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."

Comments

So don't repair it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do they always mention that the astronauts couldn't repair the damage? They could still potentially be rescued if they had known about the damage. NASA still failed in their basic responsibility to those in space by not pursuing the potential damage further and not monitoring the basic condition of the aircraft.

Re:So don't repair it!

[Anonymous Coward]

This post is not redundant. The primary reason NASA stated for not providing monitoring tools for the shuttle in space was that they couldn't repair any damage they found. But in reality they do have multiple options if the spacecraft becomes damaged prior to re-entry. It was such an head-in-the-sand approach and they continue to state it as a defense.

happens often

[jnguy]

I was watchinbg something on channel 7 about this, and they mentioned that this happens at almost every shuttle launch. Apparently it happened, but didn't create such a large hole on another shuttle a few months before columbia. I guess they better fix their stuff before they go off blasting into space again. It also showed how everything melted down because of that hole, scary how such a minor thing can cause such disaster

Re:happens often

[geekee]

It only started happening after they switched to a non-freon based foam to make the environmentalists happy. Despite that this was a known problem on quite a few missions, they were more interested in being politically correct than in insuring the safety of the missions.

Re:happens often

[fredrik70]

hmm, I though I read somewhere it actually happened on Columbia's maiden flight as well?
Also from what I heard NASA was still allowed to use freon-based foam if it still wanted to, but it switched anyway.

Re:happens often

[eyegone]

Care to point to some evidence for this?

Re:happens often

[Psion]

Not only did they make the switch, NASA chose to do so in spite of a special-use exemption granted by the EPA. After returning from a December, 1997 flight, Columbia had taken 308 hits from falling foam debris, with clear indication of the potential damage (some of the scratches in the delicate tiles on the underbelly were over 3 centimeters deep). Nevertheless, NASA continued to use the more dangerous, "environmentally safer" HCFC-141b instead of the reliable CFC-11 propellant.

Thanks for bringing this up!

Re:happens often

[KevetS]

Exactly. Since a hole in the wing is such a minor thing, and all.

Re:happens often

[kmac06]

Look for yourself. (Its the first one)

Or, if you're lazy:

"Despite that the Freon-based foam worked well and that an exemption from the CFC phase-out could have been obtained, NASA succumbed to political correctness. The agency substituted an allegedly more eco-friendly foam for the Freon-based foam.

PC-foam was an immediate problem.

The first mission with PC-foam resulted in 11 times more damaged thermal tiles on Columbia than the previous mission with the Freon-based foam."

Re:happens often

[gwernol]

It only started happening after they switched to a non-freon based foam to make the environmentalists happy. Despite that this was a known problem on quite a few missions, they were more interested in being politically correct than in insuring the safety of the missions.

NASA are in the process of switching foam types as mandated by the EPA. However STS-107 did not have the new "superlightweight" tanks with the new foam - the foam that was shed was the old foam. See the shuttle loss FAQ for details.

So it did not "only start happening after the switch". Its clearly a problem with the foam system in general, and is not directly related to the type of foam used, as you imply. This conspiracy theory that "environmentalists" or a "politically correct" NASA caused the shuttle disaster is wrong.

Re:happens often

[sphealey]

It only started happening after they switched to a non-freon based foam to make the environmentalists happy.

Yeah, it was all the fault of the granola-eating tree-huggers.

Like it or not, restrictions on CFCs are the law of the land in the United States, as well as the subject of several international treaties that the US has signed and ratified.

If NASA does not agree with these restrictions, it is free to try to get the law rescinded. But unless and until the law is rescinded, it is NASA's legal and engineering responsibility to find a foam that does not require CFC for manufacturing. Period end of story. That NASA failed to do so is still its responsibility regardless of whether or not "environmentalists" were involved.

sPh

Re:happens often

[Psion]

Nice try. Actually, they began using HCFC-141b with STS-86. Here's some relevant info on Columbia's damage after STS-87 in 1997.

Note the source.

Re:happens often

[Psion]

Gwernol is wrong. Unless you'd care to debate NASA's own reports on this?

Re:happens often

[sowellfan]

Ok, I went & read the FAQ you linked to, but you have misinterpreted what it says. It says that the "Lightweight" tank was used on the Columbia. Regarding the "Superlightweight" tanks, it says,

"Since 1998, however, a revised tank model - a 'Superlightweight' tank - has been in use."

The same FAQ says in the next paragraph,

"In addition to the development of the 'Superlightweight' tanks, Lockheed also began using a reformulated lighter version of the inch-thick, spray-on insulation used on all external tanks in the mid-1990s. The switch was made to comply with an EPA mandate to limit ozone-depleting chemicals."

So the new foam came into use on *ALL* tanks (doesn't say 'only superlightweight'), starting in the mid-1990s, whereas the "superlightweight" tank only came into service in 1998.

The FAQ also says that the use of the new "Superlightweight" tank started with STS-91. But the same FAQ talks about the extensive tile damage found on the return to earth of STS-87, and it mentions that the new, 'environmentally-friendly' foaming method was used on STS-87. It also refers to this new foaming method being one of a few possible reasons for the extensive tile damage. STS-87 comes before STS-91 (unless they have some weird numbering system I don't know about), so it couldn't have used one of the new 'Superlightweight' tanks with its 'environmentally-friendly' foam. So it is apparent from this evidence also, that the new foaming method was used with the Columbia tanks.

If you are going to try to refute somebody, and then post a link to your supposed evidence, please read your evidence carefully so I don't have to waste my time responding.

Re:happens often

[kmac06]

I looked at your link. You're wrong. Do a quick search on "Freon" in that page. Better yet, I'll show you what you get:

Four possible causes were put forth as to what caused the foam to separate from the External Tank:

1. The primer that bonds the tank foam to the External Tank itself was defective and did not set properly.

2. The aerodynamics of the roll to "heads up." The STS-87 mission was the first time this maneuver had ever been completed.

3. The change in the production methods of the foam to exclude the use of Freon and/or any ozone-damaging fluorocarbons.

4. An unforeseen shrinking of the External Tank due to cryogenic loading, leading to separation of the foam from the Tank and compromising its integrity and resistance to atmospheric drag at high velocities.

(emphasis mine)

So. The conspiracy theory that politically correct environmentalists caused the disaster is (possibly) right.

Re:happens often

[gwernol]

I looked at your link. You're wrong. Do a quick search on "Freon" in that page. Better yet, I'll show you what you get:

Four possible causes were put forth as to what caused the foam to separate from the External Tank:

1. The primer that bonds the tank foam to the External Tank itself was defective and did not set properly.

2. The aerodynamics of the roll to "heads up." The STS-87 mission was the first time this maneuver had ever been completed.

3. The change in the production methods of the foam to exclude the use of Freon and/or any ozone-damaging fluorocarbons.

4. An unforeseen shrinking of the External Tank due to cryogenic loading, leading to separation of the foam from the Tank and compromising its integrity and resistance to atmospheric drag at high velocities.

(emphasis mine)

Sorry but that's talking about STS-87 (see, its right there in the quote you gave). I'm not disputing that some of the flights that had the new foam saw shedding problems, that's clearly true. The original poster claimed it only happened after the switch to the new foam. But STS-107 (the Columbia flight that ended in disaster over Texas) was using the old foam. Its not the type of foam that's the problem, its something else.

Re:happens often

[Psion]

Nope, wrong again. NASA has not used CFC-11 as a propellant for their foam since switching in 1997. They have new application methods to reduce flaking, but obviously they are lacking. Mind you, I'm not quick to point the finger at environmentalists on this one. The EPA, for example, had exempted NASA from requiring a switch. NASA, for reasons I'm not sure about, decided to switch anyway.

Re:happens often

[gwernol]

Nice try. Actually, they began using HCFC-141b with STS-86. Here's some relevant info on Columbia's damage after STS-87 in 1997.

True, but the foam shedding problems have been going on long before STS-86. See this article, for example:

"The first NASA-reported loss of bipod closeout foam was on the June 1983 launch of Challenger. That was followed by a similar foam loss on the January 1990 flight of Columbia. No records are available from those flights about the size of the foam chunk or damage to the shuttles.

A little more than two years later, the Columbia again suffered bipod foam loss, that time from both closeouts, during a June 1992 launch. A 6-inch divot was missing from the right closeout, and the left closeout popped loose, taking with it a chunk of intertank foam. That piece measured 20 inches by 10 inches by several inches deep, according to a debris and ice assessment prepared after the mission." (quote is about half way down the page)

So it can't simply be the switch to the new foam that caused the shedding problems, now can it?

Re:happens often

[I Like Swords!!!]

Great... that's all we need from those environ"mental cases". They'll have banned is the volcano due to "extreme environmental hazards". What next, the weather?

Re:happens often

[Psion]

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.

Re:happens often

[keep_it_simple_stupi]

Does it seem odd to anyone that we're using (basically) the same shield technology that we did in 1983? Do you remember what kind of computers we had in 1983? Yikes...

Re:happens often

[SN74S181]

If I remember correctly, the computers we were using in 1983 had damned solid welded steel cases.

Now a lot of computers come in cheap molded plastic cases. The 'cost cutting MBA types' have definitely been at it.

Re:happens often

[nolesrule]

Mission numbers are designated in the order that the missions are approved, not in the order of flight. In this case, though, you are correct. 87 flew about a seven months before 91.

88 flew between 95 and 96, about 6 months after 91.

Re:happens often

[rufey]

Flights do not always fly in order. See the KSC shuttle flight archive list.

In this case, though, STS-87 did fly before STS-91.

Re:happens often

[sowellfan]

That seems logical. Now I'm glad that I threw that caveat in there.

Re:happens often

[Gossy]

Do you remember what kind of computers we had in 1983? Yikes.

Do you remember what kind of lightbulbs we had back in 1983? Yikes.

Oh..

You make it sound worse than it is. Computer technology have been developing at a rate that has never been seen before. We've all heard about the joke with Gates saying "If cars had progressed at the same rate as computers..."

Surprise - other sectors aren't developing at the same rate. It doesn't seem particularily odd at all.

Re:happens often

[Ben Hutchings]

I remember what kind of lightbulbs we had back in 1983, and I avoid using them where possible. I save energy and money by using compact fluorescent bulbs instead.

Re:happens often

[jafac]

Yes. "Fair and Balanced" Faux news would have us blame the environmentalists for forcing NASA to use unsafe foam.

That makes all the sense in the world. Instead of blaming the engineers who made the decision to launch in the face of overwhelming evidence that:
a) Foam is falling off of the tanks (does not matter WHY)
b) Foam strikes are already shown to cause tile damage.
c) Ice strikes on Atlantis mission in 2000 caused enough tile damage to create a hot-gas breach on re-entry which was non-fatal. (but easily could have been).

These three points show that something was known about the problem and something should have been done. It doesn't matter WHY the foam fell off. It was known to be falling off. The problem was this decision-making process. Not the foam!

Re:happens often

[websaber]

Isn't interesting that both shuttle losses were due to simpler external features. One was bought down by its booster rockets the other by its fuel tank. I wonder if there is any culture were the orbiter is considered so complicated that they engineer every possible contingency like writing 3 lines of code a day while excusing 308 foam hits from the simpler fuel tank. Also does anybody else see a connection between iterative programming and NASA engineering. It seems to me that the general culture is let's consider every possible outcome and if anything else happens keep a funeral fund handy. Two examples, how much would it cost to keep a little ball with a few booster rockets and a camera on every shuttle mission for shuttle inspections, also I've heard that even if they knew about the damage sending another shuttle up would of just risked 4 more lives before they knew what caused the first ones damage. How about keeping a few simple space capsules in orbit with enough fuel to reach any orbit used by astronauts? If this is impractical how about keeping 3 unmanned Apollo type rockets always on standby that can serve as life boats to any future missions in any orbit. It seems to me that rather than only always pre-engineering contingencies the first rule should be have something in place to get every piece of reasonable data. The second should be USE those tools if ANYBODY has any doubts. Three always have a independent way of getting everybody back that doesn't put more lives at risk. Does anybody think that any astronaut has a prayer if a meteorite hits the shuttle bay with out these rules?

Re:happens often

[DonaldBeckman817]

I use modern design light bulbs that last just about forever and give off 75 watts equivalent of light for 15 watts actual power. No, I DON NOT use the same light bulb.


Add to that, poly foam technology has improved as well over the last 20 years.

I wonder why they don't just wrap the tank it a Mylar wrapper to keep it all together?

Re:happens often

[carlos_benj]

No, I DON NOT use the same light bulb.

Perhaps you meant DON KNOTTS, who sometimes plays a dim bulb....

And just to make sure it's on-topic, he's wearing his space suit.

Re:happens often

[ColaMan]

Do you remember what kind of computers we had in 1983? Yikes...

Ha! the shuttle uses 70's-era computers... at least they seem to function as intended.

Re:happens often

[glenebob]

>> make the environmentalists happy

How could the environmentalists be happy about device that spews about a gazillion pounds of nauxious fumes into the atmosphere? Hey, at least that 2 pound piece of foam that falls off was made without freon. All is good.

Re:happens often

[Xerithane]

We've all heard about the joke with Gates saying "If cars had progressed at the same rate as computers..."

The first motorized car (Daimler and Benz) that used a combustion engine was in 1886. Look at cars in 1926. That is a lot more innovation than what was done in the first 40 years of computing.

There was a huge boom for car manufacturers prior to the Great Depression that was very similar to the dot-com boom. There was a tremendous amount of innovation, especially in clutch and brake design.

Cars did progress at first like computers did. Then they reached a limit as to how far the progression could take them. Computers will reach that, too.

Re:happens often

[spitzak]

I would like to see some actual report that says "we know this foam is not as good but we don't want to use CFC's".

Even if the new foam is 100% responsible, I belive the decision to use it was based on evidence that it worked as well or better than before and that thus switching to no CFC was believed to be an entirely positive mood.

Blaming environmentalists is really cheap. If they had painted an american flag on it and that caused the disaster, would you blame patriots? Or would you more intelligently blame the engineers who did not figure out that the big american flag was possibly dangerous and turn down that idea?

Re:happens often

[ferrety]

Well, Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert seems to believe that the foam in question was based on freon. See the last letter from 3/3/03 C&E News Letters . He also states that falling foam has known to been problem since 1988, far before any freon-bans.

And NASA was given exempt from the freon-ban by the EPA. The reason given by the Lockheed for changing the foam was the scarcity of the freon due the international treaty signed in Montreal banning the use of freon. So the stated reason for the change was economics, not environmentalism. If the freon was critical, of cource they would have continued to use it.

Nice spin thou, "it was not NASA's fault, it was those damn environmentalists." See my previous post(and reply) on for bit more info

Re:happens often

[Mysticalfruit]

Lets thing about this for a moment...

Firstly: "a few simple space capsules"... So your talking about lofting a craft that can accomidate 7-10 people. Be capable of surviving long endurance space flight and be capable of manuvering in space and also be capable of surviving reentry.

Secondly: The idea of keeping several Apollo type rockets kicking around is even more engineeringly hairier then the first idea.

Here's my idea. They should mandate from this point forward that all flying shuttles must be fitted with the external docking collar and the canada arm. Then what they should do is take a well understood satalite design, take out all the communications cruft and fit some big ass fuel tanks on the thing. Then put the satelite in an orbit that a shuttle could intersect with a minimum amount of fuel. Part of the package with this satelite would be all the tools/hoses necissary to allow it to be tied into the shuttles manuvering jets that would allow it to boost its orbit to the ISS.

Now, I do like your first idea. But instead of having them floating around in space, they should use them in place of the soyuz as lifeboats off the ISS. This way we could have more than 3 people on the station at a time.

Re:happens often

[meatspray]

(I would like to see some actual report that says "we know this foam is not as good but we don't want to use CFC's".)
(I belive the decision to use it was based on evidence that it worked as well or better than before)

so your argument is that the non CFC foam that falls off the tank is superior to the old CFC based foam that tended to stay on the tank.

interesting....

The point made by the parent poster here is that they were using a perfectly acceptable and proven foam, then switched to something environmentally friendly that didn't work as well.

Perhaps you are trying to claim that they did a poor job testing it.

I propose a different view for you. They should have left well enough alone. The damage caused to the enviroment by the freon based foam used in launches is peanuts to the safety and welfare of the crew and success of the mission.

It's blatantly obvious that they did not switch to the new foam because it outperformed the old foam. Switching foam to a "better preforming" product would definanitely imply testing. Testing would have certainly shown it having the cavataion and fracture problems that are occurring.

They switched to it based on environmental concerns. Whether these concerns came from internal or external sources makes no difference. Switching for such petty enviromental benefits is a substantially poor reason to jeopardize the lives of crew members, the success of missions and the overall view of NASA.

Re:happens often

[cluckshot]

There is a bit more to this story. NASA has locked up most of their crash investigation info as "Top Secret" and will not be releasing it with their report.

The reality is that the foam experiment shown was a complete makeup fabrication job to cover up what they have found. Here is why:

The shuttle was going the horrendous speed of less than 400mph when it was struck by the foam. The closure speed of the foam was something in the order of about 50mph and did little or no damage. The Test was done at nearly 600mph impact speed. The kenetic energy loading differential here is about 2500/360000 of the amount used in the test. It was an impressive test but completely irrelevant.

Numerous other poster persons have noted the reasons that the foam was not going so fast

There is a real reason NASA wants the press to buy such crap! NASA has a serious problem in procurement which probably caused the failure.

Without going into too many details and assuming it was the foam as they claim, the factory where the foam is applied has about 85% H-1B Visa Holders as their employees. As a result there is nobody of consequence in that factory would ever dare the ire of management to tell that the work was defective. The reports will always be squeeky clean.

More importantly the most likely cause of the loss is easily ignored. The Columbia was running a brand new "Glass Cockpit" with most of the software having been written and tested in India and Pakistan. How do Americans like their national treasures being run by persons who might not like us!? Pretty scary isn't it. Just a minor defect in software could account for the entire set of problems leaving all of the other stories as nonsense.

Those of us who write software are aware of a substantial difference between the American and Asian writers. No disrespect to the quality of the software written by Non-Americans is intended but their style rarely includes the rigorous inventive skills required of Space Flight.

NASA intending to save money and disdaining Americans probably just cooked 7 people and destroyed several billion dollars of national treasure. (Cheap wasn't it?)

Re:happens often

[spitzak]

I meant that I don't think there was any memo that said "this foam is worse". I believe they thought the foams were exactly equivalent and that the benifit (however tiny) of getting rid of the CFC's was worth it as there were no negative costs. This could imply they did a bad job testing it.

The damage caused to the enviroment by the freon based foam used in launches is peanuts to the safety and welfare of the crew and success of the mission.

Not sure but I also suspect the environmental damage of that freon is tiny compared to whatever is released by launching the shuttle. I think it even releases a great deal of CFC's. True rabid environmentalists think we should not be flying shuttles due to pollution.

Re:happens often

[eyegone]

Thanks!

Re:happens often

[websaber]

"Secondly: The idea of keeping several Apollo type rockets kicking around is even more engineeringly hairier then the first idea."

The point is these days they could be remote controlled on launch. They only really have to be engineered to work on re-entry. Also the technology is 30 years old it should be a lot safer.

"Here's my idea. They should mandate from this point forward that all flying shuttles must be fitted with the external docking collar and the canada arm. Then what they should do is take a well understood satalite design, take out all the communications cruft and fit some big ass fuel tanks on the thing. Then put the satelite in an orbit that a shuttle could intersect with a minimum amount of fuel. Part of the package with this satelite would be all the tools/hoses necissary to allow it to be tied into the shuttles manuvering jets that would allow it to boost its orbit to the ISS. "

Thats the idea but the whole point is even if they are attached to the space station keep enough fuel on board so that they can handle any future unforseen contingency. Also the whole reason the canda arm wasn't on the shuttle was to save weight (really worked to, the unit went from tons to pounds) how much would a ball weigh?

Re:happens often

[Mysticalfruit]

Actually, a buddy and I were talking last night about this and we were discussing rocket technologies and he brought to light something that I had over looked... these days we've got rockets that are alot more reliable and simpler in design then something like a Saturn 5 ever was. His idea was to just use a Silo that would keep the rocket out of the elements, or build a retractable mantle that you could just store the whole craft, totally unfueled until it was needed. Then it would take a couple of hours to fill the tanks, plug in some batteries and presto, your off. Howerver, I think they should still work on getting a better liferaft craft that they could put 10 people in.

