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Wing Seals Blamed in Columbia's Demise
MoonFacedAssassin writes "MSNBC has this article stating that a 'seal from Columbia's left wing was apparently the mystery object that floated away in orbit, and it was almost certainly struck by something - like a chunk of foam - before it came off, accident investigators said Tuesday.' The article also quoted Navy Rear Admiral Stephen Turcotte, a CAIB member, as having a confidence level 'up there near the 70s and 80s percent' about the T-seal."
These shuttle disasters keep proving how important seals are in our lives, no matter how mundane or simple they appear to be.
The widespread practice of clubbing them, especially the baby ones, has got to stop.
That'll give those tree-hugging hippies something to think about. Maybe we oughta kill all the whales too, just to be safe?
What was it doing up there? Shouldn't it be in the arctic headbutting clubs or something like that?
... Winged Seals responsible for Columbia's desmise.
You know, with all the flying pigs we've seen lately...
So, if it's not 100%, they just give it another arbitrary number to feed to the media?
From the begining they said that at least two pieces of debris hit the wing during launch. It seemed pretty obvious to me that this caused the problem. I guess they didn't want to admit that they had been wrong when they gave the go ahead to re-enter.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
They always use the media to blame everything on the left wing!!
/me ducks and exeunt chortling
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
They really gotta start building these shuttles a lot stronger. I mean, even the wimpiest kid doesn't flinch from getting hit in the head with a nerf ball.
First it was the O-Ring in 1985
Then it was the T-Seal in 2003
Logically, the next problem will be with the Y-Tube in 2011.
Science and Logic Prevail!
Why do I h8 apple?
There aren't going to be any great changes from this finding. We are still going to use the Shuttles. Only thing now is that we are going to "cross our legs and hope to fly," in the words of a great Canadian Prime Minister spoof.
Why slashdot? Why not?
New Scientist also has the latest.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The Shuttle is a wonderful experimental spacecraft. Let's all keep that in mind. Designed in the 1960's, built in the 1970's, finally flown in the 1980's on 20 year old technology. The world's first partially reusable launch vehicle. Kewl!
Okay, let's move on. Oh wait, we didn't. We floundered with National Space Plane projects. The X-33 was sacked. The Delta Skipper was sacked.
Hey, let's continue to rely soley on an outdated experimental concept vehicle can continue to stick roman candles up our kiesters as a way to get into "space". We'll live with the limited altitude (no micrometeorioid protection), limted power, limited duration, etc... etc...
Okay, sorry for the slight rant there. The shuttle rocked but it is time to move on. Why haven't we? If NASA had a budget that was maybe, at the least, equal to the increase in defense spending for 2003 we might be able to do this.
We are not. Maybe we just haven't found the reason to really want to go to space. I dunno. it is frustrating.
My graditude to everyone that has ever dared to travel to space. My thanks to those that have lost their lives in the endeavour.
Isn't this kind of like saying the bullet isn't what killed him, it was the hole it left behind?
Besides, you should all know that Wing Seals are the Air Force's answer to Navy Seals.
A catastrophic failure rate of ~1% is not comparable to any other form of travel that I am aware of. Space travel is not a safe occupation. That being said, it is an important task and should be continued. I also hope we don't see any more fatalities, but this seems an unreasonable expectation in a young field.
The U-Vent?
Then they can finally move on to the X-Window, and finally the Y-Zipper!
BlackGriffen
This penguin is driving his car in the desert and it breaks down. After walking down the highway for miles, he's able to find a gas station that will tow his car in and fix it up. The mechanic warns Mr. Penguin (maybe it's Tux?) that it'll take awhile.
Penguin is dying of thirst. After all, he doesn't like being in the desert in the first place, let alone walking for miles. He finds an ice cream shop and orders a big bowl of vanilla ice cream. Man is it good. He's just gobbling it up like crazy -- getting it all over his face and everything. He finishes up his desert and goes back to the shop, still looking a mess.
The mechanic looks up from the car, sees the penguin and says "Looks like you blew a seal."
Penguin points to his mouth and says "No, no, this is just ice cream!"
That's the joke! Laugh, damn you!
