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Crack Found in Shuttle Tank
hpulley writes "The shuttle's new fuel tank, supposedly redesigned to be safer, has a crack in it. Pictures were sent to the manufacturer who decided that it is too small to be worrisome. Hmm, what caused the Columbia disaster, pieces of foam?
Meanwhile, there will be a second shuttle on standby, just in case the first one has problems after being hit by foam, etc. If the first shuttle has a design flaw, what's to say the second one isn't afflicted by the same problem? Won't there be a good chance of them stranding the rescue crew in addition to the original crew? If an aircraft crashes and the redesign to fix it crashes, would you send another of the same type to rescue it? Of course not! The ISS is going to be a smelly, scary place with the regular complement and two shuttle crews onboard and no way home but a Russian Soyuz capsule that isn't slated to launch again until September and has seats for just three..."
Pardon me for being insensitive here, but I always wonder what the problem is with a potentially problematic space shuttle? Is it the cost, bad PR or safety of the crews?
It always puzzles me that a country which recruits hundreds of thousands of soldiers and spends hundreds of billions of dollars to go to wars with guaranteed casualties (and not all die in action) are so timid in losing a relatively small percentage of lives/dollars to go to space.
Everything has a risk, if you send those astronauts to do sky diving (or just drive to the supermarket) often enough, some of them will get killed too.
Why can't we allow those who are more than willing to sacrify their lives to go to space to do just that?
I understand that we have the responsibility to maintain certain level of reliability and to minimize risk, but all the safety concerns are slowing things way down. Other countries are catching up fast, maybe their lives are cheap? Or maybe they knew and anticipated the risk of losing lives to achieve something great?
I guess we can't go to the moon now because of the deadly moon dust, imagine what would have happened if we discovered it before landing on the moon?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
STS was originally conceived in the 60s, implemented in the 70s, and was launched in the 80s. I turned 24 today. The space shuttle first took off when I was six days old.
Sounds like Unix. And we're still using it, too.
If the first shuttle has a design flaw, what's to say the second one isn't afflicted by the same problem? Won't there be a good chance of them stranding the rescue crew in addition to the original crew? If an aircraft crashes and the redesign to fix it crashes, would you send another of the same type to rescue it? Of course not!
Whatever the fuck happened to objective reporting? What is this, Fox News?
I guess because its really expensive to start from scratch? I'm with you though... time for a clean start.
From the summary: Pictures were sent to the manufacturer who decided that it is too small to be worrisome.
I say, tell that to the astronauts who have to sit on top of the goddamn thing.
I bet the people at NASA who are smarter in their sleep than I will ever be could never come up with that.
Hell, I bet this guy knows what the tolerances for the tanks are intricately... way more than the GUYS WHO DESIGNED IT AND MADE IT FLY FOR THE LAST 10 YEARS.
This whole article reminds me of a little dog jumping up and down saying "hey boss, what if, hey boss what if" and you just want to kick it.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
That's actually not true at all. Originally phones were "party lines" where you could pick up your phone and listen to all the phone traffic for the neigborhood. It worked because you mostly didn't have too many people using them at once.
Then they had operators that switched the phone calls for you manually. You picked up the phone and got the operator and asked her to connect you to somewhere else, and she did.
Then there was pulse dialing with those old rotary phones.
Then they added touch-tone.
The phone signals are now often digitized when send over long distances and turned back into analog signals on the other end.
In actual fact, phone technology has been (and is still being) upgraded a LOT.
I agree that the shuttle does need to be replaced but it is not the same shuttle that flew in the early 80s.
No it's not. Those both exploded.
As a matter of fact, they both exploded because something seemingly trivial went wrong, something that nobody in a million years would have thought could endanger the orbiter. Something like a tiny crack in the foam on the external fuel tank. All the processing power in the world won't help one iota if sloppy security procedures and pressure to push the launch through cause yet another seemingly trivial thing to go wrong. I just hope NASA knows what it's doing.
I want the fire back.
Thank you. That is exactly what I thought when I read the stupid wording in the story.
You've got 113 missions. One blew up in flight, one blew up on landing. So 111 successes and 2 failures.
Please won't someone ask the astronauts if they consider those odds a fair risk to take for a flight into space?