Eh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't this already the prevailing theory? What exactly is news here?

Re:Eh...

[Enry]

It was the prevailing theory of the media. NASA didn't have evidence either way, but now that they've done the testing and looked at the results, it's now the best theory as to what happened.

Re:Eh...

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Not quite. The prevailing theory was that it made a crack in the wing, not a gaping hole. Now they've seen the hole- it makes a lot more sense- the hot gases would have been chewing into the wing, really early on in the reentry.

woah

[EMH_Mark3]

deja vu

Re:woah

[Tmack]

Well, that was the first test.... This was one of the ones they had been delaying because they actually used a REAL shuttle wing panel as opposed to the fiberglass mock-up (from the prototype shuttle Enterprise) they used before. The first test was used to determine the severity to see if the second and further testing was going to be worth the $$$$$ that those panels cost. The second test showed that the carbon-carbon panels would crack significantly, prompting this test. These tests are not cheap, quoth the WashingtonTimes.com:
The $1 million foam-impact test at Southwest Research Institute took just a second.

Tm

Re:woah

[Jeremy Erwin]

NASA planned a whole series of tests. This test, the last of seven, used a panel taken from Atlantis (leading edge panel No. 8), and therefore most precisely approximated the conditions of Columbia's accident.

At least they found the "smoking gun"...

[trompete]

so that the next time they observe a piece of foam coming off during the launch, they will take the time to repair the wing before they reenter the atmosphere.
The accident itself is water under the bridge. Let's just hope it never happens again.

Re:At least they found the "smoking gun"...

[edgrale]

RTFA!

"He also said he believed that repairing the damage to the wing while the Columbia was on orbit would have been a nearly impossible task."

I hate trolls

Re:At least they found the "smoking gun"...

[trompete]

I read one on Google groups last night that did not mention that it would have been nearly impossible to repair the wing. I glanced over this one. I guess that it wasn't the same article :P

Re:At least they found the "smoking gun"...

[IWorkForMorons]

Well, at the very least, they'd have known to send another shuttle up to retrieve the astronauts. Shuttles can be replaced, lives can't...

Re:At least they found the "smoking gun"...

[Chris Burke]

No, of course they could have fixed it with a really good roll of duct tape. The real problem is that a NASA rookie had stocked Columbia with one of those shoddy Wal-Mart brands that are practically transparent. That crap can't fix anything!

i have often wondered

[JeanBaptiste]

how much supplies do they have on the ship? as in: so they discover a problem that wont allow them to re-enter... do they have enough food and stuff to allow them to stay up there a few more days, until possibly another shuttle could be launched with repair materiels, or at least to ferry the astronauts safely back to earth?
what about the ISS? could they have docked there for a while?

Re:i have often wondered

[sparkie]

No, the Columbia could not have docked with the ISS. The space shuttle was launched into a much lower orbit and would not have been able to propel itself high enough to reach the ISS. That is one of the 'problems' that has been brought up. I believe they are going to put more restrictions on where in orbit the shuttle can go. However, don't take my word for it. It's been all over the news and on Nasa's website.

Re:i have often wondered

[grub]

do they have enough food

They could have drawn straws. The long straw gets to live and eat the other six. That would have provided many many more weeks of food. Not sure what they'd do for air.

Re:i have often wondered

[Nyrath the nearly wi]

All your questions can be answered with the Columbia Loss FAQ. (scroll down to section "VI: Preventative Measures and Rescue Attempts")

Briefly:
They did not have enough oxygen to last for the weeks it would have taken to prep and launch another shuttle.
Even if they could have lasted, there were only two space-rated spacesuits aboard. And STS-107 had no airlock.
STS-107 had nowhere near enough deltaV to be able to alter their orbit enough to dock with the ISS. This is because the ISS is in a weird inclined orbit to allow Russian supply fights to be able to make it to the station.
This wierd orbit is also the reason that no Russian supply fight could have made it to STS-107

All this was argued to death on sci.space.shuttle months ago. The bottom line was that the shuttle was doomed the moment the heat shield was damaged.

Re:i have often wondered

[jmichaelg]

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.

Re:i have often wondered

[slyguy420]

Also they lacked the proper docking coupling to acheive this, i'm sure if the had known they would have been able to hammer sumthing out though.

Re:i have often wondered

[WolfWithoutAClause]

The next Shuttle wasn't due to launch for several weeks- Columbia only had supplies like air, power for about two weeks max. ISS was out; Soyuz can't launch to that orbit (it would have to drop the first stage on mainland China). Basically, there were no options, other than try to rush the next Shuttle through, and that might well not have made it up there in time.

Re:i have often wondered

[b-baggins]

It takes weeks and weeks to prep and launch a shuttle safely. You can get one out and on the pad in a couple of days, if you're willing to take risks. For some strange reason, I think most of the astronaut corps would have felt the risks worth it.

Of course, we could also have asked the Russians. We don't know how fast they could have gotten a supply rocket up. Shoot, for that matter, maybe we could have gotten a suppy rocket up, too in a few days. Or maybe the ESA could have, or even China.

Just because we couldn't get a shuttle safely prepped and launched in less than three weeks doesn't mean these folks were beyond hope.

Re:i have often wondered

[kalidasa]

Would take too damned long to get another shuttle up. Might have been possible with a complete power-down to minimal life support, but only if all the safety tests were neglected on the rescue flight (Discovery was I think next in line).

Re:i have often wondered

[Rich0]

I don't believe that Columbia was capable of reaching the ISS's orbit even if they wanted to. The Columbia has a lot of extra safety equipment since it was the first shuttle and nobody was certain it wouldn't just blow up on the pad. It is heavier than the newer shuttles.

The ISS is in a highly inclined orbit (in order to launch resupply ships from russia the ISS can't just orbit the equator like most normal satellites). As a result only the newer and lighter shuttles are even capable of reaching its orbit.

In order to visit the ISS the shuttle would have to be launched with this in mind from the outset of the mission. A shuttle launched for this purpose could not deploy normal satellites or visit the Hubble. It isn't just a matter of the orbit being the wrong height - it is the wrong inclination as well.

Inclination is the angle the orbit makes with the equator. A zero inclination orbit stays over the equator all the time. A 90 degree inclination is a polar orbit (cruises over both poles and as the earth turns beneath it the orbit crosses every point on the surface of the earth). I think the ISS is around 30 degrees inclination.

To change orbital inclination you need to thrust at a 90 degree angle to the orbital velocity. It takes a LOT of fuel to make anything more than a minor change.

Inclined orbits need more fuel at launch time as well. A zero inclination orbit launched from near the equator has the advantage that on the pad the shuttle is already moving in the right direction with considerable speed (due to the rotation of the earth). All orbits of a given height require the same velocity to maintain. However, relative to the launch pad, an inclined orbit needs more velocity. The worst orbit from this standpoint is a 180 degree inclination - or retrograde orbit. This is one in which the ship is travelling east to west, and not west to east. The ship must take off and spend a lot of fuel just to get down to zero velocity (it starts off with velocity in the wrong direction due to the rotation of the earth), then it has to spend that much energy again just to get to where a 0-inclinction launch starts off. Then it must spend the normal launch energy to get into orbit.

During re-entry all this extra velocity has to be bled off as well. This doesn't cost fuel since friction is doing the work, but it does stress the tiles more.

Re:i have often wondered

[hughk]

The ISS is in a bit of a wonky orbit anyway because of the shuttle's inability to get to higher altitudes. This is a bit of a problem because there is enough atmosphere around to cause the space station to need relatively frequent orbital corrections.

Please remember that NASA tends towards political correctness as regards its management. Many senior engineers have retired and there aren't enough experienced people around these days.

Others have already commented that although impossible when the shuttle was first built, a repair kit would now be possible. Whether it would have helped in the case of STS-107 is another issue.

One of the problems about the shuttle is the flight profile that exposes the shuttle to extended heating. This was a direct requirement of the USAF who wanted a single orbit configuration to allow for quick recconaissance misisons during the cold-war and still the possibility of always being able to land on US territory. This meant a long reentry phase as the shuttle needed to be able to 'fly'. Other designs would have allowed a controlled stall, reducing the 'flying time' and thus the exposure to heat.

Bottom line, the Shuttle was probbaly doomed as you say when the accident ocurred. Mostly because the kind of people that saved Apollo 13 have gone from NASA.

Re:i have often wondered

[NaugaHunter]

Before I pick it apart, the whole 'had they known the wing was busted' is a vital part of the decision making. This isn't the first time foam has hit the shuttle, and nothing indicated a severe problem.

Anyway, they wouldn't have sent a second shuttle because it could have happened again, and you'd have two stranded shuttles. Even now that they think they know what happened, they still need to find a way for it not to happen again. To send up another shuttle and crew would have been irresponsible.

And despite the fact that the things practically fly themselves, there currently is no button that says 'get into a synchronous orbit without hitting it, and deliver a couple of spacesuits since they don't have any'.

Re:i have often wondered

[BadBlood]

If I recall my orbital mechanics correctly, the shuttle would have to DEcelerate in order to reach higher orbits. Granted, fuel is used during deceleration (counter-thrust), but I don't think it would be "propelling" itself into a higher orbit. Disclaimer: I could very well be wrong about this, it's been about 15 years....

Re:i have often wondered

[A Bugg]

I have but a single comment to your post, and that is yes it takes weeks to prep a shuttle for launch except in the case of columbia atlantis was on the pad and ready to go for its march launch.
A Bugg

Re:i have often wondered

[cheeto]

You aren't quite recalling your orbital mechanics correctly. A burn in the direction of your orbit will increase the altitude on the opposite side of the orbit. A burn in the opposite direction (retrograde) will reduce the altitude on the other side.

Re:i have often wondered

[KoshClassic]

Although I doubt it would have been 'diplomaticaly correct', given the speeds and altitudes involved, I imagine that none of the countries in question could have done much more than complained.

Re:i have often wondered

[Billly Gates]

Yes, its possible that the crew of Columbia could of been saved!

Actually ABC news did a story on your topic about a month and a half ago. Nasa is taking quite some heat from it.

Basically Atlantis was scheduled to launch next month and testing and preperation procedures were already done. On a 24 hour contineous 2 shift team the shuttle could of been ready for launch in 2 weeks if everything goes, right and NO, SHORTCUTS ARE NOT ALLOWED.. Everything would still need to be done by the book with mountains of paperwork and checklists. But with 2 shits running 24x7 it is possible for sure Atlantis could of be ready in 2 weeks.

After that a single astronaught could guide Atlantis to Columbia and began the evacuation. When completed the last astronought would tell the computer to crash Columbia into the sea and that would be the end of the shuttle.

Yes, S turns are required and need to be precisiosly on target. The heat shield can take heat for only so long. Without the turns the right side of the shuttle would overheat or the whole shuttle would because it would take longer to slow down and cool. At mach 17 their is nothing that can stop the imense pressure of the atmosphere from entering the wing and heating it up. Imagine the force of sticking your arm out a window in your car at the highway. Now imagine maginified by 70x times? No wonder it gets so hot and its amazing the shuttle doesn't break apart just from the force.

Nasa had no idea the seriousness of the problem. If they did they probably would of executed this plan.

If Atlantis was not already partially done in preperation then nothing could save Columbia. My guess is in the future Nasa will try to pack missions together in pairs so in case a diaster happens another shuttle could be ready by 2 weeks.

Re:i have often wondered

[Billly Gates]

Nasa got flamed for the FAQ. Actually later on it was shown that Atlantis could of been ready if the crew was split into 2 teams working 24x7.

Columbia has enough oxygen for 2 weeks if the astronaughts conserve.

ABC news did a special on this.

Re:i have often wondered

[pngwen]

"But with 2 shits running 24x7 it is possible for sure Atlantis could of be ready in 2 weeks."
--emphasis mine

Hmm... would that be Bill and Tom or Fred and George? Look at those two shits go! They sure can get a shuttle going!

Sorry, couldn't resist. We all have bouts of childishness.

Re:i have often wondered

[mrjah]

My guess is in the future Nasa will try to pack missions together in pairs so in case a diaster happens another shuttle could be ready by 2 weeks.

...Unless it's the second member of the pair that has problems...

...Which it will be, 50% of the time...

Three words

[SuperBanana]

Emergency Duct Tape (as any studious watcher of the Red Green Show knows, you can make or fix anything with duct tape!)

Re:Three words

[mhesseltine]

See previous /. article for more information

Re:Three words

[Zeebs]

Well, I guess the Red Green motto fits for the 'typical' slashdotter.

"If the women don't find ya handsom, they should at least find you handy"

Longer Article

[Unknown Relic]

A slightly more detailed article is available from fox news. A couple interesting things noted here that aren't in the BBC article is that this was the seventh and final test, and that in addition to the camera lens popping off, several other guages which were measuring the experiment were damaged from the impact.

Re:Longer Article

[tftp]

So not only did they find the smoking gun, they made another shuttle unflyable!

I take it that you'd want to fly on Atlantis with that panel still installed, right?

Re:Longer Article

[SeanAhern]

Yeah, but Fox News lies in their articles.

Wasn't it CNN who reported that the space shuttle Columbia broke apart while flying at 25 times the speed of light?

Could a news agency, in fact, possibly ever be wrong?

Re:Longer Article

[cybercuzco]

Yes, I would, Id just want them to fix the foam so it wasnt falling off anymore

Similar Shuttle

[ThePolemarch]

I'm so glad they used a "similar shuttle," perhaps a model could have worked just as well?

Minor curiosity...

[Jin Wicked]

I've been following this pretty closely since I live relatively near the Johnson Space Centre here in Houston, and quite a few NASA people come in where I work. I've heard a lot of talk about training the astronauts all to spacewalk, and be able to repair minor damage to the shuttle, but what exactly would they do if the damage was too severe to be repaired? Would a second shuttle have to be launched as a rescue mission? Would they have to just abandon the damaged shuttle in space, since it would be unfit for re-entry? There's a lot of talk of repairs but I haven't heard any predictions for scenarios where repair was impossible.

Perhaps NASA should start looking at new designs with potentially fatal flaws. Have they not been using this design for something like 15-20 years now?

Re:Minor curiosity...

[Jin Wicked]

*slaps forehead*

without potentially fatal flaws...

Re:Minor curiosity...

[dereklam]

Perhaps NASA should start looking at new designs with potentially fatal flaws.

I think NASA should instead be looking at new designs that don't contain potentially fatal flaws. 8-)

Re:Minor curiosity...

[r84x]

Perhaps NASA should start looking at new designs with potentially fatal flaws.

NASA has been looking at new shuttle designs for quite a while, but like anything involvingthe guvmint, it takes a loooong time.

You can see one here.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[earthforce_1]

I believe that it would have been possible for the crew to ration everything to the bare minimum, long enough push up the launch of Atlantis to fly a rescue mission. Such a mission would have been fraught with danger, (short cuts on pre-flight safety, and it too might have been struck with foam on launch) but there would have been no shortage of volunteers to fly the mission, despite the risks.

I suspect they would have abandoned the shuttle, it wouldn't be cost effective to fly a repair mission. I don't know how long they would have had before the orbit decayed and it came down. At least the crew (and most of the science) would have been saved.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[wass]

but what exactly would they do if the damage was too severe to be repaired?

in this case, where heatup during reentry would be a huge problem with a damaged wing, I was wondering if they could bring the shuttle in at a very oblique trajectory consisting of many orbits of slightly-decreasing radii to aerobrake it orders-of-magnitude more gradually than they currently do now.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[MrScience]

Well, see, what you do is prevent anyone from realizing the full extent of the damage, so that the astronauts can complete their mission without distraction.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[cnkeller]

I believe that it would have been possible for the crew to ration everything to the bare minimum

Given enough fuel on-board, why not just rendezvous with the ISS and hole up there until either another shuttle or a recue craft was launched? My space station design goes as far as the second death star, so I'm not sure if the ISS can even hold nine or ten people, let alone sustain them.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[Xzzy]

I thought the popular strategy was to make sure the shuttle could dock with the ISS, and allow the astronauts to get back to earth in the soyuz module the station has.

Granted I got this info from the media so it could be a pointless thing to say, but it sure sounds good.. especially since I don't think they can just lob another shuttle into space on a whim.

It would also still leave a broken shuttle up in space, which I imagine makes for an interesting engineering problem once the business of keeping people alive is done.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>Perhaps NASA should start looking at new designs with potentially fatal flaws.

No need for the expense of a new design with potentially fatal flaws, when the old design has them already.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[jandrese]

Given enough fuel on-board

Too bad they didn't have enough fuel on-board.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[mr_luc]

Perhaps NASA should start looking at new designs with potentially fatal flaws. Have they not been using this design for something like 15-20 years now?

"Well, if they find potentially fatal flaws in a design, I would think that would be about when they would *stop* looking at the-"*SMACK*

Re:Minor curiosity...

[Longbow]

Aerobraking only works in the upper atmosphere and requires you to remain in orbit. Basically you incrementally lower your closest approach by dipping into the atmosphere, as you stated, however, at some point you cease to be "in orbit" and just reenter. That point is still about 100 km up, so the reentry stresses and heat would not be much different from a nominal shuttle entry and would have likely destroyed the vehicle anyway.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[f97tosc]

There's a lot of talk of repairs but I haven't heard any predictions for scenarios where repair was impossible.

They are looking into materials that could be used to patch up holes. It is unlikely but possible that they will find something sufficiently strong and workable.

Perhaps NASA should start looking at new designs with potentially fatal flaws. Have they not been using this design for something like 15-20 years now?

I agree, but maybe they should wait until they have a plan with somehting really revolutionary on the table. Perhaps in ten years they could build a scramjet thing with much greater capacity. Building something new with similar but improved designs is not very cost-efficient; and while security could potentially be improved they may also introduce new bugs that take another disaster to identify.

Tor

Re:Minor curiosity...

[John_Booty]

I was wondering if they could bring the shuttle in at a very oblique trajectory consisting of many orbits of slightly-decreasing radii to aerobrake it orders-of-magnitude more gradually than they currently do now.

I hate to have blind faith in NASA, but don't you think the normal re-entry procedure was *already* designed to minimize stress on the Shuttle? I mean, just giving them the benefit of the doubt here... I'm sure quite a bit of thought was put into the existing method of re-entering the autmosphere.

The incentive for them to do so from the start must be rather large. Finding the least-stressful re-entry method makes re-entry safer. Also, it allows them to minimize the heat shielding, which reduces the cost and complexity of the shuttle as well as its weight, which means that much less fuel needed at launch.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[ceejayoz]

I thought the popular strategy was to make sure the shuttle could dock with the ISS, and allow the astronauts to get back to earth in the soyuz module the station has.

Pity there wasn't enough fuel to reach the ISS orbit, and that the Soyuz module holds a maximum of three people.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[kevlar]

They do this. Its called re-entry. The problem is that the lower the altitude of the orbit, the faster the object needs to be travelling to maintain that orbit. The lower the altitude, the more air resistence the object encounters. Our atmosphere doesn't have a defined start/end point. It has a gradual density out into space. If the shuttle were attempting to land on the moon, then this would be a realistic posiblity, since there is NO resistence (although slowing down would be a bigger problem). In an Earth orbit, you're at the mercy of the atmosphere, plane and simple.

One thing NASA did not even attempt to do (which I've brought this up before) is to change the re-entry trajectory. The Shuttle will perform a series of rolls (turns) to aid in slowing it down. First to the Right, then to the left. While turning, the majority of the force (and heat) is on the lower wing of the turn. The Shuttle disintegrated just after completing the roll to the right when it had began its roll to the left. Does this mean the Shuttle wouldn't have broken apart if they hadn't rolled to the left? No clue, I don't know enough about the Shuttle's heat shields, but I find this particular point interesting, espcially since none of the media is quick enough to pick up on a detail like this.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[mausmalone]

Don't know how long the shuttle design has been around for sure, but the Popular Science issue I found in my school's trash bin was apparently here since our founding and it was announcing the new re-usable space shuttle. The shuttle was made public within a few years of the Moon landing... pretty scary in those terms.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[hughk]

This particular shuttle disn't have the lift capability to get into the ISS orbit. It was one of the earliest built and was somewhat more heavily engineered. For example, the temperature sensors that were used to pinpoint the damage were left over from the early days of shuttle flying.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[b-baggins]

And what was stopping us from tossing up a delta rocket with a payload full of rocket fuel? Or having Russia send up a supply ship, or china? or even the ESA? Or Arianne?