GMD
watch this
The title of the story made me think:
Seals? With wings?
Time to take that bong away from the aerospace engineers.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
- Risk dying upon reentry if the calculated damage figures are correct.
- Meet the certain fate of freezing to death staying out in space while committees decide if they can bring you home.
I don't want any warning before I die. My affairs are in order. So were the affairs of the astronauts.NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
...from a fighter aircraft, but;
"he seals are made of reinforced carbon composite and fit between pairs of panels made of the same material that are designed to withstand temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees during re-entry. These seals and panels wrap around the leading edge of each wing." sure sounds like a badly thought out design to my ears.
At mach 2+, the airpreasure is high enought to rip an aircrafts structure apart - thus we make sure that no edges stick out of the airframe, and that no holes excist or can appear in such things as the leading edges of the wings, stabs or tail. At the speeds the shuttle has on reentry, this is even more important - even if you don't factor in the heatpulse. A design which, if it breaks, opens a gash into the interior structure is thus a flawed design - even if the designer didn't think it would ever fail! And remember fellow /.ers, NASA did more or less the same error when it came to the O-rings in the solid rocket boosters; the design was flawed from the start, but they choose to belive it wouldn't fail.
As far as I recall, the shuttle does not have leading egde flaps. Thus it shouldn't be a reason for a 'split' design like the article describes, a solid leading edge panel made of reinforced carbon should be both possible and perhapes even less expencive. It is certainly among the things NASA should consider to lessen the possibility of another disaster. Oh, and make sure the foam sticks to the tank as well, or at least find a better way to test it for flaws.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Say there have been 100 space shuttle flights (That's just a wild guess). Out of those 100, two of those have blown up. That means that on average, 1 out of every 50 flights will blow up and kill everyone on board.
Would you get in a car if you knew that statistically, you had a 1 in 50 chance of the car blowing up and killing you? I guarantee that you'd be walking or riding a bike instead.
I do think that space flight is worth the risk though, and given the chance I would fly up on the very next shuttle flight.
I'm not sure what you are basing 1% on. Non-fatality flights? Insurance companies tend to base deaths on miles traveled. Airlines tend to do the same, even multiplying by the number of passengers to make it appear even safer. I'd say the shuttles rate is pretty good in those terms. That said, you'd have to pay me pretty good to get me on one.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
But you have to ask: is it worth taking on the risk of traveling around the earth 160 times just so that you can tend to a zero-g ant farm?
Why wasn't Nasa demanding the government replace these flying Edsels' ? They didn't and there's your catastrophe.
Time to push for a new future nasa. Either go with more expensive x-33 or something more affordable. Just do it.
And could you train them to sort small screws? And what about that carbon rod?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
I don't think all the blame goes to NASA specifically. You need to look a little higher up the food chain at the folks that give NASA the money to develop things like the X-33 or whatnot...
Like the PTB's in D.C....
Rickover took the seal guys aside, and asked them - if your son was on this boat, would you still want seals, or would you opt for the magnetic method? The seal guys thought for a while, and sheepishly replied that they'd go with the magnets. To this day, all US naval reactors have magnetic interlocks, not seals.
Fact is - seals are hard. Hard to make, hard to maintain, and hard to check. They're almost always the first thing to fail, and rarely gracefully.
So, rather than the next gen spaceplane being some slicko streamline hitech composite fibre whatnot, it should be a windowless monocoque made from thick polymerised concrete. The astronauts will need a stihlsaw to go EVA, but then a concrete spaceship needs no maintainance, so they won't have to.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
...Then the mechanic said, "Looks like you blew a seal." "No, no", the Eskimo replied, "that's just mayonnaise!"
Keep getting further and further away. I look up at the night sky and like everyone else see stars as specks of light, pretty but ultimately useless... I assure you that I didn't think this way when I was a kid.
Yo... latest polls show that 86% of Amercans feel the human risk is worth continuting Space exploration. That's pretty cool. I wonder why Politicians are so scared of approving NASA's budget ?
THe problem with the budget is not so much the small ammount they get, but the fact that the budget/mission changes every 2 years due to new officials in the house and senate and oval office. We need politicians to lock in a 15 year plan and write in riders to ensure the budget can't be changed. Then Nasa can focus on a long-term mission without worrying about next years budget cuts.
just my two-pence... and I work at the University of Colorado's Aerospace Department.
