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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
Actually, I took that as the guys who designed the process actually taking responsibility, rather than shifting it to the poor techs who were doing the gluing. I agree that PC sucks, but this didn't look like an example of it.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Let's remember the heroes who died that day. I think it's very sad something like a little glue can cost lives in the blink of an eye. What a horrible mistake. There is an interesting article on the safety upgrades for the spring 2005 launch.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
No... if I give you instructions on how to build a house and you build it EXACTLY to my specifications, following my instructions perfectly, who's to blame if it sucks? Me or you? Me. They're saying that it's not the fault of the guys who work on the floor, as they were just doing what they were told to do. Unfortunately, the method that they were told to use has now been discovered to be faulty.
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.
I hope that we can use this as evidence the next time someone says, "Oh please, somebody thinkg of the children.. ehrm.. astronauts!" We know know what caused the problem, and we can avoid it in the future.
On the other hand, I'm already looking forward to the privatization os space, because I think the days of NASA are declining. For as great an agency as it is, it's got a terrible public opinionation...
They will just launch another investigation into how this procedure was come up with to glue these tiles on.
They will find out that some budgetary advisory panel recommended these procedures against the wishes of some NASA engineer in order to save a buck.
Eventually this will fall out of the public eye (as most things usually do). In the end, no action will be taken against the people responsible for this horrible tradgedy. In fact, the same contractor will probably be hired again to advise them for the next-gen shuttles or whatever they come up with.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat is not the standard I want when the lives of some of the best and brightest people this world has to offer is hanging in the balance.
[/rant]
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
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.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.... (see here)
Murderers? schoolyard bullys? I hate PC too, but I don't see how your example applies here.
If you have a job at NASA, I would guess that the procedurs put in place to perform a task such as gluing foam to the shuttle are followed exactly how you were trained to do it.
I think the engineer(s) that developed the process of sticking foam to the shuttle should be looked at before those that do what they were instructed to do by the engineers..
Perhaps budget constraints didn't allow them to thoroughly test their design is to blame.
I think it is a horrible accident, a very hard lesson learned. This is rocket science, it is not easy and accidents do happen. The most important thing to get out of these accidents is, did we learn our lesson? And have all measures been taken to prevent it from ever happening again?
This is not to say that investigations looking for negligence are unwarrented. If true negligence is discovered then I will give the murderer analogy you posted a lot more consideration.
It is a terrible tragedy, yes. They're not heroes. Enough of calling anyone who dies in a well publicized disaster a hero.
"It was not the fault of the guys on the floor; they were just doing the process we gave them," Otte said. "I agree with the (accident investigation board) that we did not have a real understanding of the process. Our process for putting foam on was giving us a product different than what we certified."
Kudos to Neil Otte for coming up like this.
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.
*rotten and corrupt it certainly is, but (I think) it's still better than the rest -- we'll see in November if we can change course or remain headed for the pit.
And those shuttle crews always knew that. The shuttle couldn't somehow 'magicly' be safer to launch and use than unmanned spacecrafts.
Now wait just a minute. Is spaceflight dangerous? Yes, of course. But did it have to be THAT dangerous? NO!
We're not talking magic, just some basic common sense. NASA, before the time of the accident, was an even more bureaucratic mess than it is now. Thousands of safety waivers were signed off nearly every mission. Engineers were "pressured" not to talk to management about safety concerns, and to top it all off, the one SURE thing that could have prevented the accident (satellite photos from the DoD), were cancelled at the last minute because some douche bag in management though it might "appear like" incompetence.
I mean, it's nice to know the TECHNICAL reasons for what caused the shuttle failure, but let's not lose sight of the unforgivable bureaucratic confusion that allowed an understandable mistake to go unnoticed and uncorrected. How many more lives and billions of dollars do we have to waste before we stop blaming "foam gluing" or English standard units and address the real root of the problem?
-Grym
Nor are there any tiles, as more than two fool implies.
