Shuttle Wing Has Been Breached Before

Marc writes "AP is reporting that the shuttle's wing has been breached before on reentry. (Story on Yahoo!)"

Comments

Re:Cause of crash...

[wbav]

I think what they are saying is that Nasa has had this problem before, but didn't address it as seriously as they should have.

Just my $0.02

Atlantis probably just lucky

[TheRoachMan]

The article states that ground control ordered the Atlantis (which survived a breached wing and landed safely in 2000) to do a cooling-manoeuver, because they suspected the ceramic tiles to be damaged by a chunk of ice. If it hadn't been for ground control's suspicions about this damage, Atlantis would've probably shattered too. Columbia just went all-out during re-entry, because ground control was worried about tires not warming up enough to guarantee a safe landing. Talk about irony. This brings a question to my mind: Instead of using the cooling-manoeuver as a sort of 'last-resort', why not make it a standard modus operandi to do the cooling-manoeuver, unless of course there are serious reasons not to? Might save some lives and money.

Re:Atlantis probably just lucky

[Matrix272]

I certainly don't mean to trivialize your argument, but I tend to think the kind folks at NASA have at least one reason for not requiring a cooling maneuver upon reentry. I understand that you may believe it could save some lives and money in this instance, but overall, it might have done the opposite. The only people that can answer your proposal would be the Rocket Scientists at NASA, or someone who's a home-study Rocket Scientist, although I doubt it.

I thought this was well known?

[stefanlasiewski]

Right, foam has hit the wing before, the wings have been breached before. It was mentioned several times after the Columbia disaster. I remember listening to an 'expert' on NPR (Can't remember his name) saying the previous occurances happened without insident, and was why NASA wasn't pursuing the foam theory. Pursue the more likely scenarios first.

The Associated Press is pushing this news as if it was a big revelation, but there doesn't seem to be anything new in this report.

Am I missing something?

Re:I thought this was well known?

[rjh]

While it's true that there have been several foam impacts before, NASA never (to the best of my knowledge) said wings had been breached before. Breaches are amazingly lethal conditions, and NASA takes them very seriously; when any tile gets deteriorated by more than 0.04 inches, it gets completely replaced.

NASA's line about why they didn't throw a fit over the foam has always been "well, it never caused any problems before..."

Now it turns out it did cause problems before and came within a whisker of losing Atlantis. In a fair world, it would mean the jobs of several NASA bureaucrats--not just for not paying attention to foam-strike problems, but for lying to Lehman's committee, to Congress, and to the American people about how there had never before been any foam-strike problems.

From this AP story you can read that one of the astronauts on board the Atlantis when it had the wing-breach found out about the wing-breach when she was contacted by the AP for a comment. Not only had NASA covered up the wing-breach--they weren't even informing astronauts of the risks.

Re:I thought this was well known?

[teridon]

Now it turns out it did cause problems before and came within a whisker of losing Atlantis.

No, it did not cause problems before. Here are the relevant parts of the article:
During liftoff, a 6-inch chunk of ice had smashed against the back edge of the right wing; so experts deemed it prudent to adjust Atlantis' flight to rapidly cool its wings ...NASA blamed the Atlantis damage on improper installation of a seal between two protective panels on the shuttle's left wing[emphasis mine]

So ice had struck the right wing; the cooling maneuver was done to protect it. The defect (and subsequent breach) in the left wing wasn't known until after the landing.

Nowhere in the article does it say that foam caused damage to Atlantis. Even the ice strike was not the cause of the breach.

Dodged a bullet, but by accident

[jwriney]

The AP article mentions that ice impacted Atlantis' *right* wing. This motivated ground teams to perform the cold soaking procedure. But the actual damage was on the *left* wing, and was caused by improper installation of some sort of seal thingy. So Atlantis may have been saved by the cold soak, but the truly dangerous condition that could have cost them the orbiter and crew wasn't the one they prescribed the cold soak for!

Disturbing.

--riney

Changes needed

[gizmo_mathboy]

From what I've read concerning about what the review board has found this is exactly what they want to change.

It is one thing in a test/development/research environment to have something unexpected to happen, that's why you are doing testing/development/research. However, once the project goes live anything unexpected that does happen should be examined thoroughly. Like in Challenger, when the O-rings were being eroded that wasn't expected behaviour. Yes, O-rings are there to seal joints and they did their job but no one expected them to be eroded.

With Columbia there were 2 events: surface roughness and foam chunks. Hard to say which was more deadly, I'll start with the chunks. I would have thought that when things start falling off of the vehicle that NASA/Boeing/whomever would have done better testing and research into what was going on. A first guess would be that no harm would come of it, it's foam. However, it was moving at several hundred miles per hour and it wasn't something that was expected.