Nasa's problems can be summed up in the attitude: Well, there was nothing they could have done anyway. Nice to know that the Mediocritites have taken over yet another fine institution.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[FatAlb3rt]

before the orbit decayed and it came down

a controlled entry would be planned over a remote part of the ocean. it's better than crossing your fingers.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[grunherz]

Even so, there was a big hole in the wing that would have gotten bigger no matter what. Even with the lesser stesses the wing would have probably become useless. Once the shuttle had crossed the boudary where control switches from Reation Control Thusters to actual aerodynamic flight, the situation would not have been any more pleasant. With one wing working and one not as well or not at all, the shuttle would have probably gone into an uncontrollable roll.

Endgame: same

Re:Minor curiosity...

[FatAlb3rt]

The heat loads are similar while in a roll (within a 100 deg F or so but on the order of about 3000 deg F temps). An on-orbit cold soak and non-rolling entry may have bought a few seconds, but with the same result.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[tftp]

An RCC panel is lightweight and heat-resistant. But if you have one broken, you don't have to replace it with exactly the same one! You can have a replacement kit that is larger, heavier and otherwise worse as a permanent solution, but it would save the day in emergency.

Re:Minor curiosity...

[KoshClassic]

Perhaps NASA should start looking at new designs with[out] potentially fatal flaws.

Yes, perhaps the builders of the Titanic can build us an unsinkable space shuttle.

Any conceivable design to transport humans into space would pretty much have potentially fatal flaws by definition.

except

[VoiceOfRaisin]

1. "probably" could not
2. they did know about it and didnt even check it out.

So What Now?

[CrankyFool]

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.

Re:So What Now?

[Enry]

NPR had a report last thursday covering the possibilities of repair in space. There's a lot of options, from filling the wing cavity with heat-resistent foam to wrapping the wing in titanium which will burn off during reentry (like the heat shields of Mercury, Apollo, etc.).

Re:So What Now?

[Cyno]

So fragile that even the smallest rocks flying around in space could easily take it out. All you need is a small fracture in the hull for the heat of reentry to burn the thing apart. And we're too cheap to give our astronauts some real protection, like thier own escapable lifepod, built into the shuttle's design.

What troubles me is by our actions we probably think the shuttle itself is more valuable than the astronauts aboard.

With the cost of these things you'd think they'd be made out of titanium. What ever were we thinking to allow our government to care for the safety of our astronauts?

I think most Americans believe if they throw enough money at a problem it will go away. Pray for the lives of those astronauts and morn them on CNN every day for a year and it will be alright. Time for those dreamers to wake up, IMHO.

Its like education. When money gets involved, everyone loses. I don't know. Send more teachers to space, that's got to be the answer.

Re:So What Now?

[WegianWarrior]

And we're too cheap to give our astronauts some real protection, like thier own escapable lifepod, built into the shuttle's design.

Funny as it might seem, the problem of 'bail out' in space was studied closely in the fifties and early sixties. As usuall, the Encyclopedia Astronautica has more info, of which I have taken some samples from below.

Back in the early days of spaceflight it was envisioned that flying in space would be like flying any other kind of high-performance aircraft. Thought was therefor given to ejecting from a damaged craft, just as you can fom most military jets. They studied a one crew balistic capsule with a weight per crew of 327 kilograms and a six crew balistic capsule, mass per crew 548 kilograms. Breaking away from the ideas of capsules, you had MOOSE; a inflatable heatshield and parachute combination with a weight of 215 kilogram. Paracone was a simular idea, but with an all up weight of 227 kilograms. An derivative of the existing systems for the B-58 lead to EGRESS, with a weight per crew of 370 kilograms.

Despite this promising start, what did NASA come up with for the shuttle when it was designed? Yes, the infamous Rescue Ball!

As you can see, there really is technical reason why NASA shouldn't be able to equip the shuttle with 'lifepods', but another, very real reason. The lightest of the systems I've picked weights just under a quarter of a ton for each astronaut in question. FOr the seven man crew on Colombia, thats just over two tons to haul into space and back again - two tons less cargo. See why the shuttle don't have liferafts? They simply eats too much of the payload. It makes more sence to add more reservefuel to each mission, in order to make sure any shuttle could, if needed, rendevous with the ISS and stay there until a rescueshuttle / several Souyz caspules could be launched to pick them up.

Re:So What Now?

[Cyno]

That was very very, extremely, informative. Many thanks! :)

Re:So What Now?

[ColaMan]

Would you really want to use MOOSE?

Astronaut :"Let's see, we're in a 150km orbit, travelling at 7km/s. You want me to bail out and manually re-enter using something the size of a satellite dish strapped to my back?!"

Mission Control:"Er, yeah. Looks like the shuttle might break up on re-entry"

Astronaut:"Might!? I'll stick with the ride home I've got, thanks"

Re:So What Now?

[putaro]

The Mercury, Apollo, etc. heatshields were made out of a phenolic epoxy that burned off (ablated) during reentry, not titanium.

What next?

[geekmetal]

What we would be interested in knowing is how NASA is taking steps to prevent this from happening again. It certainly would have been nice if BBC had included a paragraph touching on that!

Come on get some better links to the story ...

[HerringFlavoredFowl]

A quick check on Spacetoday.com points to several good articles ...

SpaceFlightNow article
Florida Today article and it has three video's of the test
Orlando Sentinel article
Washington Post article
Houston Chronicle article

A pinch of salt ...

[BillsPetMonkey]

The impact was so violent that it popped a lens off one of the cameras recording the experiment and prompted gasps from about 100-strong astonished crowd.

When I hear of "entertaining" demonstrations to prove a point, I'm reminded of magicians before an audience and furrow my brow.

Is the real "secret" here a less visually spectacular flaw, not in a bodypart but in the design process and it's assumptions?

Re:A pinch of salt ...

[jhines]

I remember visitor's day at the UofI, in the materials section, they ran demos of their concrete crusher on the hour, to an audience crowd each hour.

Big things being destroyed is cool to watch, even when it is something as simple as testing batches of concrete, when it leaves a pile of rubble that takes a dozer to remove.

You shoot anything with a 1lb object at 500+ mph and it is going to be entertaining.

another story

[pyros]

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

Re:another story

[WolfWithoutAClause]

It seems to have been not only the size of the chunk but where it hit, what angle it hit at and whether it was rotating as it hit. That'a whole heap of variables- and the gotcha of all of this is that there wasn't supposed by foam falling off in the first place ;-(

Re:another story

[kevlar]

One interesting fact is that at some point within the last couple years, they switched the type of foam to be more environmentally friendly. It'd be nice to see the results of the old foam fired against the wing...

Re:another story

[limekiller4]

I want to know why this comes as a surprise to anyone. A very small and/or light thing moving at a very, very fast speed can cause considerable damage. *slaps forehead.

How do you get into NASA without passing highschool physics? If I asked these people -- the ones who declared that such an impact was not cause for concern -- what was heavier; a pound of feathers or a pound of lead, what would be their answer?

First a metric conversion issue that dooms a Mars mission now this. ... Maybe highschool physics actually isn't required...

"probably could not be repaired in orbit"

[core plexus]

It most definately could not be repaired in orbit. I can't find the links now, but I remember reading several articles about how the shuttle was designed and built, and how many of the tiles fall off when they are working on the craft in the hangers! To say nothing of how difficult it is even when the adhesive works. One of the articles went on in some detail about the flaws in the design. I'll keep looking, it was most informative. cp

Re:"probably could not be repaired in orbit"

[CausticPuppy]

The problem here, as it turns out, wasn't the tiles.

In fact, even if a few tiles were missing, there wouldn't be a problem; Columbia lost quite a few tiles during its first mission with no ill effects on re-entry.

Now, the reinforced carbon-carbon panels are another thing. That is what covers the nose of the shuttle and leading edges of the wings, because the heat there is too intense even for silica tiles. Lose a chunk of that and you're toast (literally).

Re:"probably could not be repaired in orbit"

[dpilot]

But the other side of the story is the aluminum structure behind the leading edge. Any failure in the leading edge and there is NO second line of defense.

Now I understand that they can't make the whole thing out of titanium, but what about the structural member(s) right behind the leading edge? Even titanium couldn't have stood the heat forever, but they were only 15 minutes from landing. Perhaps a few more minutes would have gotten them to bailout, if not landing. (If they had any plans for bailout on approach, that is.)

My other pet thought about this area consists of some sort of passive airflow from a cooler area of the shuttle, perhaps inside the cargo bay. The original projections of a jet of high-temperature gas could have been cooled by mixing with a larger flow of cooler air. That may not have worked with a hole this big.

Accouting for angle and all?

[tevenson]

Does this also account for the the angle at which the foam in the wing? They don't mention it so I thought it was a question worth asking.

My understanding was that the foam glanced off the wing at high speeds and wasn't simply "shot" into it from a right angle. I may be completely wrong (and would love to be corrected) on my misunderstanding.

This obviously wasn't the same kind of foam we use to sleep on when we go camping.

Re:Accouting for angle and all?

[confused one]

there are better articles at other sources. The short answer to your question is yes. Oh, and, NO, this isn't the same kind of soft foam used in padding; it's a hard, dense, polyurethane foam

They performed several tests. One problem is that, from the footage they have, they can only come up with an estimated range of angles -- not a specific number.

In one test they used a fiberglass components from the test glider Enterprise. This was more or less done to prove the test setup was correct; and, to prove that the foam would cause some (unknown) damage. Follow up tests with real RCC panels were required for verification

In another test they used actual panels taken off of Discovery -- this was more of a glancing blow and clearly cracked the RCC components. Would components with similar cracks have survived an actual re-entry? We may never know; although it's reported Discovery did return from one of it's prior flights with a significant crack in a RCC panel.

The final test used actual panels from Atlantis and was a more direct hit. As you have seen, it punched a BIG hole in the leading edge. This is bad, very very bad.

NASA, Feynman and Shuttle Disasters

[Bubbajumbo]

NASA is a scary organization. The approach to Columbia has been much more controlled than the Challenger fiasco. If you remember: insiders knew the Oring problem on Challenger, yet slowly leaked the answers to Feynman during the inquiry, making him think he discovered it. You can be sure they knew the problem before the shuttle re-entered.

Re:NASA, Feynman and Shuttle Disasters

[ReallyQuietGuy]

maybe there needs to be a "conspiracy theory" mod type and not just "troll"... ?

Re:NASA, Feynman and Shuttle Disasters

[elmegil]

maybe we should call it 'tinfoil'.

Yeah yeah...

[Jin Wicked]

I caught myself after it was too late, but thanks. ;)

Re:Yeah yeah...

[common_sence]

Nice bashing from someone who prefers to post as AC.

Something missing

[verloren]

In all the coverage I've seen of the damage investigation the scientists and reporters have made clear that the Shuttle had essentially no repair capability, so even if the problem had been found, there was nothing they could do about it.

They never seem to point out that there was one thing they could do, which was stop anyone trying to land in it. Fire the thing at the moon (I've seen Space Cowboys, so I know it can be done!) and let the shuttle crew camp out until they could be rescued.

It always sounds like they expected the crew to bound happily aboard, perhaps sharing a rueful smile at the knowledge that they were going to die, but hey, there's nothing we can do about it right?

Cheers, Paul

Escape Pod

[darth_silliarse]

I don't want to sound blase over these tragic events but isn't re-entry in the shuttle equivalent to driving at 100mph with no seat belt? ie: you take the risks you make the choice... and again surely NASA must have considered an emergency escape pod to counter this kind of scenario? Put the shuttle into Auto-Pilot on re-entry and cram the astronauts into an onboard sardine can... or are astronauts as expendable as the rest of us?

Re:Escape Pod

[BigGerman]

the problem is that the escape pod for seven people would be huge and would not leave much to the rest of the shuttle.
A capsule like one from Apollo or Soyuz would work, but it is only for 2 or 3 people and they MUST be skinny (80kg / 170 cm or something like that was the limit for Russians I believe).
That is part of the problem - Americans insist on chairs with cupholders ;-)

Re:Escape Pod

[Waffle Iron]

the problem is that the escape pod for seven people would be huge and would not leave much to the rest of the shuttle.

That's why it would be better to pack 7 of these in the carry-on baggage:

MOOSE was perhaps the most celebrated bail-out from orbit system of the early 1960's. The suited astronaut would strap the MOOSE to his back, and jump out of the spacecraft or station into free space. The MOOSE consisted of a chest-mounted parachute, a flexible, folded 1.8 m diameter elastomeric heat shield, and a canister of polyurethane foam. Pulling the deployment cord would fill the shield into shape and encase the back of the astronaut in perfectly form-fitting polyurethane. The astronaut would use a small hand-held gas get device to orient himself for retro-fire, and then fire a solid rocket motor mounted in the device. After aligning himself for re-entry and putting the MOOSE into a slow roll, he would throw the gas gun away. After a ballistic re-entry, the astronaut would pull the ripcord of the chest-parachute, which would pull him away from the heat shield for a parachute landing.

i wouldn't call that minor...

[ed.han]

it's not like the shuttle has a lot of internal cargo space, or indeed, could afford to devote the mass necessary for extensive repair materials: most of that cargo space is devoted to payload, i thought?

i too am curious about just how one might actually go about repairing the shuttle: not all astronauts are qualified for EVA to start (just payload specialists?). and would a repair done in space hold up to the rigors of re-entry? i'm really unclear on the methods used to assemble a shuttle but either it's rivets or welding, and we know the inherent problems in trying to ignite anything in space...

ed

Re:i wouldn't call that minor...

[tftp]

Welding was tried in space (on Mir), using an electron beam instead of flame.

art of understatement

[SuperBanana]

BLAM!

Audience: "oooooo"

NASA engineer: "Folks, this COULD be more proof that MAYBE this is what POSSIBLY caused the accident."

Audience: "Oh, you mean "POSSIBLY" as in, there's POSSIBLY life on mars?"

Just as well

[The Bungi]

probably could not be repaired in orbit even if it was known about.

Well, I hate to sound callous and all, but... if this indeed was impossible to repair then... well, it was probably for the better.

I mean, I can't imagine having seven people up there dying slowly on live TV. That would have been terrible.

What NASA needs to do now is to just replace the shuttle with something better for crying out loud (the Russians have been doing space on the cheap for any number of years. The STS does not really save us that much money) and get on with life.

Re:Just as well

[MImeKillEr]

No, plans would've been to send the other shuttle up to rescue & then put the damaged shuttle in an orbit that would cause it to break up & have the chunks fall into the ocean.

The report I saw last night on the news interviewed a NASA engineer that begged for spy satellites to take pictures of the shuttle to look for damage. He was ignored.

Re:Just as well

[The Bungi]

No, plans would've been to send the other shuttle up to rescue & then put the damaged shuttle in an orbit that would cause it to break up & have the chunks fall into the ocean

I remember readin somewhere that it would have been impossible to get another shuttle up there in time before the CO2 scrubbers on the Columbia crapped out? Oxygen and water (and food to a lesser extent) were not an issue, the problem was CO2 build up. That kills you faster than most other things.

Don't get me wrong, that would have been extraordinary, but I don't think it would have been possible. With the rush to get the other shuttle up there you'd potentially be risking the second crew as well.

Re:Just as well

[MImeKillEr]

Well, I guess NASA needs to include prepping TWO shuttles for launch for every time one goes up, to avoid this situation.

Then again, a shuttle design thats not 20+ years old would probably help as well.

Re:Just as well

[RatBastard]

The STS does not really save us that much money

The Shuttle is a horrendously expensive way to get material into orbit. It is not cost-effective at all. It can't be. The basic design is so manpower intensive as to be a joke. The French Arianne (sp?) rockets are cheaper per launch and per pound into orbit, as are the other disposable rockets that the US and Russians use.

As much of a fan of manned space flight as I am, it is my opinion that the Shuttle is a boondogle and always was. Remember when NASA told us that there would be flights every two weeks? How about all that hoohaw about a Shuttle only needing 30-days servicing between flight? Or that it would cost less per pound to get material into orbit than the Saturn V? None of that has turned out to be true, has it?

Yes, the Shuttle needs to be replaced. But not by one system. It needs to be replaced by systems designed for the tasks that they will be used for: cheap rockets for getting satilites into orbit, more expensive craft for getting humans into orbit and back down, etc... None of this ill-fitting jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none crap that the Shuttle is.

Re:Just as well

[titzandkunt]

Who controls the Shuttle TV feed? I doubt that the BBC and Al-Jazeera would be showing much of anything that wasn't showing on the highly impartial US networks.

And what would Faux News be showing? Old Glory fluttering in a slow motion breeze, with the marine hymn's plaintive tones echoing on the soundtrack. Shrub wiping a manful tear from the corner of his eye as he drones on about Man's indomitable nature and the True American spirit. All this, non stop for seven days.

You asked for it, you got it!

T&K.

Re:Just as well

[common_sence]

I'm no space expert, but it seems to me that the shuttle must be capable of something that the others are not. Why else would we launch a majority of the world's satellites (including commercial ones) using it? Not that we have a perfect record, but haven't French rockets blown up several times in the past?

Re:Just as well

[RatBastard]

All rockets fail. Nothing is perfect, ever. And yes, some of the French rockets have exploded. Just like some of the American and Russian disposable rockets have exploded. But these rockets are not designed and built to get a living human being into orbit and then safely back home. If one of these rockets explodes all you lose is a satilite and a rocket. It's only money, not human beings. Satilites can be rebuilt. That's what insurance is for. A human being can't be rebuilt.

One of the major problems with the Shuttle is the cost. Because you HAVE to have a crew to fly it it has to be built with that in mind. Every launch requires a HUGE investment in money and time. The other main problem is that the Shuttle can only get to Low Earth Orbit. Any satilite delivered by the Shuttle has to be equipped with booster rockets if it is going into a higher orbit.

The only thing the Shuttle can do is lift HEAVY satilites. That is the sole advantage it has, if you ignore the political machinations of NASA.

The truth of the matter is that most satilites are NOT launched on a Shuttle. Most go up on cheap, disposable rockets. If the Shuttle was grounded forever the only thing really hurt would be the ISS, which was built to give the Shuttle a job. The Shuttle only lives because NASA has decided to keep the program going at all costs.

Re:Just as well

[Keeper]

And then you'll need to have a 3rd shuttle standing by in case the 2nd shuttle craps out on its way up too...

Re:Just as well

[cheesybagel]

Most satellites are launched on expendable rockets because they are cheaper.

The market leader, Arianespace, currently launches using the expendable Ariane 5 rocket. A Shuttle flight costs about 2x as more per unit of weight as Ariane 5. The Russians can launch expendables for about half the cost per unit of weight as Ariane 5 (i.e. 4x as less as the Shuttle).

The Shuttle is too labour intensive. Maintainance is very expensive. For example: every heat protection tile has special dimensions and must be checked individually before every flight. It is like a huge jigsaw puzzle.

The Shuttle currently is only good for three things:

• It can carry more weight than current expendables can. Good for building ISS (but the old Saturn V launched even more for less).
• It can retrieve/fix satellites in orbit (but it is cheaper to send a new one on an expendable than to pay for the Shuttle trip to fix the problem for most satellites - Hubble not included)
• It can carry more people than currently available options. Soyuz can only transport three persons.

Noteworthy points

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

The impact speed and angle were not worst-case, but based on average estimates. Real-life damage could be even worse and we were lucky, lucky, lucky before Columbia.

NASA officials resisted making the reinforced carbon-carbon panel available for destructive testing, because they take 8 months and $800,000 to make.

The X-15 was considered experimental throughout its entire career, and it flew 199 times, which is far more experience than the shuttle program has had.

Re:Noteworthy points

[pyrrho]

the quote in your sig is histerical. I've been looking for the source, found it refered to a lot but I would love to know the context.

It's good to see the president is enlightened.

computer modeling

[williwilli]

Aside from the issues of using telescopes to look at Columbia in orbit, possibly altered reentry paths, or other methods of mitigating disaster, why do these people actually need to get out a piece of foam and shoot it at a wing? Is it honestly that surprising to rocket scientists that anything, even foam, is going to cause some serious damage at 500mph? The Star Wars/SDI initiative was based around this premise -- the small plastic 'warheads' had no explosives, taking out ICBMs via pure kinetic energy.

Regardless of SDI and the size of the NASA budget, they do have numerous super computers, as well as access to other computing systems. I seem to recall they even did run some tests. How can the computer models be so far off?

