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Foam Gluing Flaw Killed Columbia Astronauts
Freshly Exhumed writes "Now it can be told: NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board has blamed the faulty application of insulating foam for the loss of the Columbia orbiter. From the chief engineer for the external tanks project: '...NASA concluded after extensive testing that the process of applying some sections of foam by hand with spray guns was at fault.' And further: 'It was not the fault of the guys on the floor; they were just doing the process we gave them'."
Sixty percent of the time? I don't pretend to be an expert, but that number seems a bit high, especially when this can cause such damage. Can anyone shed some more light on the situation here?
Karma: Oldschool
It's amazing how something like the method of gluing on insulation tiles can cause a shuttle to blow up, yet for all the serious damage done to Apollo 13 they still managed to get back alive.
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
> I'm of so many minds about this. Yes, we needed to know in order to fix this process. I'm glad no one tried to pass the buck. I'm disappointed that it took so long to figure this out. [...] We know know what caused the problem, and we can avoid it in the future.
Sadly, there is (and probably always will be) a lot of learn-from-accidents in the field of engineering. When a bridge falls down or an airplane falls out of the sky we investigate and update our standards accordingly (if the bean counters don't object too strenuously).
The various fields of engineering are far more sophisticated than the way IT is usually practiced, but even in mathematically disciplined fields we still have to learn a lot of stuff the hard way.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The more things change, the more they remain the same.... (see here)
To understand this, the Russians only have to prepare to sell some of their [space] tech to the Chinese, then Americans will come out screaming.
They also produce some of the deadliest weapons on earth, and all in simple production houses...and ohh...they also have the heaviest and biggest flying aircraft in the world. Please google for the Antonov-225.
Russians just need more organization.
The notion of the, "reusable space plane," is simply stupid. If the astronauts ran NASA, we would have vehicles, like Saturn V, that lifted mass into space and capsules that bring down only what we need. The shuttle is a boondoggle to throw money to the aerospace industry. The Progress M-50 craft is vastly superior to our shuttle when it comes to lifting weight to orbit. We lost a shuttle because Senator Orrin Hatch (Bush-loving republican, natch) overrode the engineer to throw work to Thiokol. The original design called for one piece boosters which would be transported by barge. Orrin made them cut the booster in half so Thiokol could bid. (There aren't many barge routes in Utah.) The two haves were joined by -- o-rings. In the United States, there is only one agency with the tradition, tradition and ability to explore. Let's turn the space program over to the Navy and go back to the moon.
The Dutch guy who just went up with the Russians once said in an interview: Like the USA, at ESA we are very thorough on our equipment and we cherrish it. If it is not necessary, you are not even allowed to point at a rocket, let alone touch it. When I went to Russia for my first Russian training, I saw engineers hammering away at their rockets and boosters. They were sitting on the stuff working on it with wrenches and other heavy tools... it was not like anything I every experienced with ESA or NASA at all. It scared the shit out of me.
/. way: with a hammer and duck tape.... who knows? Fact is that they have been up there longer than anyone.
Maybe the Russians just do 'Space' the old fashioned
Is it not the case that they changed the formulation of the foam in an attempt to be "environmentally friendly"?
And that the foam did not have these problems when they used the original, non-green formula?
Political correctness is going to kill this country. It already killed those astronauts.
No, as I see it, the core problem is that today manned spaceflight is so difficult, so close to the limit of what is possible with chemical rockets, that every safety margin has to be shaved down to the bone for it to be even possible. There are a million things that can go wrong, because every part is designed as close to the limit of the materials as it can be. If we put in a safety margin that would be considered normal in most earthly applications, we could never get to orbit. IAAME (I am a mechanical engineer) and it would drive me crazy if I had to shave everything so close just to make the thing work marginally.
The Antonov-225 was designed back in the Soviet era, and like many of the USSR's military concepts was expected to be useful in non-conventional warfare or "police action" programs. It took Afghanistan to teach the USSR that there would likely be anti-aircraft assets in the hands of local rebels and resistance movements.
One of their assumptions was that there would be need for a military controlled asset in areas without anti-aircraft weapons deployed. The US typically relies more on civilian assets for such functions as disaster relief. We would also normally pay (in both time and money) to pre-position really large industrial equipment by ship instead of plane. The USSR wanted to be able to fly in enough gear to resume oil production and refining on very, very short notice, for just one example. The time involved was much shorter than would be needed to restore an oil based economy post war, and more a matter of having fuel for Soviet armored divisions still in full active combat mode. It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide just where the USSR hoped to use this capability.
Who is John Cabal?
Russian nuclear safety is laughingly bad, it always has been. I'm in the nuclear navy, and generally when we explain why we do our things the way that we do them, by comparing it to a russian design and point out their flaws. Look at chernobyl, in what way was that good design? The whole reason russian subs are faster than american subs are because they lack as much shielding in the reactor compartment. This is a known fact. Even the movie K19 highlights poor russian nuclear designs. Where are the equivalent US nuclear incidents, if Russian subs are so equivalent? I can't go into a detailed discussion of Russian tanks or planes, but I leave you with this. Many of our opponents in the last 20-25 years have used Soviet weaponry. If their equipment is so effective, why has the US basically decimated every standing army that stood against it during that time? The Iraqis had Russian tanks, it didn't seem that they did too well against American weaponry either time.
For all of you /.'ers out there there's an interesting new technology out there to detect these types of flaws. I'm a nuclear student at UF and some in our department are working on lateral migration radiography. It's a rather cool process, shoot x-rays into the foam and get an image of what's inside and find out where delimanation or debonding has occured. http://www.nre.ufl.edu/facilities/backscat.php
From this page:
"In November 1995, the partially completed (Russian) shuttles were dismantled at their production site. The manufacturing plant is scheduled to be converted for production of buses, syringes, and diapers."
Gotta love capitalism.