The foam is sprayed on, and it adheres directly to the External Tank's aluminum substrate (and itself, of course). Some metallic sections of the tank are coated with epoxy before being sprayed. But the process is slightly different on the bipod structure:
The insulated region where the bipod struts attach to the External Tank is structurally, geometrically, and materially complex. Because of concerns that foam applied over the fittings would not provide enough protection from the high heating of exposed surfaces during ascent, the bipod fittings are coated with ablators. BX-250 foam is sprayed by hand over the fittings (and ablator materials), allowed to dry, and manually shaved into a ramp shape. The foam is visually inspected at the Michoud Assembly Facility and also at the Kennedy Space Center, but no other non-destructive evaluation is performed.
-- excerpt from CAIB report vol. 1, p. 51
You can get all the CAIB reports here.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
The thing that doomed the shuttle was not the glue process. It was the way the organisation reacted to the clue that something was wrong. There were many people pushing for a pro-active inpsection of the shuttle, either by camera or EVA and the "suits" obstructed it.
Let's suppose it wasn't a chunk of foam that hit the wing but some unlucky bird. Nothing would have changed - the film would show "something" hitting the wing and all the decisions form that point would be made the same way. Would we then be having an inquiry that decided the bird scaring process was flawed?
The issue is that something unexpected happened and the process for dealing with that went wrong. That needs fixing, not the glue..
YMMV
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.
Its great to find the point source of the failure, but after reading the report of the committe, it was clear that the real cause of the failure was systemic, going back many, many years.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to belittle the Russian space effort, they are without a doubt the leaders in the areas of heavy lift and long duration manned space flight - but predicting a crash and abandoning a space vehicle as too expensive are not the best examples of Russian space dominance.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
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
The Russians still have the best technology in space.
...their [space] tech to the Chinese, then Americans will come out screaming
That is a broad statement, Russian and U.S. spacecraft where designed for different purposes. Each type of spacecraft has it's own advantages/disadvantages. For example, the shuttle can release, dock, and bring back satellites in it's docking bay. Also, what about GPS, US Satellite imaging, Mars rovers, etc?
Can't disagree with you there. We are not on the greatest terms with China, but the US governent would probably complain about any country selling significant technology to China.
heaviest and biggest flying aircraft in the world. Please google for the Antonov-225
The U.S. has found that using several smaller cargo aircraft such as the C-130 Herc is typically more efficient for military use. The Herc uses a smaller runway, requires less maintenance, and is a smaller target for those nasty SAMs. In this case, bigger does not mean better. Don't get me wrong, a big aircraft is cool, but how practical is it?
The individuals on board Flight 93 who counter-attacked to try and regain control of the plane are heros. They knew they were going to die regardless, yet they had the self control and motivation to act.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
> Is it not the case that they changed the formulation of the foam in an attempt to be "environmentally friendly"?
Could be...
> And that the foam did not have these problems when they used the original, non-green formula?
All that means is that they didn't test the new foam correctly.
> Political correctness is going to kill this country. It already killed those astronauts.
No, people not doing their job properly can be blamed for both.
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.
> 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.
You are actually pointing out at the very core of what makes the Russian space project better than the Western (Yes, NASA as well as ESA): Russian equipment is made with and also using, the lowest technology that gets the job done. Thus it is so simple that it can hardly fail, and if there is a problem you can fix it yourself with a hammer and a spanner.
In the West there has been a plague of techno fetishism that adds more and more tech for very little gain. Tried fixing a modern car yourself? See what I mean?
MIR operated for three times as long as intended. How is this not impressive?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
...with the people who made the decision that they didn't need to inspect the orbiter using satellites before having it return. If the extent of the damage had been properly evaluated, perhaps we'd still have seven brave talanted people and one very expensive piece of equipment.
It's good to know what caused the problems with the insulation in the first place, but unless there are procedures in place that insure that the orbiter is properly inspected if there are problems during launch we'll see this happen again. The shuttles are incredibly complicated machines that are quickly reaching the end of their design life because of procrastination on designing replacements. We need to make sure that we take that into consideration when evaluating problems in the future.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Good post, AC. The Russians also accepted long ago that space is dangerous and people are going to die. Of course they prefer to minimize the number of deaths and the loss of expensive equipment, but they don't make an impossible level of safety the primary principle behind their space program. (Especially when it really doesn't end up being all that much safer.)