Of course, none of this addresses the issue that if NASAs budget hadn't been crippled for decades there would likely already be repair infrastructure in space, rather than a single space station so hobbled by budget cuts they are now considering abandoning it (further excellent use of a small budget). I'm sorry, I know people lost friends and heros during this tragedy, but unfortunately there are also a number of issues surrounding these events that are almost rather incredulous.

visit earth2willi.com! lots of free music downloads and more

Re:computer modeling

[Psion]

Because prior to this accident, the concensus opinion at NASA was that the foamed insulation was low-mass and crumbled easily enough that it didn't pose a threat to the vehicle. In fact, the mixture of foam being used had been in place for five years. In STS-87, the first time it was applied to Orbiter Columbia, foam debris caused 308 hits on the orbiter, some resulting in deep gashes. After changes in the method of application, the foam was rendered more secure, but chunks continued to break off in future flights.

Still, none of those flights exhibited the kind of damage that would lead to the Columbia tragedy until now. It seems perfectly obvious to "monday-morning quarterbacks" that the foam was a problem, but five years of experience suggested otherwise.

Re:computer modeling

[CKW]

It seems perfectly obvious to "monday-morning quarterbacks" that the foam was a problem, but five years of experience suggested otherwise.

This is exactly the type of bad logic that helped cause the first shuttle tragedy. The dangerous fallacy that "since it's worked N times before" that it "will work N more times".

*Anyone* who is in a man-critical environment can NOT use the simple fact that something hasn't been a problem yet to conclude that it isn't dangerous.

Re:computer modeling

[mpe]

Because prior to this accident, the concensus opinion at NASA was that the foamed insulation was low-mass and crumbled easily enough that it didn't pose a threat to the vehicle.

When it comes to kinetic energy relative velocity plays a far greater part than mass.

Re:computer modeling

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Feynman found exactly the same kind of thinking during the Challenger investigation. NASA had found partial burnthrough on O-rings before. They hadn't burned all the way through, so NASA said they had a safety margin. Problem was, they weren't supposed to burn through at all.

Five years of experience dodging bullets is not proof that bullets are harmless.

Re:computer modeling

[Psion]

So prior example shouldn't be considered? While I concur that management erred in considering the threat from foam debris (and it's composition) to be negligible, five years of evidence that the system worked reliably argued that STS-107 was fine. Right or wrong, the evidence was on their side. Based on the media focus, it seems obvious that this is something that should have been investigated more clearly, but how many times had something similar happened on prior missions with no significant damage to the vehicle?

Yep, they were lucky those times, but there was no factual evidence to the contrary, and unfortunately, it took this tragedy to provide a single, compelling data point to the contrary. Had falling foam cause more significant, but non-catestrophic damage prior to STS-107, the warnings probably would have been given more attention, but until now, the only cost was expensive tile repair.

If I sit down in a chair fifteen times without it collapsing under me, it is hardly a "dangerous fallacy" to think it will continue to support me fifteen more times. It is reasonable to assume it will eventually break and fail, but no reasonable person will stop and examine their chairs every time prior to sitting in them. The shuttle is a remarkably complex machine, with extraordinary attention paid already to vehicle safety. There's going to be a lot of hand-wringing over this incident and a lot of finger-pointing until things settle, but in the final analysis, no system is perfect. It is humanly impossible to catch all accidents before they occur. Sometimes, unfortunately, it takes a catastrophic failure to highlight a problem before it is corrected.

And guess what? This won't be the last failure in space exploration/exploitation.

Re:computer modeling

[alienw]

the foamed insulation was low-mass and crumbled easily enough that it didn't pose a threat to the vehicle

Idiots. Looks like NASA is run by PHBs rather then engineers. Anyone who didn't flunk physics knows that momentum = mass * velocity. So really, the mass is irrelevant as long as the velocity is high enough.

Re:computer modeling

[PingXao]

The dangerous fallacy that "since it's worked N times before" that it "will work N more times."

How do you reconcile this "dangerous fallacy" to the other old adage:

If it ain't broke don't fix it."

???? You can't have your cake and eat it too!

Re:computer modeling

[williwilli]

>> Because prior to this accident, the concensus opinion at NASA was that the foamed insulation was low-mass and crumbled easily enough that it didn't pose a threat to the vehicle.

> When it comes to kinetic energy relative velocity plays a far greater part than mass.

See that is what I am saying. I'm not questioning whether there was mismanagement, as unfortunately that much seems pretty much obvious. I'm wondering why it is that after observing the foam impact, studying, and running computer simulations, these same scientists are so surprised at the damage from a real world test. They expected to see some tile damage, not a complete hole in the wing. I realize simulations are only as good as the data you feed it, but it almost seems to indicate that either someone's math (and NASA simulation models as a result) are completely in error, or that perhaps some people knew the possible implications and were basically ignored. I guess that is essentially why this investigation is taking place, but it seems as if the scope of the damage should have been much more obvious from simulations.

visit earth2willi.com!

Re:computer modeling

[The Briguy]

um, you mean KE = 1/2mv^2. its the squared that makes all the difference.

Re:computer modeling

[dillon_rinker]

If I sit down in a chair fifteen times without it collapsing under me ...but if it creaks, then pops, then cracks, then splinters, then there is no evidence to indicate that the chair will break.

Sort of like saying that finding a 99-foot-tall man is just one more data point that 'proves' (inductively) that there are no 100-foot-tall men.

Columbia and Challenger are both examples of ignoring trends and paying attention only to thresholds. Were there catastrophic failures before? No. Were there failures before? Absolutely. The flaw is that they IGNORED their data. No catastrophe does not equal no danger.

Re:computer modeling

[sacherjj]

Having a previous mission with a non-fatal hot gas burn through isn't "not broke" in my book. I would classify it more as foreshadowing.

Re:computer modeling

[CKW]

If you're running man critical systems based upon "old adages".... you'll get what you deserve ;)

Re:computer modeling

[stanmann]

does that mean however that 1 man running a 3:42 mile means that a 3:30 mile is possible?? at some point you accept a limiting factor. That limiting factor may be wrong, but .....we all recognize that there are limiting factors, we recognize that the shortest man will be ~20 inches and the tallest ~12 feet. there are limiting factors.

If you hit me in the head with a phone book 15 days in a row, once a day, and I have no permanent damage, it is reasonable to expect that one more time isn't going to be any different.

Re:computer modeling

[dillon_rinker]

does that mean however that 1 man running a 3:42 mile means that a 3:30 mile is possible
If the average human being ran a mile in 30 minutes, then I think that a reasonable man would believe that a 3:42 mile implies the possibility of a 3:30 mile. This, of course is not the case. To hark back to the Challenger loss, if the standard is 10% burn-away on the rubber rings, and on some you have 90% burn-away, then you are using the wrong statistical measure when you say "There have been no catastrophic failures."

Lack of catastrophic failure does not imply safety. Lack of damage anywhere near catastrophic implies safety.

If I hit you in the head with a phone book for 15 days and say "He's not dead; therefore there is no permanent damage" then I'm an idiot. If you bruise one day, and concuss another (neither is permanent damage) and your head splits open and bleeds another, then is it reasonable to expect that I have explored all possible outcomes, and that there are no worse ones?

My point is that if your expectations are in one range and you are getting results outside your expectations, then your expectations are wrong. All your assumptions need to be re-examined.

There are limiting factors; the question is do we know what they are. Drawing conclusions from a limited data set is intellectually dishonest.

850 km/h in 2 seconds?

[Psychic Burrito]

Can the impact speed be really that fast? Before the piece of foam fell away from the shuttle, it was moving at the same speed. To impact at 850 km (530 miles) hour, the piece of foam would have to slow down 850 km/h during the short distance between falling off and hitting the wing... during 2 seconds or so. Are the numbers really feasible?

Re:850 km/h in 2 seconds?

[a_timid_mouse]

OR the shuttle accelerated that much during those two seconds while the foam decelerated due to friction. Have you ever watched a shuttle launch on NASA TV? Take a look at the speeds and rate of acceleration that those things hit during launch. You might be surprised.

Re:850 km/h in 2 seconds?

[DHR]

Nevermind the fact that the shuttle probably wasn't doing 850 km/h at that point in the flight anyways.

Re:850 km/h in 2 seconds?

[Sebby]

I read somewhere else that the piece's tumbling could've added to the force of impact; furthermore, there's the chance that ice added to the weight.

I don't know if the ice factor was considered in the size/weight of the test piece here, but the tumbling effect can't be easily reproduced.

The actual speed might have been lower, and they increased it for the test to simulate the effect of the tumbling.

Re:850 km/h in 2 seconds?

[leeward]

As was pointed out elsewhere, you simply look at the film and attempt to measure how far the object moved in the last two frames before impact. Then divide by the time between frames. Gives a pretty good ballpark figure.>/P>

Re:850 km/h in 2 seconds?

[a_timid_mouse]

Here's a good link that explains the speed they're using when test firing the foam.

Re:850 km/h in 2 seconds?

[Cryptosporidium]

At T+82, Shuttle speed was approx 2550fps (feet per second).

Re:850 km/h in 2 seconds?

[plaa]

850 km/h is 236 m/s, so the average acceleration relative to the rocket (assuming 2 seconds from breaking to impact) should have been 118m/s^2, or 12 G:s. When you take into fact that the rocket itself is accelerating at some 5-10 G:s (which will be subtracted from the foam's deceleration), that it well feasable for a piece of fluff in an airstream.

(For something to compare at, glue fins on an A8-3 model rocket motor. It weighs something like 20 grams, and at 8 newtons of thrust it accelerates at around 40 G:s when not taking air resistance into account. So even though 118 m/s^2 sound huge, it really isn't *that* much.)

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[sparkie]

You fail to take into account that the foam breaking off no longer gets the thrust from the rocket. Since it was still accelerating at the time you were driving the orbiter INTO the foam. Not the other way around. Oh yea ... it's LOSE not LOOSE.

Emails that demonstrate how the shuttle was doomed

[purduephotog]

ABC News posted several emails about why the shuttle was doomed- apparently the engineers didn't follow the proper reporting procedure to send up a 'red flare' and stop it. I had all the links nicely typed into a story, but it was rejected.
Regardless, pictures were asked for and management squashed it for failing to follow procedure. And now a shuttle is dead. TPP reports, anyone?

This is no surprise...

[Snarfvs Maximvs]

...to anyone who's ever ridden a motorcycle. Getting nailed by a bee in the middle of the chest at 75 mph is no treat, let me tell you.

And I'll bet a bee weighs a LOT less than the chunk of foam that hit the Columbia.

Hey, it's not like this was rocket science...just basic PHYSICS, for Pete's sake!

Excuse the raw humor

[Stephen Samuel]

This pretty much literally blows a big hole in any argument that the nasa probe people were over=estimating the kind of damage that a 'little' chunk of foam could do to the shuttle's wing.

I think that this final test is a smoking bun because it shows that pieces of foam can do much more than just cause minor holes in the wing. that might allow a fatal stream of air into the shuttle wing. If Columbia had had a hole in it's wing like this test created, it probably wouldn't have made it anywhere near as close to the landing point as it did.

I'm guessing that this was something of a worst-case scenario, and it pretty much blew the socks off the testers.

(having gotten in my weekly quota of pun, I'm now gonna go do some real work).

Prevention . . .

[mr_luc]

so that the next time they observe a piece of foam coming off during the launch, they will take the time to repair the wing before they reenter the atmosphere.
</blockquote>

They will take the time to repair the wing . . . with . . . carbon duct tape maybe? Oy vey.

I don't think the solution to a problem like this is to say "Well, we can spot it earlier now. That will give you plenty of time to bail out and let the Shuttle break up on reentry." Or even to say "ok, we can spot it earlier, so you can fix it when you're 300 miles up . . . with whatever method of patching it up we can devise".

I think prevention is the way to go here. A good start might be to ask and answer the question "Is there some way we could clear the tanks of ice and foam immediately before or after takeoff?"

Re:Prevention . . .

[mr_luc]

I know. I know. Preview.

Is there a way that could be modded +5 Ironic? After all, it was a post about prevention.

I will beat you all to the punch by mocking myself:

I think prevention is the way to go here. A good start might be to answer the question "Is there some way that we could clear the post of incorrect html before posting, instead of trying to fix it afterwards?"

FOD... Foam?

[Zooka]

Geez, who'da'thunk it was something as benign as foam? Just goes to show how little it takes to create a catastrophy. Especially considering the harsh conditions space vehicles must endure. It's a wonder that the success rate is as good as it is...

I wonder how rigid / dense this foam was?

(fod = foreign object damage)

Ozone layers saves billions

[MushMouth]

I had read once that every shuttle flight reduces the ozone layer by .05%.

Re:Ozone layers saves billions

[Alidar]

Where did you read this?

So here's my question...

[dulinor]

Why are they firing the foam at 500 mph? I haven't seen a good explanation of where they get that figure from.

As far as I can see, I'd imagine that the foam falls from the fuel tank/booster onto the shuttle wing. The rate of fall should be only the relative acceleration that the shuttle experiences during the fall. (Since both foam and shuttle are presumably moving at the same speed when it detaches from the launcher)

So the total acceleration should be the acceleration of the shuttle (max 3G at liftoff according to a couple of web sources) plus normal gravity - call it 4 G. At most, the foam could fall the full 56 meters of the shuttle/booster/tank height (and most likely substantially less than that).

So, a quick (and probably hideously wrong) calculation based on v^2=2 * Accel * Distance shows that the end velocity of a body falling 56 meters at 4g should be about 33 meters/second, or 119 kph (74 mph)

Anyone know where I've screwed up on this?

Re:So here's my question...

[wass]

you forgot air resistance, which is the real tricky part.

You've got an odd-shaped piece of foam moving at relatively high-speed through thin air. Also take into consideration the streamlines created as the orbiter and fuel tank accelerate upwards. It's a very complicated aerodynamical and fluid-dynamical process to calculate what force the air streams would have to slow the foam down relative to the orbiter.

Re:So here's my question...

[Theaetetus]

Drag.

The foam chunk, being not at all aerodynamic, is encountering serious air resistance. That slows it down more than just the deacceleration due to gravity.

However, as for how they got the relative speeds - they looked at the high-speed film taken of the liftoff and measured how many frames it took for the foam to fall a known distance (top of shuttle to wing). Then simply play around with the units to go from the so-many-feet per blah/100th seconds of film to get miles per hour.

-T

Re:So here's my question...

[pclminion]

Anyone know where I've screwed up on this?

Yeah. You neglected the gigantic fricken' wind blowing past the shuttle. It was flying upward at 1000+ MPH after all. From the piece of foam's perspective, it was being blasted by a 1000 MPH wind. That tends to accelerate stuff.

It's getting really tiring going over this again and again...

Re:So here's my question...

[a_timid_mouse]

Here's a good link that explains the speed they're using when test firing the foam.

Re:So here's my question...

[dulinor]

Hmmm, looking at it with more detail - the wind would have been more than I'd expected. According to various online sources, the foam fell 81 seconds after liftoff, when you'd expect the shuttle to be rising at around 5000 mph.

Still, the whole thing is fairly complicated - clearly you're supersonic, so inside the shockwave I really have no idea what the "apparent" wind would be.

Given what Theaetetus said about using the pictures to estimate velocity, that's probably how they did it.

I was just curious as this whole wave of stories seems to just rattle off things like 500 mph without any reference as to why.

Re:This proves NOTHING

[Wakko Warner]

Why don't you call NASA, then, and tell them this? Clearly, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that they're wrong. I personally blame the French.

- A.P.

Challenger's O-ring led to new O-ring design...

[aksansai]

The Challenger (as well as Columbia, and the newer vehicle that was being built - Discovery) had a flaw in the design of its O-ring that NASA itself knew could cause problems in flight. The design itself worked (proven by earlier flights of the shuttles). However, the design was not resilient to, as you said, external problems that were not properly thought up before-hand, such as massive fluctuations in temperatures (which led to the failure of the seal on the booster rocket).

A university student did an excellent case study on the Challenger incident, including the O-ring design "flaw," and what NASA did to improve upon the design.

If it were in NASA's tome of simulated problems, there would have been a way to make sure a rescue would have been possible. Even if we had to park the shuttle in orbit (or on the international space station) until a rescue could have been performed. It tires me to listen to the people that say "well, they would have run out of oxygen if they were not able to return immediately."

Fact: humans will never be able to calculate for every single variable in a system. It's just impossible. I completely agree with you. We will continue to develop better designs that will hopefully prevent further destruction and loss of life.

Re:Challenger's O-ring led to new O-ring design...

[ceejayoz]

Even if we had to park the shuttle in orbit (or on the international space station) until a rescue could have been performed. It tires me to listen to the people that say "well, they would have run out of oxygen if they were not able to return immediately."

It tires me to listen to the people that say "Even if we had to park the shuttle in orbit (or on the international space station) until a rescue could have been performed".

Why?

Because just about every media outlet carried the followup stories about there not being enough fuel to reach the ISS orbit. :-p

Re:Challenger's O-ring led to new O-ring design...

[Martin Blank]

I believe aksansai meant that if NASA had anticipated this kind of problem, all missions would be sent up with enough fuel to reach the ISS.

It's not a dupe.

[AzrealAO]

This was the 7th Test, firing a chunk of foam at an actual Carbon-Carbon panel from Shuttle Atlantis. The first story from over a month ago, was a test on one of the Fiber-glass panels from Enterprise.

Interesting idea

[Jin Wicked]

Though it makes me wonder why they don't do something like that now, anyway. I'm sure there would still be things to be examined and learned at different levels of orbit? Or would something like that take so long to finally get them back down, that it would only be feasible as a last-resort?

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[Sebby]

There's something that was said about the piece's tumbling adding to the force of impact; furthermore, there's the chance that ice added to the weight.

I don't know if the ice factor was considered in the size/weight of the test piece here, but the tumbling effect can't be easily reproduced. Maybe the actual speed was lower, and they increased it for the test to simulate the effect of the tumbling of the piece.

Re:PC-ness kills 7?

[Natedog]

ooops...shuttle, not shuddle :)

but more important, a link

Reentry profiles

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

NASA's looked into it. Turns out they already designed the reentry to minimize heating loads. The one thing they might have done would have been to favor the left wing at the expense of the right wing.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[ToadMan8]

blargh... I'll bust out the high powered math modeling if I must, but about the "rocket speeding up" theory, the foam has a couple hundred feet to decelerate that much. if the shuttle multiplies it's speed by 4 times or so (to get, conservatively, a 600 mph change in speed, or about 40% of the total speed at the time) in a couple hundred feet it would have to be accelerating at a factor of 40% per length, and thus in the 80 miles or so it would have to travel it would be rougly exceeding the speed of light...

albeit cool, that's not accurate. is this a resonable response or do I have to bust out the white board, TI calculator and rabble rouse my engineers around work?

And Sparkie, thanks for the spelling correction (seriously); I'm a terrible English speller.

530MPH impact?!

[dmccarty]

Perhaps someone could explain this to me, but did the original foam piece really hit the leading edge of Columbia's wing at 500+ MPH? I don't know how fast the shuttle was going when the foam detached from the booster rocket, but the foam was moving just as fast as the shuttle prior to its detachment, right? Would it have decelerated -500MPH that quickly? I know this is basic physics, but I'm wondering how they calculated the velocity of the foam. 500MPH seems awful fast for the footage that I've seen.

Re:530MPH impact?!

[AzrealAO]

The foam fell into the slip-stream between the shuttle and the external tank (it's actually where it came from, the front bipod that connects the shuttle's nose to the external tank)

All the footage you've seen has been dramatically slowed down, so that you could actually see the event occur. It's a pretty simple matter to analyze the video footage to determine how fast any object in the frame was moving, in relation to the relatively stable (in the frame) shuttle.

Re:530MPH impact?!

[Theaetetus]

Yes/no - shuttle is still accelerating at the same time... say the foam slows down by 300 MPH and the shuttle speeds up by 200 - you get the same 500 MPH.

As for how they got it, they looked at the high-speed film of the launch and saw the number of frames (at 60 fps or whatever they use) for the foam to travel the known distance from the top of the shuttle to the wing (80 ft, IIRC) and then played with the units to get mph.

-T

Couldn't be repaired?

[chargen]

The result was a large hole that probably could not be repaired in orbit even if it was known about.

Couldn't have been repaired using current design and repair methods might be a little more accurate. NASA can design a procedure for anything!

GO NASA!!!