Gee, do you think that astronauts might actually be AWARE that you know, blasting into space on a large rocket, might just be dangerous? Do you think they might have figured that little risk into their choice of career?
I really hate people like the submitter who think that they know how to better measure the risk than those actually involved in space operations.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
That attitude is the exact pussified reason we arnt walking around on mars and pickin up space chicks right now.
The greatest accomplishments are made by people who succeed with what they have.
If man could make it to the moon in 1969 useing the processing power of a calculator and we still havent made it to mars yet, then its only because of a shift in attitude.
serenity now!
Because all the programs that were slated to replace the shuttle have been scrapped for various economic and political reasons. We need a vehicle that can take off from an airfield and fly into space without complicated and expensive launch mechanisms to support it for space travel to ever become safer and more commonplace. Look at SpaceShipOne for an excellent start to what NASA SHOULD be concentrating on. Don't blast the thing into orbit on enormous dangerous rockets, fly into the upper atmosphere on wings and then use rockets to boost into space. Unfortunately NASA's single-stage-to-orbit program has long since been axed. It's a pity really.
Because, you know, racist jokes are so funny.
Next up on Slashdot, some pundit bemoaning the dearth of women and minorities in the computer field. Wonder why that is...
In neither the Challenger nor Columbia losses was the failure something that was completely unanticipated. Both of the fatal problems had been identified as a specific risk and were being worked on and analyzed when the accidents happened.
Inability to conduct reasonable and overriding safety reviews in NASA's operations was a major and legitimate issue, but your claim goes well beyond what the historical record substantiates.
Sounds like Unix. And we're still using it, too.
That might be the most accurate comparison I've ever read on Slashdot. The thing is, it reads like a troll, but it isn't.
Here are some other thoughts to go with yours:
"Sonds like cars, which still have four wheels and reciprocating engines. And we're still using those too."
"Sounds like the 747, which still has four jet engines. And we're still using that too."
"Sounds like liquor, which still comes in glass bottles. And we're still using that too."
"Sounds like soda, which still comes in cans. And we're still using that too."
You might notice that:
A: All the things we both named have been continuously improved since inception, despite vast advances in the underlying technology.
B: UNIX is the only one unrecognizable in it's current state. (Mac OS X)
C: The Shuttle's concept was not fleshed out properly after it got beyond the design stage. The same is not true of the other designs, which have been forced to compete in competitive markets.
All of my examples (and yours, of UNIX) have done well in the market for over twenty years. The Space Shuttle has not, in my opinion.
I regret that I never got down to Edwards to see the STS land while I lived in California. Odds are it probably won't land there again - unless someone here knows different. The recovery and travel costs are too high for NASA.
Just thought it was worth a comment.
Foam tiling, or shot down? I've visited this question before, and I did a very half-assed job of presenting the 'Shot down' argument at the time. Since then, I've put various ducks in a row and rather than working from faulty memory, did the proper research. So here we go again. .
1. NASA public relations and the media presented a very tight argument for falling insulation damage being the culprit in the Columbia disaster. --Historical evidence was presented from the NASA archives purporting that previous missions of both the Columbia and other shuttles had shown some limited damage to heat tiles resulting from foam insulation falling from the fuel tanks. The speculation and arguments were that a larger piece of foam striking in a certain way could cause a critical failure of the heat shielding.
2. Despite the recommendation by NASA engineers during the mission that the foam insulation strike in question did not pose a problem and that the mission was in no danger, the conclusion was reversed after the disaster and subsequent investigation.
3. In doing follow-up on this whole story, I ran across this curious item about a photographer who was shooting the Columbia as it first started to break up. He captured an image of an energy bolt striking the Columbia followed by a series of pictures showing a flash and the break-up.
This is a follow up on that story.
The photographer was an electrical engineer who works for Sparks defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp. He was at the time also a volunteer at the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno. He captured his images of the shuttle from the Fleischmann facility.
This is a brief description of his video according to an article in the RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL;
There is no mention of the energy strike in this article; the reason I included it here was in part to show the value of his film. If you read the article, you can see that NASA sent a letter thanking him for what were considered to be valuable images which indeed showed the earliest stages of the break-up. --This article also seems important to me because these were apparently the images which came directly after the first frame which showed an energy bolt striking the shuttle. Why the energy bolt was not mentioned at all in the article seems very curious to me.