Which is why NASA is paralyzed for ridiculous lengths of time when anything goes wrong, and why private space programs are likely to make much faster progress. Private companies do all sorts of dangerous stuff all the time, people sometimes die, equipment is lost, and life goes on. It's as safe as it can afford to be given the mission at hand and the demands of competition, and that's usually Good Enough. If you're willing to spend the money from public coffers a millitary space program (as the Soviet-era space program essentially was) would also be pretty efficient.
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.
Wow, what shitty math. Ok, first you quote 400 km/h: .
The 'Foam' couldn't possibly have been traveling at the 400 km/h when it struck the Columbia's wing, as claimed. Consider. .
Then you quote 400 km/second:
The Shuttle lifter, while enormously powerful, certainly doesn't accelerate at 400 km/second.
I think we can all argree the shuttle doesn't accelerate at 400 km/SECOND.
That, and your accelerations are listed as velocities. Of course, the fact that air resistance could have played a role in accelerating the foam into the shuttle probably never crossed your mind. Finally, the shuttle is not an aircraft. It is primarily a space craft. Space craft tend to be "fragile." The heat shield tiles tend to be "fragile" as well.
Try again, with more math.
That's right. All your base.
Lack of money:
I'm 100% with you.
Lack of facilities:
Maybe. After all they have a big money problem. They used to have some damn good facilities, they just have little money for maintenance.
Lack of know how:
Are you smoking crack?
It's the RUSSIANS we're talking about. They've had space stations in orbit since the seventies.
MIR itself was the best until ISS was orbited. And they sure had a lot of influence designing ISS.
Those guys run progress unmanned craft to ISS, as they have been doing for years. Have most endurance records and even the shuttle docking system was designed by russians(NASA bought it in the ninetees).
I
GPG 0x1B479C78
that ABC has messed up the story. What is really getting into the voids is water vapor or nitrogen. Either that or the tank is so poorly constructed that dangerously flammable liquid hydrogen is leaking out, in which case it is a wonder that the shuttle hasn't exploded right on the launch pad.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
What happens to a very draggy chunk of low density foam in a supersonic stream of air? It will rapidly decelerate, right?
Imagine you impale a cheap styrofoam cooler on your car's hood ornament and head out on the highway. At 70 MPH, the cooler pops off the hood ornament. What happens? Does it keep coasting along with little relative velocity with respect to the car? No. It smashes into your windshield at close to 70 MPH. Whether the car is accelerating or not has almost no effect on the outcome. It's the rapid deceleration of the foam that causes the significant relative velocity when it strikes the car. Only the relative velocity is important. Sorry the NASA engineers confused you by not suspending a block of foam motionless in the air and hurling a section of wing at it.
As for the bulk of your post, containing that half baked ranting, UFOlogy and conspiracy theories, I'd have to say you get the tin foil hat award for the rest of this century. I imagine you with your tinfoil hat, wrapped in tin foil from head to foot, in a titanium submersible on the bottom of the ocean. And the mind control waves still get through. All that trouble, and all you really need to do is...
UP YOUR DOSAGE.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Correct. When they fly the shuttle back from its alternate landing location they have to avoid rain clouds because raindrop impacts really screw up the tiles. The heat resistent tiles are designed to withstand high temperatures, not impacts.
I think it addresses the point very well, which is that you don't know what you are talking about but do like to spout off on
Did you just learn that word or something? You seem to really like saying "sheer forces". It's still unclear why you think the forces of a wing moving through air are the same as those involved in an impact.
Yeah, they should have made use of the knowledge gained from all their other space shuttles. You are obviously a looney or a troll.
It couldn't possibly be because all the existing wings would melt during reentry, could it? No, of course not--it must be because they just didn't think of that. It's too bad they didn't solicit your input.