Velocity of Foam at Impact

[DonJefe68]

I have a question - and maybe the question will demonstrate my pig ignorance of the physics of deceleration, but I've not been able to figure this out. In the test they shot this piece of foam at approx 500 mph into the wing at approximately the same distance as the foam flew from the tank to Columbia's wing. Here's my question: At the moment of separation from the external tank, the piece of foam should have had nearly the same velocity as the shuttle/external tank, relative to a stationary object. Immediately upon separation, the foam would have started decelerating and the shuttle was still accelerating, but it seems hard to imagine that at the moment of impact, the differential velocity of the shuttle/tank versus the foam piece would have resulted in an impact at 500 mph.

I mean, it's not like the shuttle flew into a stationary object while it (the shuttle) was going 500 mph (similar to a jet hitting a bird or whatever). Was the shuttle really accelerating that quickly so that in the one or two seconds between foam separation and impact on the wing the shuttle had gained 500 mph in velocity relative to the foam piece? My faith in scientists is such that I imagine this must be the case (since the alternative is that they missed this question) but I would love to have someone with enough knowledge of the science to clue me in.

Hubble was designed from the start

[AzrealAO]

Hubble was designed for on-orbit servicing (which is different from repairs).

It's got nice easy equipment racks, such that they can just pull one piece of science equipment out, and roll another one in and hook it up.

Quite a bit different from repairs, patching broken tiles on the Shuttle (each one is different, and actually quite brittle), or replacing the carbon-carbon leading edge panels.

I don't buy it.

[molo]

From Fox News:

The 1.67-pound piece of fuel-tank foam insulation shot out of a 35-foot nitrogen-pressurized gun and slammed into a carbon-reinforced panel removed from shuttle Atlantis (search).

The countdown boomed through loudspeakers, and the crack of the foam coming out at more than 530 mph reverberated in the field where the test was conducted.

This really doesn't make any sense to me. How the hell would that piece of foam get moving at 530 mph in about 50 feet (between the nose and the wing)?

The only thing slowing down the foam relative to the shuttle is air resistance. As the shuttle goes higher, the air resistance gets lower. Can someone prove me wrong here? I don't know the specifics of the altitude or speed of the shuttle at the time of the strike.. so this is all guesswork.. but damn, it just seems wrong.

Could this be a convenient way for NASA to place the blame without investigating further?

-molo

Re:I don't buy it.

[Zach978]

The only thing slowing down the foam relative to the shuttle is air resistance.

The foam was also being accelerated by gravity.

Re:I don't buy it.

[sexylicious]

Drag increases with the square of the velocity. That piece of foam they shot in the experiment was probably travelling slower than the one that actually hit the wing.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[mortonda]

They didn't just pull that number out of thin air. They looked at the film, calculated the distance the foam traveled in one frame, and thus the speed it hit. True, there's some margin of error in that, but there's an awful lot of intelligent people behind that number.

bang.bang.bang.bang.bang-smash. We found it.

[switcha]

My problem with this, is that in the interview I heard on Morning Edition, the spokeperson basically layed it out as gospel (that the foam caused it).

Sure it did, Ace. You shot the damn thing enough times at 500 mph. You kept getting small, inconclusive cracks, so you shot it over and over and over until you got what you wanted. How do we know the wing used for that test wasn't defective? Maybe the foam you used was a tiny bit more dense. Rip that same hole 3 times in a row, and I'm on board.

Found what you're looking for? More like looking for what you found.

Re:bang.bang.bang.bang.bang-smash. We found it.

[RobL3]

Actually, this was the first test to target the part of the leading edge that was hit during launch. The prevoius tests (which "only" caused cracks) were carried out at other points along the wing structure. So what this test really demonstrtes is that like most other NASA "disasters" several very unlikely events had to occur at exactly the wrong time and manner.

Re:bang.bang.bang.bang.bang-smash. We found it.

[a_timid_mouse]

>Rip that same hole 3 times in a row, and I'm on board.

You gonna pony up the ~$3 million for those three tests? Each one costs more than $1 million when you're using the Reinforced Carbon Carbon wing that exactly replicates the doomed shuttle's wing.

They test fired at several stronger, cheaper, fiberglass mock-ups to get their simulation right before they blasted away at the real thing (read very expensive). I for one am glad they took their time recreating the event as accurately and with as little waste as they did.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[Jin Wicked]

Disregarding the validity of this specific experiment or not, could it also be possible there was a pre-existing crack/flaw in the tile(s) that caused the foam to do more damage than it might have otherwise done? Or was that ruled out? I know that there's no likelihood of examining the actual wing after the fact, but I'm not certain of how closely the shuttles are inspected prior to launch.

Re:This proves NOTHING

[WC as Kato]

The foam didn't fall at 500+ MPH onto a stationary shuttle. You forget that the shuttle was moving too.

Video available

[dmccarty]

The San Fran Chronicle has a short MPEG available here.

Re:This proves NOTHING

[jason0000042]

And keep in mind that the shuttle was accelerating toward the foam at what was probably several G's. Two seconds after those things start moving they are going very, very fast.

Astronauts knew of wing damage

[Muttonhead]

The astronauts knew their wing was damaged because one of them wrote to his brother on earth via email:

"Sen. George Allen, R-Va., said in a televised speech on Tuesday that the brother of Columbia astronaut David Brown disclosed receiving an e-mail from orbit that conveyed the crew's "concern" about the left wing, the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch reported in Wednesday's paper. According to the report, the senator said Doug Brown, who lives in Virginia, told him his brother's e-mail said the crew had taken a photo of the left wing.

Story

Re:Foam?

[ReallyQuietGuy]

y'know - considering how people got killed, this is not something funny to joke about.

Columbia could not have reached the ISS

[AzrealAO]

Columbia was in the wrong sort of orbit to be able to rendevous with the ISS, nor was it capable of generating enough delta-v to enter a rendevous orbit.

This is one of the reasons the board recommended that all future shuttle flights (apart from the already scheduled Hubble Servicing Mission), fly to the ISS, or in Orbits that are capable of rendevousing with the ISS.

Re:Columbia could not have reached the ISS

[jjhplus9]

This is one of the reasons the board recommended that all future shuttle flights (apart from the already scheduled Hubble Servicing Mission), fly to the ISS, or in Orbits that are capable of rendevousing with the ISS

That is NOT one of the panels recommendations!
Read them yourselves

CAIB Board Recommendation

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[ToadMan8]

yeah, like Macs in elementary school ;) (I'm just kidding) yeah, I love my TI-89 though. it solves equations so I don't have to and, hey, it has 256 shades of gray to make Super Mario Brothers look really quite amazing. On that little 6Mhz Motarole proc one can install Gentoo linux too. (my good friend is a gentoo freak (read: dev))

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[rodney dill]

Why would NASA be shooting the piece of foam at the wing of the shuttle at "about 850 km (530 miles) hour" (sic.)?! The shuttle is going slowly when just taking off in the relatively dense atmosphere of the surface of the earth. As it picks up speed in the thinner upper atmosphere it is also in an environment with less friction.

The initial report that I remembered hearing, within days of the catastrophe, was that the shuttle was already doing around 1900/mph, when the foam detached and hit the wing. It (the shuttle) was probably still greatly accelerating at that point, and devoid of thrust, an oddly shaped, and "relatively" light piece of foam would probably gain some relevant kinetic energy by the time it contacted the wing. I haven't heard any more recent information on the speed of the shuttle at the time of the contact.

Local reporting

[JCMay]

Our local paper, Florida Today, has more reporting and it was the above-the-fold news today.

From my point of view, this is the most impressive part of the whole thing:

The real panels cost $800,000 each. So combined with the $1 million custom-built wing frame, the cost of the tests is $4.2 million not counting the fake fiberglass parts or money paid to Southwest Research Institute for use of its unique nitrogen gas gun.

That's an awful lot of testing that's been done for a mere $4.2 million! Last winter I was involved with some testing that cost $500,000 and the result was a little 50-page report. Way to go, NASA! Hooray for SRI!

Re:Local reporting

[Idarubicin]

That's an awful lot of testing that's been done for a mere $4.2 million! Last winter I was involved with some testing that cost $500,000 and the result was a little 50-page report. Way to go, NASA! Hooray for SRI!

Um. Do you do destructive testing of million-dollar components? No? Maybe that has something to do with why your report was less expensive to produce. Just a thought.

Baseball != foam

[MadCow42]

Try throwing a styrofoam cup out your window at 100mph and see how much delta-V there is by the time it passes your bumper. I bet it'll be at least 40mph delta... scale that up to shuttle proportions and speeds with a 1.5lb chunk of foam and yes, this experiment is very realistic.

MadCow.

Re:Baseball != foam

[zackbar]

I'll go farther than that. (no pun intended)

On ground level, assuming a calm day, the styrofoam cup would lose almost all of it's inertia almost immediately after leaving your hand. It wouldn't go 10 feet in the direction the car was travelling once it left your hand.

Try throwing a styrofoam cup and see how far it goes. Doesn't go far.

Re:Baseball != foam

[MadCow42]

>>the styrofoam cup would lose almost all of it's inertia almost immediately after leaving your hand

Um, yeah... and your point would be?

Try running into a stationary styrofoam cup that has "no inertia" while YOU are going 1000MPH. It still hurts.

q:]

MadCow.

Re:Baseball != foam

[zackbar]

I didn't say it didn't hurt. I was agreeing, and simplying extending the point. The previous post said that the styrofoam cup would slow down a lot. I think it would nearly stop.

How about a *real* test?

[whitroth]

I read the news story...including the part where they said, "we could do this again, and get a different result".

So, first, how about doing this at *least* three times?

THEN, take the average, and put the damn thing in front of a horizontally-mounted rocket engine, to simulate actual re-entry, and see if it happens...or if, as has happened in the past, the shockwave keeps the heat from penetrating.

Gee, if that happened, then they'd have to go back to looking for another cause...like (google for it) the diehard's analysis that it was stress corrosion cracking in the hydraulic lines that control the elevons. Loosing control of them would rip the wing *right* off.

But then, stress corrosion cracking shold have been caught...*if* they hadn't cut safety inspectors by 75%, and if the managers, in their own meetings, cared more for safety than for "being a team player, and meeting the schedule".

NASA's management strucure needs flattening, anyway - there's maybe 1 chief for 2 indians. Is that sane, to y'all?

mark

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[SlayerofGods]

Until you can give me formulas and mathematical models, I think I'm going to have believe what the Rocket Scientists are telling me about their field. But, I defiantly see how you came to this conclusion, wheather is right or wromg.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[Sebby]

Possibly. Research has shown tiles have been weakened by the chemicals from the launch tower's paint leaching onto the tiles during rain. Who knows what effect this and the vibration of the launch itself had on the tiles.

Not much in that article

[Z0mb1eman]

Besides, didn't they run a similar simulation something like a month ago? Is this just really old news of the same test, or a new test entirely?

Perhaps a more interesting article is the following from space.com.

Top Ten: Questions and Answers About the Columbia Board Report

The entire article is a good read, but I found this particularly interesting:


First, the external tank was designed with a layer of insulation foam that isn't supposed to shed during launch. It was designed to stick to the tank, so if it's not sticking then something isn't working the way it's supposed to be.

Second, the shuttle's heatshield of tiles, RCC panels and thermal blankets were not designed to be damaged in any way for any reason. That's why the orbiter isn't allowed to fly through rain, stay outside when it hails or risk having workers drop tools on it. The tiles are especially fragile.

But for some reason, when foam fell off at launch and damaged tiles, NASA managers didn't seem alarmed. When the shuttle came back and there wasn't significant damage, managers convinced themselves there was no safety of flight issue. After 112 flights in which foam shed 70 times and tiles came back damaged every time, shuttle officials got used to it.

Trickier than it sounds

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>wrapping the wing in titanium which will burn off

The hidden gotcha which you'd need to account for is that if you have bumps or roughness on the wing surface, you may create a little hypersonic shockwave which will create a localized hotspot downwind, potentially hot enough to burn through even the heat-resistant tiles.

A repair would have to be smooth enough to avoid creating more problems than it solved. Lots of computation and testing would be needed.

Re:Trickier than it sounds

[Alaska Jack]

Re your sig - You may find this helpful:

Volokh Archive Cheers.

I wondered the same thing...

[Vellmont]

If you toss a baseball out of a car window when you're driving at 100 mph the ball isn't going to slow down to 0 by the back of the car. It maybe will loose 100 mph in comparison to the shuttle by the time it decelerates a bit from where it broke off to where it hits the wing. That's not such a big deal.

Yah, but if I toss a piece of foam out the window driving at 100 miles an hour, and I'm driving a semi-truck, I bet that piece of foam is going to slow down quite a bit by the time it gets to the end of the trailer. (And the orbiter is about 1.5 semi lengths). Baseballs have a large mass compared to surface area, foam has a small mass compared to surface area. Point being that foam will slow down much faster than a baseball.

I still think your question is intereresting, I just don't think the armchair comparisons to a baseball dropped from a car are at all valid.

Re:I wondered the same thing...

[paulthomas]

Another huge factor: Gravity.

When you are looking at the car/semi-truck example, you don't change the horizontal vector of the baseball with the gravity of the earth. (You do change the vertical vector, which in this case is inconsequential... in the case of the shuttle it is not).

In the case of the shuttle you also have the acceleration due to gravity at apprx -9.8 meters per second (^2) the moment the tile detaches from the shuttle body, in addition to friction against the air.

Anyone planning on using altitude as a counterpoint for my gravity argument should also recall that gravity is an inverse-square law and that distance change from source yields minimum change in force.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[NukeIear]

Exactly, clearly this parent poster understands physics better than NASA. I'm sure the poster is in charge of a similair space agency that has sent many thousands of astronauts into space and that he himself helped designed their shuttle craft.

Or maybe he's just some self-important kid who took a year of physics in college, doesn't understand something and is therefore claiming that they are wrong.

NASA == NIH syndrome.

[Thud457]

You don't think they even considered the Russians sending up a capsule to rescue the shuttle astronauts, do you? Oh, the humiliation!

Face it, every time an Astronaut dies, (s)he was murdered by bueracracy.

Re:NASA == NIH syndrome.

[dcphoenix]

That reminds me a bit of a quote I once heard. I can't remember who said it, but it makes for a good statement as to generally what should be done.....

"In technology, reality must take precedance over public relations because nature can not be fooled."

Re:NASA == NIH syndrome.

[Longbow]

a) the shuttle is in a different inclination orbit that would be difficult if not impossible to reach from the Russian launch site. b) each soyuz only holds 3 people, therefore you would need to launch four of them to save the 7 person crew (each soyuz would need a pilot, so that takes up one of the slots) c) there probably weren't docking modules to connect the spacecraft available, and certainly not in orbit on columbia d) you are an idiot

Re:NASA == NIH syndrome.

[Thud457]

To all the unemployed rocket scientists that flamed me for that : During the Apollo era, they would have evaluated every possible contigency scenario and been able to pull out a big fat binder and open it to a page with step-by-step instructions about how to recover.

We've seen that NASA management was aware of the foam sloughing issue -- so why didn't they at least think about how to handle the worst case scenario? Burning up a $5billion dollar camel and seven human beings is more than just a little "oopsie". 1. They didn't prevent the situation. 2. They made an ill-advised decision without exhausting all possibilities. (Did they do an EVA to visually inspect the damage?)

The right stuff -- NOT!

Re:NASA == NIH syndrome.

[Matthew Austern]

For those who don't recognize the quote, the exact wording is: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." It comes from Richard Feynman's appendex to the Rogers Commission report on the Challenger.

Re:NASA == NIH syndrome.

[iocat]

They couldn't do an EVA; they didn't have the equipiment on board. They would have had to put a guy in the bay in a suit, untethered, flip the shuttle around, have him look, flip it back around, and try to grab him some how, by slowly moving the shuttle towards him so he smacked the bottom of the cargo bay, hopefully being able to grab something and not bounce off.

Pretty fricking risky for something that had happened a few times before (foam hits) with no apparent ill effects.

It's easy now to Monday Morning Quarterback it, and if they had had an inkling that the damage was that bad, there was all sorts of crazy, gutsy, Apollo 13 kind of shit that could have been tried (including an Atlantis rescure mission), but they thought everything was ok . Now maybe they shouldn't have, but they did.

Re:NASA == NIH syndrome.

[ThaReetLad]

I think the point is that good contingency planning would have required that either EVA equipment or enough fuel to reach the ISS would have to be available on each and every flight. A good safety culture would have required every incident, however minor, to be investigated in full. The problem is it appears that corners were being cut in the planning and support phases for financial reasons.

Air Density at this altitude (speed)

[ToadMan8]

The air density is not close to that of ground level when the shuttle is high enough for it to be doing >1000 mph. When that same styrofoam cup is tossed out of the window, it would decelerate much less than it would on the ground. I do agree that a baseball (and I'd say a styrofoam cup, not solid, extremely irregular, big cavity) was not a good direct object for my analogy.

Re:Air Density at this altitude (speed)

[WolfWithoutAClause]

When that same styrofoam cup is tossed out of the window, it would decelerate much less than it would on the ground.

No. Actually the maximum aerodynamic drag (and hence the maximum deceleration) is at 'max-q', about 1 minute into the flight. The accident happened a little after that, at 82 seconds, but there's still a lot of air around, and the vehicle is going very fast.

Excuse me, but ....

[jwriney]

People flying in a spacecraft, the thermal system of which is the only thing that stands between them and forces strong enough to neatly distribute their bodies across 200 miles of forest, should not have to "hope it never happens again".

The current Thermal Protection System is a dangerous, fragile and unreliable hack that should be thrown away and replaced with a more sensible system using modern materials and technologies that are proven and ready to use now.

--riney

Re:Excuse me, but ....

[arivanov]

Shall we add to this that the launch system using uncontrollable solid fuel boosters and a grafted fuel tank is also an ugly hack. As a ugly as it gets. Even uglier then the thermal protection system which at least more or less works.

IMO shutlles should be grounded until there is a horisontal launch system from a proper reusable first stage vehicle. Either a high altitude plane or a proper missile system that does not fall apart on every launch. If NASA cannot effing build it ask the russians to build a few Enegia launchers. That was what they were designed for in first place.

Re:Excuse me, but ....

[jwriney]

A modified Shuttle mated to an American-licensed Energia would be sweet. Fix the thermal system, and drop the SSMEs that have to be rebuilt every flight anyway.

(repost - stupid thing won't log me in!)
--riney

Re:Well...

[LilMikey]

How about a space station? There's got to be some kind of supplies up there somewhere to sustain the 'nauts until something can be done.

If not, maybe that should be the next mission. Just toss a heap of air, fuel, and food on a satellite and let it sit 'just in case.'

Re:This proves NOTHING

[Theaetetus]

The insulation probably would have reached terminal velocity long before reaching that speed.

Psst... Shuttle was moving, too. That's the point - the foam fell off and started decelerating due to drag... at the same time, the shuttle was still accelerating due to thrust. The foam still had a vertical velocity, but it was far slower than the shuttle's vertical velocity... basically the wing caught up with the foam chunk.

They "calculated" the speed of the foam chunk by measuring how long (in frames of the high-speed film) it took for the foam to travel a known length (top of shuttle to wing). Not super accurate, but probably within 10%.

-T

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[RollingThunder]

Chunks of foam are extremely unaerodynamic.

Not only was the shuttle accelerating - and accelerating HARD - the chunk of foam was decelerating rapidly while it "fell" (or rather, tumbled upwards, but slower than the shuttle).

They didn't pull the number out of their ass, basically. As I understand, they used the two frames of film closest to the impact, figured out the time between them and the distance the chunk moved relative to the shuttle in that time... and there's your impact velocity.

Pathfinder gives some insight...

[aksansai]

I live near Huntsville, Alabama - where our wonderful Pathfinder mock-shuttle sits by I-565. You can view the shuttle from a very close distance by visiting the Space and Rocket Center. The external fuel tank is covered with the same foam that was in service for the Columbia.

Many visitors to the center will stand underneath the tank (toward the rear of the assembly) and throw coins into the foam (sort of like a wishing well). You can see the foam and the thousands of dents from coins with the naked eye, including quite a few coins that have managed to stick.

Many people wonder why the foam replaced the bright white paint of the fuel tanks of the extremely early flights (STS-01 and STS-02). All that paint weighs in at about 240 kilograms. While it doesn't seem much, it costs an extraordinary amount to get enough thrust to lift one pound of material into space, let alone about 110 pounds.