There was also a large amount of surface roughness on the wings. This leads to an early transition to turbulence which leads to increased heating earlier in the descent. Combine that with a foam chunk tearing a whole in the wing and you get 7 more dead astronauts.

Both these things were not part of the expected behaviour of the shuttle. Folks at NASA didn't think they were particularly harmful or didn't appear to cause any harm. So they let them go because they rationalized it away without understanding why they were occurring and what effects they may have.

Older, more effective foam was replaced

[e_pluribus_funk]

The older, more effective insulation foam, which was CFC based, was replaced with a much less effective foam that was more 'environmentally friendly' that was susceptible to breaking off in ways that the old foam was not:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,77832,00.htm l
http://education.atu.edu/people/sadams/blogger2 /20 03/02/01.html
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/ DailyNews/shutt le_ross_safetyproblems030204.html
http://www.baya rea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/510079 4.htm

Re:Older, more effective foam was replaced

[Matrix272]

I understand the arguments of both sides. I don't believe there is any global warming.

Global Warming or Hot Air?

The Leipzig Declaratioin

Desperate Times Call for Desperate Acts

Global Warming? Nevermind!

Cooling Off on Global Warming

Why the Kyoto Greenhouse Gases Accord is Full of Hot Air

Global Warming Hype Heats Up

Global Warming and the Media Elite

The Heat is Online

Numerous Articles on Global Warming


Read those articles, and do your own research. Don't trust me... look into it yourself, and you'll see the truth.

Re:Older, more effective foam was replaced

[wayward_son]

The Earth may indeed be getting warmer. (And there is still debate over this) If it is, it is seriously unlikely that it is caused by man.

Guess what, the climate has changed MANY times in Earth's history, long before man was around. Have you ever been to the sandhills of the Carolinas? These sandhills are about 100mi (160km) inland. How'd they get there? Once upon a time, that was the beach. Likewise, what is now the beach was once considerably inland during the last ice age.

If the earth wants to heat up or cool down, there is truly very little we can do about it. Man made "greenhouse gasses" are relatively minor compared to naturally occuring "greenhouse gasses" coming from volcanoes and forest fires. It's a fart in a windstorm.

I could go on but I won't. There's still lots of debate, and this is as it should be, but global warming has not been "disproved" except in the minds of politically motivated ideologues.

The global environmental movement is as politically motivated as any right-wing ideologue. To say otherwise is terribly naive.

Inform yourself: life ain't black and white

[ianscot]

Feeding the trolls, I know, but Hello -- for the rest of us, those aren't mutually exclusive options. It isn't "save lives or protect the environment," as stark oppositional choices. And in this case, your black and white ideology is causing you to pile onto a political tactic rather than seeking the truth.

A nice synopsis of the tank types, the flights they were used on, and so on:

What's this about Columbia using an old tank?

The tank being used on Columbia was the older style. NASA has gotten exemptions from the EPA to use the old style tanks and foam. They happened to use an old one on this launch.

"(NASA) said the piece that broke off and hit the wing of the Columbia was PROBABLY THE OLD FOAM, NOT THE NEW, MORE TROUBLE-PLAGUED MATERIAL.

When it had trouble with the replacement foam, NASA applied to the Environmental Protection Agency for an exemption from the CFC ban, saying, 'no viable alternative has been identified.' It gained the exemption in 2001, and still uses that foam in a few spots on the shuttle fleet."

--ANDREW C. REVKIN (NYT 2/6/03)

Meanwhile, astronauts have mentioned the problems with the foam since the earliest days of the program:

During the early missions, astronauts even complained over their cockpit radios during liftoffs about falling white-colored insulation from the external fuel tank hitting the shuttle's windows, according to a 1983 NASA report. It said spray-on foam insulation flying off the external tank could cause significant damage to the shuttle's heat-resistant tiles.

Engineers developed at least two procedures -- shaving foam insulation and venting it with thousands of tiny pinpricks -- to reduce the amount of insulation flying off the external tank.

But NASA stated three years ago that "venting ... is only a temporary solution to the problem until a new type of foam can be formulated and applied."

The old foam is still being used.

...After Columbia's first flight in April 1981, NASA engineers said they would have had a difficult time clearing it for flight had they known in advance the insulation breakaways would produce such a debris shower.

-- AP story on USAToday

NASA's been working on this problem since before the first launch. Gee, it doesn't seem like a stark "environment vs. people" choice they made, does it?

You might want to consider your sources before you start assuming everything falls into the neat little cubbyholes your politics make you think of. Fox "News" has run a "special" claiming that the moon launches were all a big conspiracy; maybe that's not the best source for news about NASA. You think? (Meanwhile do we hear any liberals ranting about this all being Bush's fault? They seem to actually give a crap about the problem, rather than just vying to score faked-up political points.)