Jeezus!?!?!?!? Really?
I'd pay any amount I could manage to fly on one! I'd sell off prized possessions, lose the car and walk/bike/public transit to work, go without sex (Oh wait, I'm married, that would be redundant), sever internet access, etc.... if it allowed me to ride the shuttle into space.
I think that would be the most fascinating thing I could ever do, and I simply can't fathom not wanting to go.
Of course, while I still think the shuttle is a pretty neat vehicle, I'd also be perfectly willing to go on any other vehicle that would send me into space.
Coming back safely would be nice too, but given the current state of the technology I'd accept the inherent risks.
This is almost exactly the same point that Richard Feynman made in regard to the first shuttle accident: they calculate failure statistics wrong and don't properly reinforce to guarantee against disaster. I believe his example went something like this:
If a suspension bridge is expected to handle 40,000 pounds of traffic on a daily basis without failing, but small cracks begin to appear after a month of usage at that weight, the bridge has failed. It is architecturally flawed, regardless of the fact that the bridge has not collapsed. If an O-ring is 1 inch thick and cracks 0.25 inches thick routinely appear in said O-ring, there is not a 75% margin of error; the O-ring has failed. A disaster has not occured, but the structural integrity has been compromised, even if it is well below the point of a catastrophic failure.
His point was that NASA had virtually ignored all non-catastrophic failures, instead seeing how far they were from being catastrophic and calling that difference the margin of error. The problem is, the design had failed, since those non-catastrophic failures were not supposed to have happened. Hence, depending upon a device which has already shown a tendency for non-catastrophic failures is no margin of error at all.
I'm probably doing injustice to his argument since he was a genius and I'm merely a Systems Administrator, but I think it's relevant.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
I've wondered why they don't make the silica surface out of larger pieces as opposed to the smaller tiles. The answer I got was:
1. Smaller tiles are more fault-tolerant (to a degree). You can lose a few small tiles with no serious effects (depending upon location and the number of lost tiles), whereas losing a large tile would be uniformly catastrophic.
2. Thermal expansion. Smaller tiles have room to expand without moving around too much. Larger tiles would exert more stress on the attachment points when the tile heats up during re-entry.
3. Maintenance. It's unavoidable that tiles will be damaged during a mission, mostly due to ice strikes during liftoff. It's easier to replace a few smaller damaged tiles than one larger damaged tile.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4 Km/s... yeh it floated away
The object "floating" away from the space shuttle was moving at 4 Km/s. That indicates it absorbed momentum from a meteorite. The shuttle is susceptible to meteorites from 1-10 cm. Foam is being blamed because we can control the foam. The real story is that the 1-10cm meteorites are a risk we cannot control. Unfortunately, we will never be told what the probability of a meteorite hit will be.
...pulled out of the management's ass.
After Richard Feynman was asked to investigate the Challenger accident, he wrote up his experiences. They're published as the second half of his second autobiography.
He was stupified by the amount of fudge-factoring that went on at NASA. The MTBF for a component would be listed at 300 flight hours, and when he asked how they arrived at such a nice round figure, managers would retroactively come up with a listing where each sub-component had MTBFs listed to decimal places, 34.8712 hours, 29.1109 hours, ... and they all conveniently added up to exactly 300 hours.
Engineers were going nuts, but managers kept overriding the decisions. It was a fantastic "it looks nice on paper, therefore it works this way in real life, and fuck the laws of physics" mindset.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
My understanding is even if we had known the shuttle was doomed there was nothing we could do about it. Does this mean we would have been forced to watch the crew starve/asphyxiate in space? And given that, is it beyond reason to think they didn't even bother looking because of it?
No, thats not what I was trying to say at all Coward. Like lindsayt so clearly said, a design which allows for a catastrophic failure is flawed, and a design which fails 25% don't have a 75% safetymargin - it has failed, period.