The aforementioned link is a good paper (from NASA) that explains the "lessons learned" approach to space flight.

a large hole that probably could not be repaired

[Anonymous Coward]

It really pisses me off, everytime I read something like that.

You'd be amazed what can be repaired if the only alternative is dying.

We've already been over this.

[pclminion]

The shuttle was hurtling upward at 1000 MPH. That means that, from the shuttle's perspective, a 1000 MPH wind was blowing past. It's quite easy to imagine how a 1000 MPH wind could accelerate a light piece of foam to 500 MPH in the short distance it fell.

Really, I don't see why this is so hard to understand. When you go 60 MPH on a jetski, your eyelids peel back. It isn't because you're accelerating, it's because your going really fast through the air.

Re:We've already been over this.

[pclminion]

If everyone did physics like you did (take guess, scratch head, flip coin, decide whether guess is correct), I think we'd be into the neighboring galaxies by now!

David vs Goliath

[nemeosis]

When I saw the video of the impact simulation, I was amazed how a tiny (but fast) little David was able to take down Goliath. It's amazing something like this didn't happen sooner in the shuttle's 20 year lifetime.

Couldn't be repaired from orbit?

[Capt_Troy]

What BS!!! Way to rationalize it...

"Well, yea, you know that foam we said couldn't have caused any problems? Well, it caused the shuttle to fall apart. BUT! We couldn't have fixed it anyway!"

There is always a solution. Apollo 13 was doomed, everyone knew that, but they got their shit together and got things taken care of. They could have potentially fixed this if they had tried. They didn't even try, so now they are making excuses.

I for one, would feel better about the state of affairs at NASA if the had at least tried to fix the problem, or payed attention to the existance of a potentially serious problem in the first place (we've all read the concerned engineer emails posted on /. after it happened).

What happened to the NASA that wasn't afraid to take risks to make sure it's astronauts came home safely? Couldn't these foam tests been done while the shuttle was still in orbit to study the damage the impact (everyone knew occured) could have caused? And couldn't that data support a risky move (I won't even conjecture what move that might have been) to save the lives of these people?

Maybe it's time for NASA to get out of the space business and let private industry do a better job of it...

Of course they did.

[AzrealAO]

NASA told them there has been a foam impact on the wing once they found out about it (a day or two after the launch during routine review of the high-speed film of the launch).

They also told them there was nothing to worry about, and that all the engineer's on the ground had gone through the scenarios and didn't think it'd pose a problem. It wasn't some big secret or anything.

Docking wasnt possible...

[Tmack]

Even if hey had enough fuel to match the ISS's orbit, docking would still not have been possible. The only time they take the docking module with them is when they expect to dock with something. The shuttle itself only has an airlock to the cargo bay. Thats where they put the docking module, which isnt light. See the pic and links on this page. Since this was a purely scientific mission, the docking ring was not onboard to save weight, which in turn saves fuel, which saves much $$.

Tm

Re:Docking wasnt possible...

[Rich0]

I doubt that docking would be a big problem. They could just pull up alongside, throw a line, and climb across in space suits. It isn't like they need to have a cozy docking module in an emergency situation. The shuttle could then be remotely thrusted away from the ISS.

On the other hand, the fuel problem is a no-go. There is no way to switch from a low inclination orbit to a high inclination orbit using the fuel capacity of the shuttle.

rescue mission

[vasqzr]

Columbia rescue would have been difficult but feasible: investigators

Posted: Sat, May 24 8:33 AM ET (1233 GMT)

Harold Gehman, chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB), confirmed Friday that it would have been possible to mount a rescue mission had the damage to Columbia's wing been known shortly after launch, although such a mission would have been very challenging. Florida Today first reported Wednesday that an internal NASA study, performed at the request of the CAIB, showed that it would have been possible to launch Atlantis -- which was being prepared for a March 1 launch -- on a rescue mission as early as February 9 or 10. Atlantis would have rendezvoused with Columbia, whose crew would have conserved supplies and power to stay alive. Atlantis's crew would have then carried out spacewalks to send supplies and extra spacesuits to Columbia, so that Columbia's crew could be transferred back to Atlantis for return to Earth. Gehman said that such a mission would have been extremely difficult and hazardous, particularly because of the danger of falling foam during launch damaging Atlantis as well. Gehman said it may have also been possible to repair the damage to Columbia by stuffing a bag of water in the hole in the wing, then covering it with teflon tape. Even though either option could have been too risky to carry out, their existence contradicts earlier claims by NASA officials that there was nothing they could have done to save the crew. Gehman said those rescue options make decision by NASA not to seek spy satellite images of the shuttle "even more ominous."

Re:rescue mission

[Ananee]

It disturbes me greatly to think that there could have been ways to save the seven astronauts aboard that ship, but nothing was done.
Just because there have only been two fatal accidents in the history of the US space program, does that mean that monitoring of the missions is allowed to be so laxed that something like this could happen?

I'll step off my soap-box now.

Re:rescue mission

[scottcha 4]

I believe there have been three...

1. Apollo 1
2. Challenger
3. Columbia

Re:rescue mission

[sparkie]

Uh .... A Bag of water? That better be a PRESSURIZED bag of water. Otherwise it'd boil off almost instantly once released into the vaccum of space.

Re:rescue mission

[packeteer]

Im sorry but are you retarded? As soon as a bag of water came into contact with the vaccum of space it would FREEZE into ice.

Watch the video

[KalvinB]

They know pretty well how fast it was going by looking at the time from the break to the hit on the video. They can then figure out the distance it traveled in that time and with basic math get a good idea of how fast it was going.

It was only a few frames and it's quite a distance from where it came off of to the wing.

There's very little speculation about how fast it was going.

Ben

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[ceejayoz]

Please don't mod it up, and read this instead.

Re:Well...

[leeward]

Well, there is a station up there. The problem is that the shuttle would have to be in roughly the same orbit as the station. It does not carry enough fuel to make large orbit changes.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[bigpat]

"My point is that if the piece of foam broke off the the top of the shuttle when the craft was doing many hundreds of miles per hour (like when the ET separates - the last time the foam (covering the ET) is on the shuttle) the air is not dense enough to slow the piece of foam enough to possibly impact the shuttle at hundreds of miles per hour."

Well, the shuttle ends up going 17,500 miles per hour. I don't know what speed it was going at when the piece fell off, but it was a heck of a lot faster than a few hundred mile per hour. So your math is way off. Anything falling off the shuttle will find itself going at a substantially different speed than the shuttle very shortly, even in a very thin atmosphere.

whatever happened to starlite?

[ed.han]

back in 1993, british amateur inventor maurice ward created a plastic he called "starlite", which would withstand temperatures of up to 2700 celsius (that of a nuclear explosion). does anybody know what temperatures are reached during reentry, or for that matter, what happened to ward & starlite? i tried googling but didn't find anything interesting.

ed

Re:whatever happened to starlite?

[Kintanon]

Check this out

I think this might be what you were looking for.

Kintanon

Re:whatever happened to starlite?

[SevenTowers]

2700 degrees is the peripheral or heat wave temperature of a "nuclear explosion". Core temperatures go up to about 12 000 000 degrees since fission outputs a hell of a lot of energy. In hydrogen or other type of fusion, the temperatures goe even higher.

Re:whatever happened to starlite?

[Christopher Thomas]

This article sounds suspicious.

Regardless of how heat-resistant the coating was, the whole egg would have heated up during that demo. Playing a torch on it would boil the egg material, resulting in a nice microwave-style "eggs"-plosion.

What you need for heat shielding is both high temperature resistance and good insulating properties. A very thin layer could have the first, but definitely won't have the second.

Re:whatever happened to starlite?

[Christopher Thomas]

And so why not coat the extremely delicate heat tiles the shuttle currently uses with a more durable coating of this plastic substance? It seems to me that you don't need to solve the problem of insulation, you only need to get an extra layer on top of it so it doesn't break apart when you toss foam and ice on it, and that won't vaporize in the heat of re-entry itself.

Tossing foam and ice at 850 mph will go through just about any coating. If they wanted something more durable, they could use the same tungsten carbide-coated carbon composites they use for high-temperature areas.

The best thing to do is to alter and/or coat the insulation itself such that it doesn't break off as easily, and do more aggressive de-icing prior to launch.

We'll see what they end up doing in a few months.

Only one problem, Sparky.

[RatBastard]

Only one problem there, Sparky. Apollo 13 didn't suffer from a cracked heat shield. If te heat shirld from the command module had been broken they would have died. Period. And there was no way they could have ever fixed that. The crew of Apollo 13 also had the good furtune to have a fully functional L.E.M. docked and powered up. It was THAT and that alone that let them live. If the explosion had happened before the L.E.M. had docked they would be dead. Period.

Re:Only one problem, Sparky.

[multi io]

The crew of Apollo 13 also had the good furtune to have a fully functional L.E.M. docked and powered up. It was THAT and that alone that let them live. If the explosion had happened before the L.E.M. had docked

...or after lunar orbit insertion

they would be dead.

OTOH, there seem to be credible sources saying that getting Atlantis up in time for a rescue mission might have been possible (albeit risky).

This is the exact mistake NASA did

[f97tosc]

They figured that falling foam could not be so fast; it isn't in everyday situations.

But common sense only applies to common situtations. In exotic situtions you have to use math and computers. Your basic intuition simply does not work.

And the difference here is that the shuttle was going extremely fast. I don't know the exact speed, but much faster than 850 km/ hour.

The math of this is that air drag is proportional to the square of the speed. On top of this the foam is much lighter than the baseball. So if the shuttle was travelling in say 4000 km / hour (~Mach 4); what will be the speed of the foam by the time it hits the shuttle?

You have to do math and simulations for this one. NASA did, after the disaster, and you should not throw out the results (that the foam had slowed down to say 3150 km per hour) because of your everyday experience with speeds below 100 km/ hour.

Your post is illustrative of how easy these mistakes are to make. In rocket science, you have to think about and calculate everything; because your intution does not work.

Tor

Re:This is the exact mistake NASA did

[Darth Maul]

The point isn't the large speed of the shuttle, but the acceleration. After the foam detached, the shuttle accelerated up into it. By the time the shuttle reached the position of the foam, the shuttle had accelerated *a lot*, therefore the velocities were very different.

Re:This is the exact mistake NASA did

[SlayerofGods]

The math of this is that air drag is proportional to the square of the speed.
It is about the speed.
Basicly the foam decelerated into the shuttle.

Re:This is the exact mistake NASA did

[f97tosc]

The point isn't the large speed of the shuttle, but the acceleration. After the foam detached, the shuttle accelerated up into it. By the time the shuttle reached the position of the foam, the shuttle had accelerated *a lot*, therefore the velocities were very different.

Sorry, this is wrong. It is true that an accelerating shuttle causes a speed difference between falling foam, but the effect is very small. Think about it. The shuttle was travelling at what, say 1000m/s. If the foam fell 10 m, this would happen in 0.01 s. The shuttle could not possible accelerate by 850 km per hour ~= 300 m/ s during that period. That would imply an acceleration of 30,000 m/s^2, or 3000 g.

No, what happened with the falling foam was that it hit air drag. And as I pointed out in my original post, this is proportional to the square of the speed. Thus if the shulle was travelling at say 50 times the speed of a car, then a released item will deaccelerate 2500 times faster than the baseball in the original example (give some for the low density of the foam, take some for the thinner atmosphere).

Tor

Re:This is the exact mistake NASA did

[mpe]

They figured that falling foam could not be so fast; it isn't in everyday situations.

The foam probably wasn't falling, just slowing down due to air resistance. Whilst the shuttle was accelerating upwards.

And the difference here is that the shuttle was going extremely fast. I don't know the exact speed, but much faster than 850 km/ hour.

What's important here is the relative speed.

Re:This is the exact mistake NASA did

[mpe]

The point isn't the large speed of the shuttle, but the acceleration. After the foam detached, the shuttle accelerated up into it. By the time the shuttle reached the position of the foam, the shuttle had accelerated *a lot*, therefore the velocities were very different.

It's actually even worst than that. Since as soon as the foam broke off it would become subject to both an acceleration due to gravity and drag due to the air around it.

Re:This is the exact mistake NASA did

[johndiii]

On top of this the foam is much lighter than the baseball.

I'm not disputing your conclusion, but the piece of foam that they used for the test was 0.8 kg, significantly more massive than a baseball. They didn't mention the dimensions, though. I believe that the foam is much denser than styrofoam, so the analogies being offered here are somewhat misleading. The rate at which the foam decelerated would also depend on its mass.

Re:This is the exact mistake NASA did

[f97tosc]

The foam probably wasn't falling, just slowing down due to air resistance. Whilst the shuttle was accelerating upwards.

The impact speed was affected by gravity, air drag, and the acceleration of the shuttle. Of these three the first and last were of neglible importance. "falling" is admitively an imprecise term, perhaps "coming loose and being deaccelerated by air drag" is better.

What's important here is the relative speed between foam and shuttle,which in turn is determined by the absolute air speed of the shuttle (and thus the foam, when it breaks loose). Because of the (non-linear) properties of air drag, different shuttle speeds causes vastly different impact scenarios for falling foam. For example, if the shuttle goes 50 times faster than a car, then a dropped item (such as loose foam) will experience a force 2500 times greater. Such a force is sufficient to cause a relative speed of 850 km/ hour in the distance before the foam hits the shuttle. On the other hand, if the foam had fallen off right after blast-off, when the shuttle was still at only say 100 mph, then this would never have happened.

Tor

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[Wind_Walker]

I'm getting the strange feeling I'm responding to a troll, but I'll bite.

Your analogy is horrible. Imagine insead a better analogy: A piece of flat styrofoam is duct-taped to the hood of your car. As you're moving down the highway at 60MPH (100KPH for the normal people) the air friction eventually creates enough force to break the bonds of the duct tape and the piece of foam is now free.

Since this is a large, flat piece of foam (lightweight and not aerodynamic) it's going to lose its speed very quickly. In the car's frame of reference, the foam is now moving towards the windshield at, say, 40MPH. That's gonna startle any driver no matter what.

And besides, don't you think that NASA of all people would have been able to figure out some math like that? It's what they do for a living for Christ's sake. It's not like they're pulling this number of of their collective ass.

What makes me sad...

[pclminion]

... is seeing how a bunch of geeks on some website can criticize the physics knowledge of a bunch of rocket scientists. Before you start quoting various "disasters," remember that one of them was caused by a failure to convert units (some engineers made a dumb mistake), and the other was caused by an acceleration-sensitive switch having a weak spring, and therefore triggering too early. Both of these were engineering mistakes.

These people are capable of launching a spacecraft from a planet whipping around the sun, through continuously changing gravitational fields, for hundreds of millions of miles, and put it down on a spot the width of your city park. They know physics. To put it bluntly, these people are badasses. The last thing they deserve right now is the intellectual equivalent of a 2 year old arguing over politics with Kofi Annan...

Re:What makes me sad...

[pclminion]

I'd be more than happy to work it out for you right here, if I had access to the correct numbers (exact altitude at which it happened, average cross section of foam, exact speed of shuttle, etc.) Unfortunately I can't get them.

What I can do, however, is look at the video footage. It's pretty easy to calculate how fast the foam was moving if you make a single assumption -- that the acceleration was constant. It's easy to count frames, and NASA knows how long their own shuttle is. I don't understand why people are disputing something that can easily be verified by anyone who looks at the video footage.

Re:What makes me sad...

[pclminion]

I'm giving up at this point, as your already consdering the shuttles velocity a variable in this equation.

Umm.. The upward velocity of the shuttle gives the upward velocity of the foam at the moment of seperation, which plugs into the equation D=1/2*C*p*A*v^2, to give the aerodynamic drag on the foam. Exactly how is that not relevant? Notice that the drag depends on the square of the velocity. Then you plug that into a=D/m+g+S where g is the acceleration of gravity and S is the shuttle's upward acceleration. Rewrite in differential form and integrate to get a damn good model of how fast the foam was traveling at each point along its fall. Maple can do it in a jiffy.

If you'll just give me the correct values of C, A, S, starting altitude, and air temperature, I'll work it out for you right here. I doubt you'll have more success in obtaining those numbers than I have.

Or are you gonna cut us off here before I prove you wrong?

Re:What makes me sad...

[hughk]

... is seeing how a bunch of geeks on some website can criticize the physics knowledge of a bunch of rocket scientists.

Sorry, they have mostly gone in the cutbacks. The young guys brought into replace them have most of their rocketry experience from the 4th July. The cases you site are engineering management errors. Problems happen, but they should be minimised and then caught by QA. Management decided not to rerun the test involving the acceleration sensitive switch because it cost too much. The problem could have been simply fixed in software without any hardware tests, but it takes tests to show this.

Re:What makes me sad...

[khallow]

I'm giving up at this point, as your already consdering the shuttles velocity a variable in this equation. It's not, this is all relative, the foam is what is important (or so you believe).

That's because shuttle velocity is a variable (it varies over even short timespans).

I've seen the video footage, many times. It shows foam hitting the shuttle, yeah, and? You never clearly see any damage.

The strike area can't be seen directly (it is on the leading edge of the wing and on the surface facing the tank), and the resolution isn't good enough. That's what makes these simulations important. They show that foam traveling at the speeds it was traveling at and hitting the area it was observed to have hit can cause damage compatible with the evidence.

And?

[Wind_Walker]

Great, there are ways to repair a hole. Now, do you think they had the heat resistent foam in space? Or the titanium? Or the oxygen reserves to spend another 2 weeks in orbit until we could get those materials up to them? Or the EVA equipment to repair it? Or the training to adequately fix it, without making matters worse?

It's not like patching up a tire on the side of a road, you know. For one, you at least have unlimited oxygen here on Earth and if you screw up, you can always walk back.

Re:And?

[Enry]

Uhm...you misread. They don't have any of those repair kits NOW. NASA is looking at what to bring up in case this happens again. What is light enough, what will handle the most general case, what can be done by astronauts in EVA suits, etc.

Re:And?

[b-baggins]

Why does somebody always have to die before bureaucrats and engineers finally get off their @$$e$ and fix what they know is broken?

Oh, wait. I forgot. Because only people dying is horrific enough to dent that massive god-like ego most engineers and bureaucrats have.

Bad Documentation Kills.

[Tackhead]

> It seems perfectly obvious to "monday-morning quarterbacks" that the foam was a problem, but five years of experience suggested otherwise.

Five years of experience, or One Fucked Up Powerpoint Slide?

Just like poor presentation of temperature data killed Challenger, poor presentation of the foam data killed Columbia.

Stupid goddamn PHBs and their fucking PowerPoint slides.

Re:Bad Documentation Kills.

[TopShelf]

I loved this article from a couple years ago, wherein the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tried to discourage the rampant overuse of PowerPoint. While Word and Excel have done wonders for office productivity, one could argue that PowerPoint has taken mismanagement to a whole new level...

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[vasqzr]

You ever kick a balloon? Better yet, how about a light rubber ball like they sell at K Mart?

It's nothing like a baseball or even soccer ball, where you can send the thing flying a couple hundred feet.

You kick it, the thing probably hits 50mph, and the slows down very quickly. The curve of the thing is very steep. You can probably only kick one 30 or 40 feet.

Think of the foam as that ball. It loses momentum VERY fast.

Some back of the envelope calculations

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

The foam strike happened shortly after the point called "Max Q", where aerodynamic loads are highest. Before then, the shuttle's still moving relatively slowly. After then, the shuttle's in thinner air.

Aerodynamic pressure at Max Q is usually quoted as 580 pounds per square foot.

The piece of foam that hit Columbia is usually described as "suitcase sized" and estimated to have been 1-1/2 or 1-1/4 pounds.

One square foot is a really small suitcase, but the foam wouldn't always have been broadside-on to the relative wind. So 1 ft**2 is the right order of magnitude. The ballpark figure for acceleration is then a = F / m ~= 400 g's.

Rounding off, since this is just back-of-the-envelope, 13,000 ft per second per second. 60 milliseconds would suffice to reach the speed used in the test.

s == 1/2 * a * t ** 2. Accelerate at 400 g's for 60 milliseconds and you've gone 23 feet.

The speed they used in the test is the right order of magnitude.

As someone else pointed out, NASA also had film showing the strike and could do frame-by-frame measurements to estimate the actual speed of the chunk.

Re:Some back of the envelope calculations

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

OK, NASA's estimate is that the foam chunk was 20 inches by 16 inches by 6 inches, and about 2.67 pounds. Almost 500 g's acceleration if it was broadside-on, less than 150 g's for edge-on.