Here is the first photo showing the energy bolt.
So anyway. . . What we have right now are two stories. The first is the big media story which broadcast the NASA claims regarding the incident; a piece of foam caused damage to heat tiles, which in turn resulted in a critical failure.
The second story is one which comes from two sources; a channeled source claiming an energy weapon was used to shoot down the Columbia, and a photograph of an energy bolt actually striking the shuttle just before it broke up.
So which is more likely. . ?
One:The U.S. Government can be counted on to not fabricate stories, and that NASA's own engineers who originally said the foam strike did
If India does the engineering and China does the building, then what the hell do WE americans do?
Neither India nor China are going to outsource "Management" to the US. We can't even be BUYers (customers) of this great new technology if we don't have money coming from somewhere in the first place. In short, we will be completely out of the "loop".
US tax payers have a duty to fund research in the US.
Otherwise the US will just be a large, poor, underdeveloped residential community.
Looking at the design of the shuttle we have three major components. The tank, the SRB's and the orbiter itself. We've had catastrophic failures of the orbiter due to the failures of the SRB's and the tank. Are we biding our time until the orbiter is the primary cause? When are we going to finally get to a simpler design? All the major unmanned missions we launch are upgrading their systems to more robust and newer designs that use simpler configurations (which are usually more reliable). The shuttle has provided a great service, but it's time to leverage it's lessons learned and more forward.
I know it's too late and no one will read this, but...
I would like to point out that the level of engineering involved in the design of the shuttle is in a completely different class than any technology you have in your computer or in your car or that you've likely ever have had physical contact with. Cars and computers advance quickly because they are cheap and if they occasionally don't work no one really cares.
Everyone bringing up the age of the space shuttle sounds like morons. Whatever our next orbiter is going to be, the technology will be outdated. It has to be outdated by the time the thing is ready for flight because it has to be proven. You don't use the latest composite materials or computers in building something of this cost (dollar, life, and national pride) because you don't know how they respond to the excessive accelerations, vibrations, and high energy radiation involved.
This is assuming you're building a real vehicle and not a toy to win a prize. And actually, we probably will not see another feat of engineering like the current orbiter because the government doesn't give money to people who know what they're are doing like they use to and the private sector is too lazy and opportunistic to engineer it right.
UNIX is the only one unrecognizable in it's current state. (Mac OS X)
How you snuck that one through and still got a +5 is beyond me.. bravo!
A lot of the materials used in both the space shuttle and an airliner are same but the stresses are very different. Each flight puts many years of stress on a shuttle. Even with airliners stress fractures are largely guess work. It's impractical to do inspections thorough enough to find every stress fracture in an airliner. It's why most are grounded after a certain number of hours in the air. Remember when a large number of 747s were brought out of mothballs? Several of them had stress failures. The space shuttles are inspected far better than an airliner but under the massive stress of a single flight it's very difficult to be sure that a minor stress fracture won't cause a failure. A small crack in the wing that wouldn't cause a failure in of itself could allow in superheated gasses in much as happened in the last shuttle flight and cause a major failure. The best you can do is reduce it to an acceptable risk. The real eye openner related to the last disaster was the fact that NASA had no contingency plan for surface damage. Imagine they had been able to inspect the shuttle and found the damage, what then? You can't land and there's no rescue on the way. The entire world gets to watch the crew slowly die or they watch them die quickly in a hopeless attempt to land. It was a scary revelation that in truth NASA was crossing it's fingers and praying nothing happened because there was no fallback plan. The ugly truth of why there were no inspections was that it wouldn't make any difference. Ignorance is bliss is a scary safety policy.
"Personally, I'm all for that. Let the private companies make the progressive steps, let NASA become..." let NASA be the FCC of the space 'world', at least here in the usa. just dont give them the outright and overbearingness of he FCC.
Let them be the general populations "seal of approval."
sure they have f00ked up in the past, but you have got to give them SOME credit!
like me having to use BIG M's onscreen keyboard to 'type' this thanks to an unfortunate beer accident...