The troubles with the O-rings were well know. On several previous missions the inner O-ring had been burned, and on at least one occation the outer O-ring had started to melt as well. While the cold and water made the problem more acute as it altered the elastisity of the material, but the design would have failed sooner or later anyway. And for that matter, the use of solid rocket boosters are not good design in the first place. Cheap, yes, but unable to throttle, unable to shut down.
There are better, if more expencive and fiddly, ways to seal a joint than a T-seal. You could for instance take an inverted T-seal. If that seal fails, the sealingstrip stays where it is, blocking to a certain degree the ingress of hot air.
And no, the Colombia and Challenger accidents wern't that different. In both causes seven astronauts lost their lifes, and in both causes it looks like the reason for this can be traced to a faulty design.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
You know, it seems only a few years back, some crazy animal huggers were complaining about the clubbing of baby seals. See what happens when you let 'em grow up? I say we go back to clubbing the baby wing seals.
NASA said launch derbis hitting the shuttle happened several times before. this time it may have been heavier from ice. Or it may have hit a weakened part of an aging shuttle.
No, it's only the kind that have wings that we need to protect. Wingless seals eat all our salmon and do nothing for us except look cute. The winged seals are the useful ones. I hear the Airforce is training them to carry bombs.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
and come off in space? There is a lot of shear forces and vibration during launch and almost nothing of that in space, so why did it come off when it did?
beer die is the best game ever. my friends and I have branched out from Cleveland to Lexington to New York. We keep stats, but i forgot the url.
It is a game requiring true athletic and drinking skills. A good partner helps too.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
There's probably a really good reason, but from a naive viewpoint, the proximal cause for any chunks of foam coming off the main fuel tank being able to damage the shuttle is that during primary burn, the shuttle is slung below the tank. If the vehicle were lifted to orbit in shuttle-above-tank configuration (rotated 180 degrees along the longitudinal axis from the standard configuration), the Columbia accident might not have happened.
Anyone know why the current method (shuttle-below-tank) is used?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
And think "Winged seals - i didnt know there were any species of flying seals" ;-)
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
The MTBF for a component would be listed at 300 flight hours, and when he asked how they arrived at such a nice round figure, managers would retroactively come up with a listing where each sub-component had MTBFs listed to decimal places, 34.8712 hours, 29.1109 hours, ... and they all conveniently added up to exactly 300 hours.
Is this as bad as looks with lower MTBF numbers adding up to a higher MTBF number?
Dastardly
Shoulda checked before posting, although that was my recollection.
The shuttle turns over so the crew can see the horizon and have a visual frame of reference if they needed to take over manual control without instrumentation in case of an abort. Sitting on top of the external tank they wouldn't know where they were.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I'm going from memory here but there are about 20 mission critical parts on the shuttle. If any one of these fails, there is no backup and a disaster will occur. Now remember, the shuttle is designed to a cost and the parts have something like 0.9999 reliability. Designing in more reliability would mean more cost so that wasn't going to happen. That means there is a roughly a 2% chance of catastrophic failure on any given mission. There have been 113 mission so the number of expected failures we should see is 2.26 (=(1-0.9999)* 113)).
This doesn't mean any given mission will fail, but we can be quite sure that we will lose one regularly no matter how careful NASA is. Thus because the shuttle was designed for a given level of reliability, we should expect to lose one roughly every 50 flights. Challenger was mission STS-51. Losing the Columbia should not surprise anyone. We should have expected to lose a shuttle around this time. Tragic but not surprising.
Maybe there was nothing that could be done. But they didn't even try and address the problem while the shuttle was orbiting. An offer to view the shuttle using a military satellite before re-entry was dismissed. If they'd been able to see the problem they MIGHT have been able to remedy it (especially if enough experts realized that the flaw might be catastrophic).
