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NASA Test Shows Foam Could Be Culprit
Ben Hutchings writes "The BBC has a report on an impact simulation that aimed to recreate the impact of insulating foam on Columbia's wing. The result was a large hole that probably could not be repaired in orbit even if it was known about."
It'll be interesting to see what the reaction to this failure will be.
Challenger didn't really rock the way we did Shuttle missions because the problems that led to its explosion were not core to how the Shuttles are built -- someone / some process screwed up and there was a relatively reliable way to make sure it wouldn't happen again.
Columbia, on the other hand, was destroyed because the design of the Shuttle is so fragile that once you develop an external problem, you're dead -- since they're using tiles that are individualized, there are no spares they could carry that would help them fix this sort of problem.
Hopefully, this will be a step in the right direction -- either a radical redesign of the Shuttle, or its abandonment in favor of a more robust solution.
It's amazing to think that prior shuttle launches have had foam break off and strike the wing without this happening (according to Discovery Channel). Makes me wonder what was different, perhaps just the size of the foam chunk. It's good to know they finally tested it out to measure the impact. Tragic that people died first. Here's a link to another article on VOANews.com
The ISS was out - it was on a different orbit and the Shuttle didn't have enough fuel to make the transition.
On the other hand, I have also wondered why the hell they couldn't send up an empty shuttle and bring everyone back on it. Moreover, once the Columbia had been emptied, they could have tried to bring it back with out bleeding off speed using S turns. The Columbia broke apart as it was slaloming and had just loaded up the damaged wing. Had they known the wing was busted, they may have been able to slide slip the whole way in and kept the damaged wing trailing on the backside the whole way down.
All those ideas go out the door when the shuttle manager said "Even had we known, there was nothing we could have done." For that sentiment alone, he deserved to go - it was a far cry from Gene Kranz'es "failure is not an option" attitude when Apollo 13 blew an oxygen tank.
Let's see, prior to STS-86 and while CFC-11 was still used as propellant, sprayed-foam insulation loss was minimal, sporadic, and concentrated around a few problem areas and was characterized by small debris. After that, the loss became common, resulting in significant damage to STS-87 and other flights and was characterized by much bigger chunks shedding off random areas of the external tank.
So, yes, it most certainly is the new formula that caused the problems.