Slashdot Mirror
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'."
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.
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?
Luck basically. 60% of launches lost foam, and the foam has a miniscule chance of causing damage
It might hit at an acute angle and bounce off easily. the foam might not hit the orbiter at all. The foam might be tiny tiny pieces.
It's because of this experience of the foam falling off so often and not causing damage that the idea foam could be to blame was originally discounted. It was just too outrageous - but when foam was actually tested on the most dangerous possibly spot, the leading edge of a wing or right into the flat of the nose, then the damage became obvious.
It's like the experience of riding a bicycle, and saying being hit by bugs isn't dangerous - and 99% of the time it's not, until you happen to get a rather sharp angry beetle right in your eye. Blinded and in pain riding along at 30kph and you're suddenly on the pavement.
It is a terrible tragedy, yes. They're not heroes. Enough of calling anyone who dies in a well publicized disaster a hero.
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.