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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.
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 think part of the problem is the expectation of people that space travel is more science than art, when this is not true. It requires more than crunching numbers, it requires a lot of guess work and estimation, as well as intuitive individuals to impliment the science in the safest way they know how.
Yes, the science makes it possible but there is no way to fully test theories until you put them into practice, thus there will always be significant risks with space travel. I think most people know this, and the crews that actually take the risks certainly do.
Space travel is similar to travel by submarine, being submersed in an atmosphere that is hostile and will kill you if you are exposed to it, where you are totally dependent on what you have on board to deal with any situation. With all the experience and science we have regarding submarines, we still have accidents and should expect no less with space travel, where you can't simply surface. There simply is not, and never will be, a 100% solution to guarantee total safety for either.
This is part of the reason I still awestruck by those who are willing to take this extreme risk.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
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.
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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.
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?
> 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?
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
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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.
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.
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