"As far as I recall, the shuttle does not have leading egde flaps. Thus it shouldn't be a reason for a 'split' design like the article describes, a solid leading edge panel made of reinforced carbon should be both possible and perhapes even less expensive"
You sound uninformed and are speculating without even attempting to research the subject. The RCC (Reinforced Carbon-Carbon) panels have gaps between them for a reason. The panels are mounted on floating joints to reduce the loads placed on them due to wing deflections. This also helps reduce the effects of mismatched thermal expansion coefficients between the aluminum wing structure and the carbon composite material they are made of. You can read more about the RCC panels and their attachment to the wing structure at:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts -newsref/sts_sys.html#sts-rcc
Your comment that a design that causes a breach to the interior structure in case of failure is a flawed one doesn't make too much sense either. The TPS (Thermal Protection System) design is there specifically to protect the orbiter structures that cannot withstand the heat of reentry. Therefore, by design, if the TPS was not there, the structure would be breached. You should look for flaws in the design based on a lack of anticipation of possible external damage modes and not in that it was a very critical system whose loss results in an overall failure of the orbiter.
If you read Feynmen's writing, and what's been written about him, you will see that he was quite special, in how he thought and behaved.
Just to point out, not most people can do what he can - for example, win the Nobel prize.
On the other hand, the depleted uranium slug fired from an M1A1 Abrams bounced harmlessly off your neutronium-density skull.
The foam is closer in density to styrofoam like in a bicycle helmet, and came off the tank at 300mph relative to the shuttle's wing. I'd love to see you taking a bicycle helmet in the face at 300mph. Or a Nerf football for that matter. Or best yet, the M1A1 tank round.
"Would you get in a car if you knew that statistically, you had a 1 in 50 chance of the car blowing up and killing you? I guarantee that you'd be walking or riding a bike instead."
Oh come now, people have been driving Ford Pintos for over 20 years now, and yet somehow 99% of them are still here.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I think it was pretty obvious what brought them down.
Really?
You were saying?
Troll?
What about this?
Hell go look for 9/11, norad, conspiracy, whatever in google and you'll find a dozen websites talking about the same things, asking the same questions. I'm not stating an opinion here.. Something is seriously wrong with the way the WTC was investigated and I think these investigations are certainly related to the shuttle disaster.
I mean why is it that we make the shuttle a front page report, along with Iraq, for months and months while the 9/11 attack was only front page long enough to get support to attack Afghanistan?
Since i don't moderate would anyone else mind moderating my parent post up to something readable? If you think its relevant at all..
However, there comes a time when NASA should probably just bite the bullet and build a new vehicle, and accept the factor of two or three improvements in cost and safety it can realistically achieve rather than the hundredfold cost improvements it seeks in the longer term.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
At a quick glance I see six top level postings as +5 Funny.
I wonder how many funny comments you can squeeze out of a space shuttle blowing up? And maybe who should I be more ashamed of, the people posting or the people moderating them all up?
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Math and science education to all is meant to prevent such bogus "statistics" from being taken at a face value. These subjects are not taught because someone say so; math and science have values such that people can think and evaluate what he/she is heard and form one's own conclusion.
We forgot that simple point. Now math and science are merely the subjects you just have to pass to graduate schools. Few really cares (even some so-called scientists are that way).
So ask yourself a question: are we any smarter than people were in 16th century?
We may be not.
um...shouldn't the MTBF of the component be the MIMUMUM of all the MTBFs of each subcomponent? the chain is as strong as its weakest link and all that?
The experts there (of which you are not one) examined the data at their disposal (which you do not possess) and consulted their own education and experience with the program (which you do not have) and made a determination (which you are not qualified to do) that the risk ... was low.
... program and the lives of those depending on you.
:)
(snip)
If you're going to ignore the advice of the experts, just because that advice very infrequently ends up being wrong, you are going to end up wrong far more often than not, much to the detriment of the
---
I thought the same thing about Bush and the UN Weapon Inspectors
apt-get install deathstar && deathstar alderaan && echo "You're far too trusting"
I've heard of ships being struck by flying fish, but never winged seals.
Did you ever see the place crash into the pentagon? Did you see pieces of it?
The whole time I was watching all this happen I never thought it could have been possible for the pentagon to have never been attacked by an airplane. But now that I think back about it. I never once saw anything resembling an airplane or any video showing an airplane smash into the pentagon. The damage done to the pentagon was very similar to a bomb, the grass in front of it was undamaged and only the first floor was really damaged, the rest just collapsed.