Re:Some back of the envelope calculations

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Perhaps some more detail will help you.

We're talking about what happens to a piece of foam when it detaches from the shuttle stack and begins decelerating due to air resistance.

Foam is light, the airstream is strong. Intuitively you could say the foam comes to a stop very quickly while the shuttle keeps going. The foam changes speed a lot faster than the shuttle does, because the foam is lighter. Change of speed per time is acceleration. Deceleration is acceleration with a change of sign.

Once again, we're talking about the rate of change of speed of the detached foam chunk, not of the shuttle.

To look at it another way, the foam is no longer part of the shuttle once it falls off. It no longer has a structure attached to five rocket engines pushing it along. The foam at that point is governed by momentum and air resistance. Air resistance at speeds like that is very high even when you're partway out of the atmosphere. The force due to air resistance peaks about 580 pounds-force per square foot. A one-square-foot object will feel 580 pounds of force acting on it. F=ma, force equals mass times acceleration.

A "pound" is both a unit of mass and a unit of force. A pound of force is the force exerted by Earth's gravity field at sea level on one pound of mass. Apply one pound of force to one pound of mass and it accelerates at 32 feet per second per second. Apply 580 pounds of force to a one-pound object and it accelerates (or decelerates) at 20,300 feet per second per second.

Yes, one gee is a unit of acceleration, equal to the acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface, 9.8 meters per second per second or 32 feet per second per second.

Please don't feel bad about misunderstanding. If physics were obvious, it wouldn't have taken us thousands of years to figure it out. And plenty of other people seem to having trouble with the same concepts.

Rescue missions do NOT require immediate shuttle

[vasqzr]

They could have used (basically an ICBM) a satellite launch rocket, put a supply shipment up there, and let them sit up there for a few weeks.

Re:PC-ness kills 7?

[RGRistroph]

Here is the page where I found the smoking gun; I dug it up before noon the Saturday of:

http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/F-15B/

Go down to the section of photographs of shuttle foam tests.

Now, the press release contains the lines "The experiment was part of an effort to determine why small particles of spray-on foam insulation flaked off of the inter-tank section of the external fuel tank on Space Shuttle mission STS-87 as the Shuttle ascended. The new lightweight insulation material was developed to comply with an EPA mandate to reduce ozone-depleting chemicals released into the atmosphere."

However, that is contradicted by a quote from an EPA official that appeared in the Houston Chronicle within a few days of the disaster -- he claimed that NASA and in particular craft carrying humans were exempted, but that NASA wanted to comply anyway.

We will never know whether it was mandated or not. The issue will simply not be investigated or talked about. However the larger picture is clear: you cannot trust human safety to an organization that is essentially an endless publicity stunt factory. If we want to do things in space we have to toss NASA and setup an organization that will rationally attack the problem, and not be a press release mill.

not unexpected

[mantera]

According to the legendary aeronautical designer, Burt Rutan, the shuttle is a very expensive and very dangerous vehicle. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/space.htm l

Re:Challenger jokes

[ReallyQuietGuy]

You mean to tell me you never told a challenger joke

never.

imagine this scenario. bunch of guys standing around. one guy says - "q:what was the astronaut's last words? a: What's this big red button for?" everybody bar one laughs. 1 guy standing in the back says "my uncle was on the challenger". does everyone laugh even more, or does everyone shut the fuck up and look down?

but if the guy isn't there, it's ok to make that kind of joke?

humour as catharsis: ok, when it's the guy in the back making the joke, not when its some random asshat who lost nothing

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[kevlar]

It (the shuttle) was probably still greatly accelerating at that point, and devoid of thrust, an oddly shaped, and "relatively" light piece of foam would probably gain some relevant kinetic energy by the time it contacted the wing.

Actually, it would LOSE kinetic energy relative to the Shuttle. The foam slowed quickly, while the Shuttle still accelerated. Its kinda like hitting a hitting a rock that falls off the back of a truck on the high way. If you were to drop the rock on the wind shield at rest, it may not do any damage, but when it whacks it in motion, you get a nasty crack!

Limits of Technology

[Detritus]

How do you eject an escape pod at Mach 25?

Military pilots run into similar problems at much lower speeds. It is very easy to kill yourself and destroy the aircraft while flying at hypersonic speed. Just yaw the aircraft a bit and the airflow will rip it to shreds.

NASA Finds Foaming Gun [Link]

[tenzig_112]

an excerpt from an interesting article from a disreputable source:

After seeing the test results, NASA Director Sean O'Keefe declared the case closed and the space agency exonerated of all blame in last February's tragedy that took the lives of 7 astronauts. "We have a saying around here now," O'Keefe told reporters, "crappy engineering and institutional arrogance don't kill people, errant bits of foam kill people."

Happily, O'Keefe announced that the changes mandated by the investigation won't affect the current launch schedule. The Shuttle crew slated to take Atlantis into orbit this fall without escape pods or repair gear has not yet been briefed on the situation.

full text

Stop attempting to walk before you Crawl

[shthd]

Perhaps NASA should start looking at new designs with potentially fatal flaws. Have they not been using this design for something like 15-20 years now? I agree, but maybe they should wait until they have a plan with somehting really revolutionary on the table. Perhaps in ten years they could build a scramjet thing with much greater capacity.

In order to develop scramjets, NASA needs to ressurect the X-15 program. Hypersonic flight . With newer materials and newer rockets, they could go higher and faster than ever before. The X-15 reached 62.5 miles and the pilots even got their Astronaut wings. If that 62.5 mi altitude sounds familiar, it should. That's what you need to win the X-prize. It did close to 200 missions in 9 years and nowhere near the cost of the shuttle program. The X-15 would make a perfect platform to test designs. As a matter of fact it flew one mission with a mock scramjet aboard.

Re:Artificial foam...

[ReallyQuietGuy]

i am amazed at the willingness of anybody to put in the amount of effort to write up this kind of crap. like maybe darth vader would say - "impressive, most impressive".

if it was done on company time, it's time to short that company's stock.

Let's get a few things straight.

[ramk13]

1. The foam was going that fast. The *real* scientists/engineers have both the aerodynamic calculations and estimations from the video that show this.
2. They couldn't have fixed it on orbit (no tools, materials), they couldn't have 'flown to the station, (wrong orbit, no mating adapter)' they couldn't have sent a soyuz (no mating adapter), and they likely could not have gotten a shuttle up in time (literally no time). Do some reading.
3. They didn't know how serious the problem was. The population of know-it-all monday morning quarterbacks on /. forgets this.
4. If NASA freaked out everytime there was a problem of that magnitude, as they understood AT THE TIME, nothing would ever get done. I'm not saying they should take risks, or even that they could have gotten to the point where they were sloppy. The bottom line is that space travel is risky, and those people who work on it take it seriously and to the best they can do. It irks me when people who know so little say 'they should have done this or that.' That *is* the reason there is the accident review board. They have the expertise. Let them do their job, and stop thinking you know more than you do.

Re:$3.4M dollars for the test

[confused one]

In the process they destroyed a good set of RCC panels from Atlantis. They'll have to be replaced. That's probably a big chunk of that $3.4M dollars...

Research ain't cheap. Ask any scientist.

Because no other theories exist?

[Jerk City Troll]

Perhaps part of the reason NASA tried that experiment, despite the invalidity of it as you pointed out, is because the government and the public demand an answer for the trajedy. This wasn't just any accidental death, this was the destruction of a shuttle and its astronauts (which the American population has placed an unusual amount of emotional value on).

However, no other particularly sound theories have really be publicized. Nevertheless, NASA must make an answer and that answer must satisfy politicians and their budget committees. A piece of foam fired at the wing at 850km/hour is probably very convincing (and emotionally satisfying) to most people who do not understand the science of space travel.

Doomed from launch?

[Bigtoad]

I keep hearing talking heads on the media saying that even if they had discovered the damage right away, they couldn't have saved the astronauts, and frankly, I do not believe that.

I'm sure they couldn't have saved them if they'd followed all of their precious beauracratic processes and procedures - but then, they couldn't have saved Apollo 13 that way either. I have confidence that the shuttle astronauts could have and would have been saved through feverish application of a couple of humanities best traits: ingenuity and perseverance.

Re:Doomed from launch?

[August_zero]

Certainly if they had known about it they at least would have had the chance to do something.

Its akin to going to take an exam you are likely to fail, versus skipping class that day. At least if you go there is a chance.

Re:This proves NOTHING

[a_timid_mouse]

Your post proves that you lack a good understanding of physics and hypersonic flight. That highschool physics class you took didn't cover the physics of space flight, did it? You're falling prey to the same thinking that caused NASA engineers to underestimate the power that a chunk of foam posesses at high speeds.

Wow the conspiracy theorists are in here in force

[Anonymous Coward]

I was actually starting to doubt the 500mph impact speed due to all the naysayers on here.

Then I started using my brain.

Drag = 1/2 * C * rho * A * v^2

C = drag coefficient, we'll guess 0.4 (look it up)
rho = air density, could not find exact value, so I'll guess less than half sea level (0.5 kg/m^3)
A = area, we'll guess 0.5 meters (again, a guess)
v = velocity of shuttle when foam detatched, I don't know, so I'll use the stated test velocity, which is actually too slow, but what the heck = 236 m/s

Plug into formula: drag force = about 2800 N

using F= m*a, and remembering that the foam had a mass of less than a kilo (0.8), this means that the foam was subjected to an acceleration of almost 3500 m/s^2, or over 350 times gravity.

Even if some of the estimates of density, drag coefficient, or area are off, that v^2 term crushes them.

Conclusion: The foam slowed down really fast once it came off the tank.

NASA Test Shows Foam Could Be Culprit, or...

[8BitWimp]

maybe... Foam Test Shows NASA Could Be Culprit

Personally...

[EvilStickMan]

I'm getting a little sick of hearing about this. Yes, I know it is tragic that several astronauts died. Yes, I also know that the world (myself included) wants to know what happened to that shuttle, and how it can be prevented. However, in bringing us every excrutiatingly minute detail about this accident, the media has officially not only killed the story, but done irreparable damage to our space program by throwing accusing fingers at anyone or anything that gives the slightest impression at having been even a remote cause of the accident. Cnn.com has been running stories saying that the foam was the cause for over a month now, the current hot topic is some itra-NASA e-mail that pointed out the potential danger. How long until the "shock" of that is out?

Here's the equation.

[pclminion]

Since everyone seems to think this is just "basic physics," let's actually work this out. The foam is going to be accelerated by several things: the aerodynamic drag due to its velocity through the atmosphere, the force of its own weight, and the acceleration of the shuttle (we can treat the shuttle as moving at constant velocity, and add its acceleration to the foam, and achieve the same numerical results).

Formula for drag force: D=1/2*C*p*A*v^2. C is coeff. of drag of foam, p is air density, A is foam cross section, v is velocity of foam. Over the short distance in which the event occurred we can treat p as constant.

Formula for acceleration of foam: a=-D/m-g-S, S is shuttle acceleration, m is mass of foam.

Substituting eq1 into eq2, a=-1/2*C*p*A*v^2/m-g-s.

Rewrite in differential form: v'(t)=-1/2*C*p*A*v(t)^2/m-g-s.

Solve the differential equation for v(t): v(t) = tan(1/2*(-t*(m*(g+S)*C*p*A)^(1/2)+arctan(1/2*v0*C* p*A*2^(1/2)/(m*(g+S)*C*p*A)^(1/2))*m*2^(1/2))*2^(1 /2)/m)/C/p/A*2^(1/2)*(m*(g+S)*C*p*A)^(1/ 2).

Integrate to find x(t): x(t) = (-m*ln(1+tan(1/2*(-t*(m*(g+S)*C*p*A)^(1/2)+arctan( 1/2*v0*C*p*A*2^(1/2)/(m*(g+S)*C*p*A)^(1/2))*m*2^(1 /2))*2^(1/2)/m)^2)+x0*C*p*A)/C/p/A

I don't know about you, but that doesn't exactly seem "basic" to me. The only reason I was able to come up with it is I have a program (Maple) that can integrate and solve differential equations for me. It's a fairly simple matter of plugging the in the right values for m, g, S, C, p, A, v0, and x0, and we'll settle this right now. If anyone knows what those numbers are I invite you to share them.

Re:Here's the equation.

[coult]

> It's a fairly simple matter of plugging the in the right
>values for m, g, S, C, p, A, v0, and x0, and we'll settle this
>right now. If anyone knows what those numbers are I
>invite you to share them.

This makes a nice toy model but it won't cut it for estimating the relative velocity of the foam (which can be done more easily just by watching the video and using fifth-grade math: velocity = distance traveled/travel time).

First of all, the foam was very likely tumbling. So A isn't constant. Second of all, the foam was probably rougher in some places than others; so C isn't constant either. To solve both for the velocity of the foam and its orientation requires a nonlinear system of 7 differential equations. You'd also need to know the exact shape and surface characteristics -- clearly impossible to know at this point.

I saw a TV program about the shuttle

[An Average American]

So I'm an expert on the subject. Also I have a Texan uncle who lives in San Antonio where they do the testing and I sometimes visit him so that makes me even more qualified. Anyway, I knew it was the foam from the beginning. I don't know why they need to spend all that money figuring it out. My uncle knew as well. He says they should use something stronger than foam.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[jfollas]

And besides, don't you think that NASA of all people would have been able to figure out some math like that? It's what they do for a living for Christ's sake. It's not like they're pulling this number of of their collective ass. As long as they get their English Metric conversions right. NASA's not infallible (look at the collection of Mars failures), but I would trust their numbers over my own.

AP reports, it's not the first time!

[jafac]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=53 3&ncid=533&e=3&u=/ap/20030708/ap_on_sc/shuttle_ear lier_breach

Gasses have breached the wing on a previous Atlantis flight. And they didn't even know about it until a postflight inspection, AND, it sounds like the damage almost went unnoticed, and the Atlantis would have launched with the damage from a previous flight, and no replacement of the faulty seal.

This damage was caused by the combination of a faulty seal, and falling ice.

The Columbia is being blamed on just the falling foam. But wouldn't you say that the heat shield was a faulty design?

Did the Soviet shuttle use tiles?
The X-33?

I recall during Columbia's first flight - the tile design was questioned in the press. The aluminum structure underneath, of course, is flexible, and it's covering, the tiles, is not. A few tiles popped off on that first flight, and subsequent flights - and it was mentioned that the wrong tiles falling off would have dire consequences.

Sad, that nobody sees this as an unacceptably risky design.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I've become a bit annoyed by all of the people who are spouting off about how 500mi/h is way off for the impact velocity. I'm going to dust off my highschool math and physics and attempt to figure this out.

According to:

http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/fdf/107 as centtimeline.html

The shuttle velocity at T+59sec was 1643mi/h. Since the impact occured at T+83sec, we can assume that the shuttle was going faster than this. I'm going to be very conservative and assume 1800mi/h.

Shuttle velocity: 1800 mi/h (2640 ft/s or 804 m/s)

Now, we need to figure out air resistance. Since I have no idea about any of the foam's characteristics, I'm going to base this on a human body. According to:

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/JianHuang.shtml

Human terminal velocity: ~56 m/s (200 km/h)

More importantly, air resistance is proportional to velocity squared.

This means that a human going at 804m/s (speed of the shuttle) would have ~44 times the air resistance as someone going at terminal velocity.

I did this as a simple proportion:

(56 m/s)^2 * x = (804 m/s)^2
x = (804 m/s)^2/(56 m/s)^2 = 206.128

I believe this means that the air resistance would then be generating the equivalent acceleration of 206.128 times the force of gravity on said piece of foam. That works out to 2022.116 m/s^2 (9.81*206.128).

So, how long would it take a piece of foam under those conditions to accelerate to 500mi/h?

500 mi/h = 223.5 m/s

2022.116 m/s^2 * x sec = 223.5 m/s
x = (223.5 m/s) / (2022.116 m/s^2) = 0.111 sec

How far would it take the foam to accelerate to that distance?

distance = acceleration * time^2
distance = 2022.116 m/s^2 * (0.111s)^2 = 24.70m

Given that the length of the external fuel tank is only 47m, this sounds within tolerances of my thumbnail calculation.

The major thing to remember is that they aren't trying to say that the space shuttle accelerated 500m/h between the time that the foam broke off and that it impacted. They are saying that the force of air resistance slowed it down that much by the time it impacted.

Feel free to point out all of the obvious math errors. This is /. after all.

Did anyone actually see the video of the test?

[scosol]

It looked like they shot the foam out of a shotgun- it was moving so fast that you couldn't even see it.
Just a *BANG* then theres a big hole in the wing.

This was NOT the same kind of impact caused by the "casually falling" piece of foam as seen in the video of the actual Columbia launch...

Re:Did anyone actually see the video of the test?

[Mark of THE CITY]

At different points in the show I heard them say the velocity of the foam was 500mph or 700fps (equivalent to 1 sig fig). With a TV camera frame rate of 30 frames/second, the foam would have been in the image for maybe a frame.

Here are my suggested cures.

[MtViewGuy]

To prevent the problem from happening in the future, NASA, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin need to do the following:

1. Develop a new foam insulation that exhibits less tendency to shed from the External Tank during the launch phase. They may have to go back to the CFC-based insulation material, probably with a special EPA waiver.

2. Redesign the wing leading edges using stronger materials and structures behind the insulating tiles. Fortunately, with 2002 materials technology that could work without adding undue weight to the wing.

3. Replace the current insulating tiles with ones that are made of materials that are less susceptible to foreign object damage (FOD). During the late 1980's, Lockheed (before it merged with Martin Marietta) seriously studied new insulation tiles using metal-based materials; maybe it's time to replace all the tiles with this new material, which (using our current knowledge of aerospace materials) could actually lighten the weight of the shuttle.

4. Make sure that NASA has ALL ground tracking cameras operating during every Shuttle launch. NASA had a devil of a time identifying the problem of the wing leading edge damage because some of their tracking cameras were turned off as a money-saving measure.

Re:Challenger jokes

[karstux]

but if the guy isn't there, it's ok to make that kind of joke?

If he's not there, no one's feelings get hurt. The other recipient's emotional states may benefit due to the aforementioned cathartic effect. If the joker has no personal moral problems with telling the joke, why deny him the pleasure of it?

I didn't think

[The Analog Kid]

I didn't think that it would take a rocket scientist to show this but I guess I was wrong.

Shuttle Atlantis had a breech 3 years earlier

[rufey]

Space.com just posted an article written by an AP reporter saying that Atlantis had a breech 3 years before the Columbia accident.

The breech on Atlantis was attributed to something other than a foam impact though.

The story can be found here. About 2/3 of the way down is where it discusses the cause of the Atlantis incident.

Use stochastic physics

[pclminion]

Finally, someone who actually understands the complexity of this, even if you aren't quite agreeing with me...

The system of 7 equations you mention would more than likely be highly chaotic, meaning the results would be meaningless unless the initial conditions were known to extremely high accuracy. Of course this depends on the Lyapunov exponent of the specific system. I think we're wandering off into irrelevant territory here.

I think what is ticking me off is hearing people say "High school physics disproves this," wildly assuming that high school physics is not oversimplified and actually describes all possible scenarios. I wish these people would wake up and realize that "high school physics" is to physics as integer arithmetic is to mathematics...

Re:Does this test scale to the real thing?

[sexylicious]

Heavy or not doesn't matter. It's how the force is spread over the area of contact, and whether the foam can disintegrate fast enough.

It's kind of like if you fall from something really high (say an airplane, and your chute doesn't open), and you are over the ocean. When you hit the water, even though the water is a liquid, you will likely die from the impact.

Things are not intuitive when you are in situations that you don't normally encounter. It seems that there are a lot of people (not only here at /.) that try to apply their intuition to things. Those NASA guys honestly didn't know what would happen to a shuttle wing when a piece of foam hit it. No one did the analysis, and because of beauracracy, the omission was not caught.

Shuttle reentry temperatures, starlite

[zipwow]

I found on this site a mention of 1650 C for reentry temperatures, which seems low enough to make the material feasable.

I did my own google search on ward and starlite, and found this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010407012348/www.char m.net/~dmg/mysteries/mystery1.html

The article mentions that NASA was investigating it, but the inventor wouldn't allow them to pursue it when they refused to sign an NDA.

I'm guessing the actual temperature on the material would differ slightly based on friction (or its coefficient of friction? I'm not a physicist), so its possible that the plastic still wasn't feasable for some reason. Then again, I'm told most of the heat is from ram pressure, so friction may not make a lot of difference.