- You're not paranoid, they really are after you.
The hairline crack is on the side of the tank opposite the shuttle. No one is sending astronauts to their death, this article is looking for a flame war.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
If you had decent reading comprehension, you would have noticed that he didn't say anything derogatory towards "black people" at all. It's more like he called the CIA racist, which the government as a whole most certainly is.
Freaking out when someone mentions anything that could possibly be related to someone whose skin color is dark due to their ancestors living closer to the equator than someone else's ancestors does more to propogate racism, and the idea that there is any real difference between humans of any race other than history, and cultures that were held in certain, static areas of the globs due to lack of instantaneous global communication, and differing natural resources.
Christ.
kaens.blogspot.com
lest we forget.
The Army's most deadly aircraft the A-10 Warthog was designed and built in the 50's most flying today are 20+ years old. We CANT come up with a replacement that is as safe, effective and DEADLY to tanks as this horribly old aircraft. Men on the ground in the middle of what seems like a hopeless fight gain new hope and even cheer at the sound of the A-10 engines. Enemies around the world have nothing but fear for that distinctive sound... as they know that no matter how high tech your tank,carrier or other vehicle is that aircraft will destroy it easily... Oh the A-10 can be missing, yes MISSING 35% of it's aircraft and still fly home safely, it can also take direct hits to the pilot's location from below and protect the pilot... this thing was designed to be shot at almost constantly.
How about the C-130 transport aircraft? It still uses fricking props! Designed and built in the late 40's the last c130's built were made in the 60's and 70's! they are STILL the backbone for military cargo and transport. These planes can land and take off from places that no other transport can even hope to.
I can come up with thousands of "old" examples that we rely on today because the new device is a piece of crap and can not replace the old one, or there is no replacement because it was designed "perfectly" back then.
How come some new smartypants engineering students have not "redesigned" the geodesic dome? How come none of the great minds coming out of engineering schools can even touch the genius that was Frank Lloyd Wright and his designed from the beginning of the last century?
New does not mean Better. And that is more truthful right now than ever.
computer components today are garbage compared to 5 years ago... hard drives and ram almost NEVER failed. Cars today are certianly no better at effeciency than 10 years ago. I chose to buy and drive a 10 year old car because it is getting better gas mileage than any of the hybrid cars today.
The shuttle is dated, but it also is certianly not running on designs from that long ago. The computrers are newer, the engines were redesigned not that long ago, and we have that nifty new camera on the main fuel tank just a few years back!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
1. Nasa's rates are too high? The Delta-IV Heavy is one of the cheapest launch systems in the world per kilogram, *despite* the fact that US labor costs are so much higher than Russia's and China's. The shuttle is expensive (although not as expensive as is often portrayed here, and has many capabilities that are widely used - for example, bulk cargo return, which has ferried back spacecraft on about 1 in 3 missions, and was what was keeping the ISS from being loaded up with trash), but the shuttle is hardly the only NASA spacecraft out there.
2. NASA didn't build the spacecraft. *Private* companies like Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital, etc did. In general, they did both the design and construction. Now, if cheaper spacecraft were possible without unreasonable risk, don't you think that these companies, with all of their experience, would just build their own? They've got the budget for it, after all. Some private space launch companies exist, but they mostly use modded versions of Soviet-era rockets, and charge about what the Russians and Chinese charge for space launch; they're not hugely profitable companies.
The only way to seriously get space launch costs down are the "high risk" designs and extensive basic research. Guess who's doing those? That's right: NASA.
By the way, lets just head off an obviously impending argument.
3. The shuttle *HAS* changed since its inception. For example, the bulk alloy of its tanks is now lithium-aluminum; its insulation type has changed; its thermal blankets have changed; its tiles have improved; the SSMEs have gone through a number of refinements; the seals on the O-rings have completely changed (and probably would have changed even without the challenger disaster, as the research was ongoing at the time into the separation problem, which was a well known problem, and not just in shuttle SRBs); etc. But yes, the basic design is old; only the details have changed. There are a number of basic design issues that should be dealt with that we didn't know at the time, and a number of issues that were forced on them due to budget constraints.
What a crazy random happenstance!