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More on Columbia
RodeoBoy writes "It seems that regardless of what NASA and Boeing wants the public to believe there are still questions about damage to the shuttle's left wing. Some Boeing engineers have raised concerns that proper analysis of the damage was not done at the time, due to changes and cutbacks in Boeing. It is also coming out that more than one chunk of foam might have hit and damaged the wing. With Boeing having some financial troubles and NASA under public scrutiny again, what is the future of the space shuttle program..."
Does anyone know how dense this foam is? I haven't found any mention of it. Is it like styrofoam density or is it much heaver than that?
The best outcome of the Columbia tragedy would be for NASA to get entirely out of the suborbital and orbital business altogether. As a pure launch vehichle, the Space Shuttle was not all that efficient, especially when considering the turnaround time involved. Handing over (what should be) relatively simple tasks to the private sector, would save millions of dollars of pork and mismanagement, thereby freeing said missions from a needless government bureaucracy and private sector 'contractors-for-life'. For it to remain viable, NASA needs to focus on extra-terran missions, both robotic and manned, if it wishes to remain a worthy vassal of the United States taxpayer.
For that matter, even lunar missions would be a better use of money than testing the effects of near zero gravity on ants.
You're only as smart as your brain.
What probably will happen is that our government will waste a lot more of our tax money and make a bunch of stupid decisions that nobody really cares about.
What I say is we should do the following
1. Sell the space shuttles to someone else, China?
2. Make NASA a regulator agency, like the FCC of FDA.
3. Privatize the space industry.
This will result in money being spent to do useful things with space travel. People will be able to put up sattelites, space tourism will begin and eventually flourish. Someone might set up a hotel type space station. Or a moon base, or go to mars. All in all it should boost the economy by creating a new industry for people to work in and new companies to work for, as well as making life a hell of a lot more interesting.
Of course there are reasons not to do this, but this is what I want, not necessarily the best idea in the world, or the most realistic one.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
My dad works for Boeing and does lots of stuff with sattelites and space, though admittedly not rockets specifically. He can't imagine how insulation could've caused the damage in question. The insulation is extremely light and low density; it would've had to have been going rediculiously fast to have the force to cause damage to the tiles, and launching speeds aren't that fast until you're a few miles up. Ice is a more likely contender than insulation, since it's very hard etc, but it's rare to have a piece fall off that is massive enough to have much kinetic energy, and most of the ice is kicked off before the rocket gets going very fast.
I find it pretty insulting when people try to imply that NASA and Boeing are being anything but absolutely forthcoming about information. Sure, it's in their best interest to displace blame, but this isn't the X-Files here. If NASA knows something, they're going to tell the public.
but this was a friggin car accident. Seven people died. The car happened to be very very very very very very very expensive.
Like this guy said. All this speculation is ridiculous. Let them do what they do.
Flame on.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
Even if the foam hitting the wing at launch was the cause of the reentry failure, there's nothing they could have done about it, even if they had positively known that was going to cause a catastrophic failure upon reentry.
A similar event occured during Apollo XII, the second manned Moon landing. During launch, the Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning, causing a number of failures which were rapidly corrected. After they were out of the atmosphere, back at Mission Control, they pondered whether or not the lightning strike might have damaged the pyrotechnics that cause the parachute to deploy after reentry (they could hit the "chute deploy" button, but nothing would happen -- the pyros would already be burned out). Just as in the case of the Columbia, to know this information they'd need to have done an unscheduled EVA, and the additional information would have really changed nothing: If they did an about-face and reentered right then, they'd have been just as dead reentering then as they would after a successful Moon landing. So there was really no point even knowing; the knowledge would have changed nothing about the reality of the situation. (Of course, in the case of Apollo XII, the pyros were undamaged and the chutes deployed without incident.)
The point is, even if they positively knew that it was a problem, knowing and then reentering and dying isn't any different from not knowing and then reentering and dying.
Its just that most journalists dont understand scientific uncertainty or getting all the facts before reaching a conclusion. Time and again NASA has said that they dont know what caused the shuttle to break up for the simple reason that they dont KNOW for sure what caused the shuttle to break up. They know it had something to do with the left wing, and they know that foam hit the left wing. They dont have the "smoking gun" that connects the two causally. While the media may be willing to jump to that conclusion, NASA isnt because there is not enough evidence to draw that conclusion.
Jerry Pournelle's Site has several interesting articles on the space program. He's a science fiction author (see 'Fallen Angeles') at the Baen Free Library who worked in aerospace for many years, has testified before Congress and given speeches to the Air War College.
The US needs to separate their manned space activities from cargo delivery. Sure, we can use the current design for a while more, but it would make more economic sense to stop driving an 18-wheeler to the supermarket. What we need is a toyota.
What I mean is that we need a smaller, manned spaceplane and a larger, heavy-lift system which can carry the spaceplane as an addition to a medium-size payload.
What I propose is to have a system where 8 SRBs launch two shuttle main tank assemblies. One filled with fuel, with a rocket motor on the ass end. The other can be filled with cargo. Some of the things we need to launch are not so much HEAVY as they are bulky. A good example would be an inflatable habitation module for lunar or ISS use. Not particularly heavy, but it's bulky.
The shuttle spaceplane should be much smaller and lighter. For operations requiring extravehicular manipulation of cargo, the shuttle and heavy lift system could simply dock in orbit. An added benefit could be that we build a spaceplane that can dock with a fuel tank in orbit and head off to the moon. We really should be building there instead of in low earth orbit. There are building materials on the moon, and none in the vacuum of space. The moon doesn't need energy to maintain orbit, and we can safely park a nuclear reactor there without worrying about reentry. That power can be used for excavation. This way we don't have to bring our entire living quarters with us. We can make cement structures on the moon instead. It seems very reasonable to do this instead of all this mars crap.
This just doesn't seem like good engineering. The traditional Apollo/Soyuz reentry vehicles had few if any of those risk factors. Compare what happened to Columbia with what happened to Soyuz 5: the reentry module failed to separate from the service module and entered into the atmosphere backwards. But when the service module had burned off, the reentry module righted itself (just because of its weight distribution--that's what it was designed to do) and Volynov landed and survived. Those reentry vehicles require no electronics and no flight control. The only thing that needs to happen is that the parachutes open some time before the capsule hits the ground. I think I'd have a bit more confidence in something like a Soyuz reentry vehicle than in the shuttle. And they are probably a lot cheaper, too.
I recently saw an analysis of the space station that said most of the time spent by the ISS crew was dedicated to station maintenance and NASA's own research (how people work and live in space). Only about 15 man-hours of non-NASA research is conducted each week. Of that, Russia directs half and the US directs the other half.
So let's face it, NASA is unable to do real space exploration and instead is running an unreliable shuttle service to an incredibly expensive 7.5 man-hr/wk research facility. We have to make a choice. We can either continue to pour money down this hole or we can scrap it altogether and reset our priorities to fit whatever money we want to spend on truly worthwhile projects.
If you think about it, that means the shuttle is an even worse deal than usually assumed. Lifting mass into orbit is hugely expensive. First, we spend all that money lifting the huge mass of the shuttle itself into space, and then we bring it all back again? Imagine if every shuttle launch had left a carefully designed, multi-purpose transport vehicle and container of the size of the shuttle in space and returned the astronauts via a Soyuz-like capsule--the ISS could have been completed long ago from those vehicles and transport containers.
The more one thinks about it, the more wasteful and bizarre the shuttle program becomes.