of water and other necessities created by the grounding of the space shuttle fleet since the Columbia disaster would force NASA to replace the three crew members on the international space station with rotating two-member crews by early May.
The news drew concern from legislators. They said they had been under the clear impression that a minimum of three crew members were needed to keep the station running properly and to perform the experiments that have long been offered to justify the project, which is expected to cost close to $US100 billion.
This goes back to QC and the apparent lack or quality of people doing it.(as much as I hate QC's)
Some one who knows, please set me straight!
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