Another explanation could be that the starlite plastic doesn't handle the extreme cold of space.

Or, NASA refused to sign the NDA because they thought he was a crackpot. Their view is somewhat supported by the site's claim that Maurcie Ward is no longer interested in his revoluntionary material, having given it up for harness horse-racing.

-Zipwow

On air drag

[f97tosc]

Hum, there seems to be a lot of confusion around air drag. Let's clarify a few things.

A good approximation for air drag is:

F = C*S*D*V^2 (give and take some normalizing constant to get the right unit)
Where C is a shape factor of the object (e.g., aerodynamic baseball - small C, broken foam - big C).
S is the surface area of the object
D is the density of the gas or liquid, in this case the athmosphere at the altitude of the accident
V is the speed of the object, relative to the air. For the falling foam, this is initially the speed of the shuttle.

Of course, the acceleration A is given by
A=F/M = C*S*D*V^2 / M

Thus, when I wrote 'massive' I really meant dense. What is interesting is the relationship between the surface area and the mass; the ratio S/M. This is no doubt greater for foam than for a baseball. And in a additon to this the shape factor is greater as well.

Tor

Re:On air drag

[johndiii]

Excellent. Thanks for the formula; I hoped that someone who knew would bring some accuracy to the discussion. Actually thinking about the real piece of foam - its size and mass - makes both the degree of air-drag deceleration and the damage that it inflicted on the wing more comprehensible. We're talking about a large, relatively massive (probably at least an order of magnitude more massive than an equivalent volume of styrofoam) chunk of material, travelling at a high rate of speed.

Bzzzzzzzt. You're all wrong.

[irving47]

At least, I didn't see anyone point this out...
The math of this is that air drag is proportional to the square of the speed....blah blah blah. Lots of people trying to calculate this...
In two words:
What air? Way up there, there's little or no air.
Read up on what happens when you drop a feather and a hammer in a vacuum. They hit the ground at the same time. No wind resistance. It might as we have been a 1.5 lb hammer.

Re:Bzzzzzzzt. You're all wrong.

[cheeto]

They were only 81 seconds into flight when the foam broke off. Plenty of air there.

Re:Bzzzzzzzt. You're all wrong.

[irving47]

By 20 seconds into the flight, the shuttle has completed it roll and is accelerating through the atmosphere at about a 78 degree angle. Stress on the shuttle caused by its speed through the atmosphere is further relieved by powering back the main engines. By 45 seconds into the flight, the shuttle breaks the sound barrier. A minute into the flight, the pressure on the orbiter decreases and so the shuttle engines are returned to full power. At this point, the shuttle is traveling at an incredible 1,609 kilometers per hour (1,000 mph) or about Mach 1.5. By the end of the next minute, it will triple this speed!

No way was there much atmosphere at ALL at 81 seconds. I'm not sure where the troposphere meets the ionosphere, etc, but at that speed, they've got to be out of it.

Re:Bzzzzzzzt. You're all wrong.

[ColaMan]

Search google for "shuttle max Q" - that's the maximum aerodynamic pressure exerted on the shuttle during launch.. and it's about 60 or seconds after liftoff.

Actually - look at the chart here which shows the typical pressures on the shuttle during lift-off. At 80 seconds, they're still only a little below max q. Still would be awfully windy outside at that point

Re:Bzzzzzzzt. You're all wrong.

[ColaMan]

Replying to my own post, and reading the graph mentioned previously, q at 80 seconds into the launch is about 500lbs per square foot of surface area. Thats a fucking lot of force exerted on a (1-5lb?) chunk of foam over the time it takes to get from tank to wing. I'm not bothered to work through the actual velocity change, but it's be a fair bit.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[Zach978]

I'm pretty sure the acceleration is not linear. I think the coeficient of drag increases quadratically with higher speeds. I don't think you accounted for the low density of the foam either. Less dense objects will be effected more by drag (more volume/S.A., less momentum).

mass is not a measure of inertia, idiot

[truth_revealed]

Where did you go to school? I'll be sure not to send my kids there.

The Test Sounds Invalid

[jmcharry]

If they did what the account seems to indicate, fired a chunk of foam at a stationary wing, then the impact would be much greater than if the wing were also moving at 500+mph. It is rather like the difference between chucking a beer bottle at a mailbox alongside the road as you pass by vs chucking it at one mounted on the bed of your truck.

Re:The Test Sounds Invalid

[Basehart]

Get your truck up to the speed the shuttle was travelling when the foam hit its wing and see what a bottle does to that mailbox.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[Daetrin]

Actually, it would LOSE kinetic energy relative to the Shuttle. The foam slowed quickly, while the Shuttle still accelerated. Its kinda like hitting a hitting a rock that falls off the back of a truck on the high way. If you were to drop the rock on the wind shield at rest, it may not do any damage, but when it whacks it in motion, you get a nasty crack!

No, it was losing kinetic energy with respect to the earth (at least until it had slowed down to terminal velocity) but it was gaining kinetic energy with respect to the shuttle. From the reference frame of the shuttle the foam was accelerating towards it. It's just like a relativity problem except a lot slower :)

Not even with Duct-tape?

[sirgoran]

"The result was a large hole that probably could not be repaired in orbit even if it was known about."

Geez, I always thought you could fix anything with enough duct-tape.

Who Knew!?

-Goran

Re:Not even with Duct-tape?

[Jack Schitt]

yeah... duct tape could've fixed it, but because the SCO is claiming the it holds the copyright to 11% of every roll of the stuff, NASA decided not to include it on the shuttle.

TPS reports!

[zoloto]

I hear your having a problem with your TPS reports...
Yeah, didn't you get that memo?

Mass is too a measure of inertia, idiot

[Daetrin]

from dictionary.com,

Mass n.

6: Abbr. m Physics. A property of matter equal to the measure of an object's resistance to changes in either the speed or direction of its motion. The mass of an object is not dependent on gravity and therefore is different from but proportional to its weight.

inertia n.

1. Physics. The tendency of a body to resist acceleration; the tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest or of a body in straight line motion to stay in motion in a straight line unless acted on by an outside force.

Or if that isn't an exact enough correlation for you, from Webster.com:

Main Entry: 2mass

1 c : the property of a body that is a measure of its inertia and that is commonly taken as a measure of the amount of material it contains and causes it to have weight in a gravitational field

Where did you go to school? I'll be sure not to send my kids there.

Yeah, i know, the truth hurts. I at least would like to think my kids can handle it though.

Freon

[carlos_benj]

And now those involved in medical missions to third world countries are finding it more difficult to refrigerate medicines - especially bad since DDT can't be used to eliminate the insect carriers of diseases like river blindness.

In the meantime, cows all over the planet are depleting the ozone layer with unregulated flatulance.....

What could they do in the future...

[Codex The Sloth]

It strikes me that every shuttle should carry an escape pod in it's cargo bay. Maybe buy a soyuz cheap from the ruskies. Then the next time the shuttle craps out they can punch out in orbit rather than us pretending that it's all ok till they burn up in the atmosphere.

Just a suggestion...

Re:What could they do in the future...

[Quarters]

You'd need the lift capacity of a Shuttle + the lift capacity of a Soyuz just to get the whole thing into space. With $/pound-lifted costs being as high as they are it's just not feasible to do something like you suggest.

Re:Fine, Fine

[ramdac]

I think you mean Lose, not Loose.

Check here http://www.stickimup.com/modules.php?name=News&fil e=article&sid=1

for an explanation.

The point of all this blabber...

[yunfat]

I think that this is one of the better /. stories I have seen in a while because the comments are pretty well informed and involved a good degree of empirical evidence. Regardless of whether the foam did it or not, I think the point is that the shuttle itself is a dinosaur. We need a newer/safer/cheaper/faster method of getting into space. A few months ago someone wrote a comment that there are 5 shuttle orbiters, and 2 have crashed... that means NASA has lost 40% of its shuttle fleet. Sure the shuttles go on multiple dangerous missions etc... but 40% failure rate during a vehicles usable lifetime is an indication to me that NASA is very bad at what they do. I don't give a damn about the 60's and 70's, I am a child of the 80's... NASA has done nothing for me except TANG. Between the hubble mirror being faulty, the space shuttles going down, and the fact that NASA clearly has a policy that wants to keep the average joe from getting into space, I'm pissed. New management is necessary for me to beleive in NASA again. Every American should have a chance to view the earth from outer space in 100 years, thats the future I want, not scientists mucking around with earthworms... I want parties in space.

Not the first time...

[davehaas]

Looks like the doomed Columbia flight wasn't the first time hot gases intruded into a shuttle wing:

CNN Link

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[wideBlueSkies]

>>And besides, don't you think that NASA of all people would have been able to figure out some math like that? It's what they do for a living for Christ's sake. It's not like they're pulling this number of of their collective ass.

Are you sure about that?

I seem to recall

[uberdave]

I seem to recall that on the first shuttle flight, when missing tiles were a *huge* concern, that the astronauts had some sort of chemical foam, or gel that they could use. It would burn off like the Apollo heat shields.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[sparkie]

*Maybe* the shuttle was travelling at the speed of light. :)

Not quite correct

[spitzak]

Non-inclined orbits are not easier. As you just pointed out the ISS orbit was chosen so the Russian launches could reach it (actually it is a compromise between the idea orbits for them and for Florida and Europe), so it is obvious that some orbits are easier to reach than equatorial.

In any case this is the first time anybody has mentioned inclination instead of altitude. Does anybody know if, assumming the shuttle had unlimited fuel, it would spend more fuel speeding up (and raising it's orbit) or changing the inclination to reach the space station?

Re:Not quite correct

[Rich0]

Non-inclined orbits are always easier to reach - if you can launch from anyplace on the earth. The USA has florida - which is nearly on the equator. Russia doesn't - they launch from much higher latitude.

It would be harder for the Russians to launch to zero inclination than for them to launch to the high inclination used by the ISS. However, it is still more expensive for them to launch to ANY orbit than it is for the USA to launch to a low inclination orbit from Florida. This is because the closer you get to the equator the more advantage the Earth's rotation gives you.

In the end there was a trade-off to consider. Is it cheaper to have the Russians spend more fuel to get their ships to a low inclination orbit, or is it cheaper to have NASA spend more fuel getting the shuttle to a high-inclination orbit. The answer is that it is cheaper for NASA to compromise than for the Russians.

For the Russians to get to a low inclination orbit they have to launch at high inclination and then once the ship approaches the equator they have to change their direction of thrust. For the shuttle to end up in the ISS orbit they just have to wait until the ISS orbit is overhead and launch towards the northeast instead of towards the east as usual. This just requires a little more fuel at launch instead of some complex two-stage launch vehicle.

My basic point is that a zero inclination orbit is always the cheapest to reach if you can launch from anywhere on the Earth. If you have a constrained launch position some orbits may be cheaper to reach than zero-inclination, but you'll never be able to make orbit as cheaply as you could from the Equator.

Re:Not quite correct

[spitzak]

That's very interesting, and agrees with the limited knowledge that I have (which is that for a given position on the earth, one inclination is best, and it depends on the latitude. I think that inclination is equal to the latitude, but not sure).

Does it actually take less energy to increase the inclination than to decrease it, or is just that it can be done at the ground by the booster rockets (ignore atmospheric friction any anything else complex). It does seem like the fact that the high-inclination one actually passes over the low-inclination position could make a difference to the entire energy requirement, but I'm not sure.

Re:Not quite correct

[Rich0]

I'll admit I'm not a rocket scientist, but I think I can answer your questions.

Inclination is the angle the orbit makes with the earth. If you project an orbit onto a flat map you get a sine wave (think movies showing mission control). The inclination would be the amplitude of the sine wave. Low inclination orbits only pass over tropical regions. High inclination orbits pass over most of the Earth's surface. If you launch going due East I believe the inclination would be the same as your latitude. If you launch in some other direction you can increase the inclination further. You can't decrease inclination simply by changing launch direction - any deviation from due East increases inclination but may rotate the phase of the "sine wave" by 180 degrees.

I believe the energy needed to increase or decrease the declination of an existing orbit is the same. The issue is where the energy must be applied. Picture two orbits with different inclinations - they intersect at two places on opposite sides of the earth. To change orbit you have to thrust at the point of intersection. This point of intersection must always be at a latitude lower than the inclincation of the lowest inclination orbit (since a lower inclination orbit doesn't pass over higher latitudes). If you launched with 50 degrees inclination over Russia you would have to wait a quarter orbit until you are over the equator to switch to a lower inclination orbit. Note that in setting up the first orbit you created a large velocity component perpendicular to the equator - you now have to cancel all that out - which is wasted fuel on launch and at correction time.

The issue isn't so much the fuel as when you have to spend it. Spending twice as much fuel at launch means just having bigger engines. Spending the launch fuel twice (once getting to one orbit, and once changing it) means carrying the second set of fuel as payload (meaning more fuel on the first half of the operation) and then having big engines in orbit to make the change (meaning more weight and also more fuel in the initial launch).

It is better to lanch directly into an orbit than to try to change things later. And since you can always increase your inclination at launch but never decrease it that is the best way to go.

If you ever want to tinker with these concepts first hand you can download a program called Orbiter which is a spacecraft simulator. It isn't altogether polished (though as freeware it rates pretty good), but you can put yourself on a pad at Kennedy and take off headed NE and see just how your orbit ends up. It can give you an idea of just how much fuel it does take to change inclinations - you'll find you spend almost as much fuel dramatically changing inclination as you would taking off in the first place... (You can also dock with the ISS if you want, or fly to the Moon or Jupiter or wherever for that matter - though leaving Earth's orbit gets harder since now there are multiple gravitational bodies involved).

Re:Not quite correct

[spitzak]

Sounds exactly the same as what I was thinking.

Is the ISS orbit at the ideal inclination for the Russian launch location, or do they have to change it slightly, and is the change up or down? If so, do you know what other factors went into choosing the inclination?

Re:Not quite correct

[Rich0]

Don't know offhand. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find out. You just need the ISS inclination and the latitude of the Russian spaceport. As far as other factors - I'm sure there is stuff out there, but I have no idea what they might be. I have seen complaints though that the ISS orbit was designed to accomodate the Russians and now NASA is finding that they have to pay a hefty part of the bills. If you ask me the whole thing is a boondoggle. They didn't even make a choice between getting into space or getting out - they decided to go halfway and ended up with a station which requires full time effort just to stay operational...

ISS orbit inclination

[200_success]

FYI: The orbit of the ISS is inclined at 51.6 degrees. The inclination is in large part determined by the latitude of the launch site. (Source: Ed Lu's Space Blog, recently mentioned on Slashdot.)

#3... yeah, whatever!

[black_widow]

the x-15 never reached its design goals because a hypersonic shockwave burned a hole through the ventral fin on flight #199 and nearly destroyed the aircraft.

the x-15 had to use an ablative coating to survive the heat because material sciences could not provide sufficient heat resistance

note that one had a fuel expl0sion and one became a smoking hole somewhere out west

oh yeah, and it never made it into orbit

geez, how wonderfully superior to the shuttle...

Re:#3... yeah, whatever!

[Galvatron]

I don't think he was saying the X-15 was better than the shuttle, he was simply saying that the X-15, an experimental project, was flown more times than the Shuttle, which is not considered experimental. The point is that the Shuttle has not been as thoroughly tested as many people believe, despite its age.

Re:#3... yeah, whatever!

[black_widow]

The difference is that we could accurately model the flight envelope for the shuttle at its inception, but could not for the X-15.

I respectfully do not agree with "the point"

The X-15 and related programs were the research necessary for the shuttle.

Although the shuttle also did not meet its initial design expecttations, it has obviously had great value beyond proving concepts or recording flight data

Note that "prototype" airliners now join the fleet soon after the launch customer receives the first production aircraft.

Read and learn

[truth_revealed]

So Webster.com says mass is a measure of inertia, does it? Oh boy! It must be right!
Not according to Special Relativity.

I'd take the MOOSE...

[Tokerat]

...over the Paracone! Look at this:

A ballistic re-entry followed, with a peak of 9.6 G's. No parachute was required. The terminal velocity of the Paracone was 42 km/hour and impact was absorbed by the crushable structure of the cap of the cone.

Basically, you jump from orbit and your rocket-powered chair breaks your fall. I'd rather have the 'chute and be covered in foam crap, thanks...

The X-15 has killed.

[sllim]

The US has had an astronaught die in space. One of the maneuvering jets in an X-15 got stuck open. I remember seeing cockpit footage of it once when I was a kid.
What an awful way to die.

Re:The X-15 has killed.

[shthd]

Absolutely: Spaceflight is dangerous. There will always be accidents in the industry. The idea is to reduce the dangers to more acceptable risks. There was also a spectacular accident in the X-15 program. This was a manned ground based test firing. I've seen the video on the discovery channel but couldn't find any links. The engine exploded and blew the cockpit forward. Somehow, Scott Crossfield surivived.

Read it, you're still wrong

[Daetrin]

Let's take a look at that page. Ah, the first definition they give:

"The term mass was introduced by Newton in Principia, 1687."

Okay, let's take a look at Principia. Oh look! He was talking about Inertial mass, which is exactly what the rest of us are talking about!

Oh, wait a second, i missed a little bit, the page you showed us is titled "Mass In Special Relativity."

That's great news! I hadn't heard that they'd put new Space Shuttles in service that traveled a significant fraction of c! When did that heppen?

Oh wait, it didn't.

I doubt that there's a single physics professor on the planet that would claim that special relativity needs to be applied to a Space Shuttle and a one pound chunk of foam traveling only 1000 or 2000 mph over the space of a few seconds, especially given what we're trying to calculate. The only conceivable case in which relativity might be usefully applied involving the space shuttle is if you were trying to calculate the fraction of a thousandth (or millionth?) of a second that is "lost" after a week or so of orbiting the earth. Guess what, that's not what we're trying to do.

And not only is that the only source on the web that i can find that claims "mass is not a measure of inertia," it itself specifies, "From the point of view of relativity[...]" which as previously shown, we're not using in this discussion and have no reason to use.

And if you think the best way for your kids to be taught in school is to skip clasical physics and go straight to special relativity, your kids are going to be in a world of pain, and probably not very well educated to boot.

Simply amazing...

[JRHelgeson]

Its simply amazing that after thousands of hours of research, and millions of dollars spent, they have discovered the obvious.

Leave it to NASA and the government to research the hell out of what is a painfully obvious cause to the accident.

Rumor has it that NASA is changing its acronym to "Needs Another Seven Astronauts"...

Re:NASA getting desperate, (take II)

[mobets]

I was going to moderate, but instead I think I will feed the troll...

What if... The shuttle was already moving very fast, with some rather high speed wind going by. What if the foam, while pretty hard, is also light. What if air resistance slowed it down substantialy. Then, there could be a much greater difference in their speeds.

Re:This proves NOTHING

[Jack Schitt]

...basically the wing caught up with the foam chunk

...like a bug hitting the windshield...

Re:NASA getting desperate, (take II)

[Fantastic Lad]

What if... The shuttle was already moving very fast, with some rather high speed wind going by. What if the foam, while pretty hard, is also light. What if air resistance slowed it down substantialy. Then, there could be a much greater difference in their speeds.

A 500+ mph differential achieved in one second due to wind resistance? You're reaching.

Anyway, we all saw the foam fall in the video footage. And if we could see it, then it sure as heck wasn't moving at 500 mph relative to the camera!

-FL

Re:Well...

[LilMikey]

Dude... Tang is already radioactive.

You don't have a clue, do you?

[truth_revealed]

The original poster claimed that mass was a measure of intertia. Special Relativity refutes this. I brought this to your attention. You were wrong. You obviously agree with this or you would not have posted such a long-winded fact-less rant. This is pedantic perhaps, but this is Slashdot afterall. I never was making reference to mass and intertia with repect to the space shuttle. I was just making a point. You did not and can not refute this fact. So, please stop embarassing yourself further. You and your AC friend whom has professed his love for you should get a room.

Re:Sound familar? I'll say the same thing I did th

[mfrank]

Don't forget the that large, non-aerodynamically shaped chunk of foam was also being hit with 1900 mph winds. It's not just a matter of the shuttle still accelerating.

Simulation ?!?!?!?

[cgas]

Yeah,but by the why NASA did real tests, fired with a real cannon, and made a real HOLE in the leading edge RCC. And if they cant repair it in orbit well why not to use a paradrop to rescue astros . . .