I don't want an investigation that exposes the "truth". I want to know the truth. I also want to know why we spent more money investigating the shuttle than we did the World Trade Center. Is it more important to us to know what happens in a car crash than a national disaster? That's the way it looks to me. Americans like you are prefectly satisfied that some brown people flew our planes into our own buildings without any motive. So we bomb them in relatiation and revenge and kill twice as many brown people. They may not have been the same brown people and most of them may have been innocent, but at least we got our revenge! Right? Is that how you feel?
Wow. That almost sounds reasonable. Is this your own invention, or is this the stuff NASA is selling these days? I'm rather amazed that such 'plausible' stuff can actually be spun into a product people will buy! --But then, somebody found that encasing chicken feces in plastic key ring holders made poultry bio-refuse a viable commodity. Wonders never cease.
First off, the foam wasn't moving at anywhere near 300mph relative to the wing, (despite what NASA may have been telling people). Until the moment it fell and bounced off the wing, the foam had been flying at the same speed as the rest of the rocket, which never experiences an acceleration of more than 3G's during any point of its flight. --Assuming that the rocket was accelerating at its fastest, and the foam took about one second to travel from where it became separated to where it bounced off the wing, (and not taking air resistance, etc. into account), you're looking at a relative speed of around 22-23 Mph. I've been hit with a Nerf football at speeds much greater than that and it's called, 'Play'.
Consider ice. --Ice due to condensation often falls off liquid fuel rocket engines and strikes against vehicle superstructure, and it would do so at about the same relative speed as that piece of foam, (at between 1-3 G's acceleration). Ice is denser than foam, but ice doesn't cause rockets to blow up. If it did, then it would be a sign of very poor engineering. --Engineers must take these sorts of impacts into account, and certainly do to tolerances much higher than what can be expected from pieces of foam; bird impacts must be survivable, as well as ice crystals up to a certain size, (while ice can be avoided upon launch, it cannot be guaranteed absent upon re-entry). --Objects which, when they impact, are for all intents and purposes considered stationary relative to the vehicle.
NASA is grasping at straws because it knows the real reason their craft exploded, and it certainly hasn't got anything to do with foam.
-Fantastic Lad
Wow. That almost sounds reasonable. Is this your own invention, or is this the stuff NASA is selling these days? I'm rather amazed that such 'plausible' stuff can actually be spun into a product people will buy! --But then, somebody found that encasing chicken feces in plastic key ring holders made poultry bio-refuse a viable commodity. Wonders never cease.
First off, the foam wasn't moving at anywhere near 300mph relative to the wing, (despite what NASA may have been telling people). Until the moment it fell and bounced off the wing, the foam had been flying at the same speed as the rest of the rocket, which never experiences an acceleration of more than 3G's during any point of its flight. --Assuming that the rocket was accelerating at its fastest, and the foam took about one second to travel from where it became separated to where it bounced off the wing, (and not taking air resistance, etc. into account), you're looking at a relative speed of around 22-23 Mph. I've been hit with a Nerf football at speeds much greater than that and it's called, 'Play'.
Consider ice. --Ice due to condensation often falls off liquid fuel rocket engines and strikes against vehicle superstructure, and it would do so at about the same relative speed as that piece of foam, (at between 1-3 G's acceleration). Ice is denser than foam, but ice doesn't cause rockets to blow up. If it did, then it would be a sign of very poor engineering. --Engineers must take these sorts of impacts into account, and certainly do to tolerances much higher than what can be expected from pieces of foam; bird impacts must be survivable, as well as ice crystals up to a certain size, (while ice can be avoided upon launch, it cannot be guaranteed absent upon re-entry). --Objects which, when they impact, are for all intents and purposes considered stationary relative to the vehicle.
NASA is grasping at straws because it knows the real reason their craft exploded, (look up EM weapons, aliens and NWO,) and it certainly hasn't got anything to do with foam.
-Fantastic Lad
here Or just look throught articles on yahoo's full coverage section. I just call them like I see them.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I do like the analogy, but just want to point out the missing time dilation that's present for space travel. I use a car five times a day; space travel happens (according to your guess) about five times a year. That puts the time-weighted likelihood of space death at one flight every ten years, but for a car once every ten days. The analogy is a powerful one, but to a degree it is misleading.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.