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Debris Seen Falling Off Shuttle During Launch
kushboy writes "According to an article on CNN.com, there is video of debris falling off Discovery during its launch earlier today. While the debris does not appear to hit the shuttle, extra precaution and more video will be analyzed due to the Columbia mission of 2003. 'NASA has taken steps to minimize the amount and size of debris falling off the shuttle's exterior tank during its ascent. But the space agency has said it's impossible to eliminate falling launch debris.'"
Must've been all that crack...
Although I heard on the news this morning (Australian EST) that NASA had announced there was damage to tiles on the nose of the shuttle - apparently unrelated to the falling debris.
That, I would have thought, would be more newsworthy for Slashdot - assuming I could actually find a reference to it on the web.
And to be frank, which is true Pinky-style, he thinks at 30 years old, the shuttle is past her prime and says it's time for the next spacecraft.
"I'm gonna worry about every launch until then," he says.
http://www.komotv.com/stories/38187.htm
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Articles like this just makes me proud to pay taxes.
Seriously, NASA does some amazing work! I wish the politicians could stay out of it so we would have the next generation craft 10 years ago as we were promised. The shuttle also should have been retired 10 years ago (with a workin replacement 10 yrs ago), but thanks to the number of people the shuttle keeps employed, the "pork" shuttle is still here. Oh well, thankfully it is over soon.
The sad thing is the shuttle was supposed to be part of a system that included a space tug and a space station. Of course the shuttle is nothing like it should have been. To many short term savings traded for long term costs.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"But they don't have a mind for policy and no one chose them to choose it."
I assure you very few politicians have a "mind for policy" either especially when it comes to space, science and engineering.
How about let Mike Griffin make the decisions since he is in charge of the agency, he should be held responsibile for success and failure, and that means he should have the power and money so that he has a chance to succeed. From the stuff I've read he seems to have a pretty good head on his shoulders, and is a VAST improvement over O'Keefe who was both gutless and clueless. NASA desperately needs one person with some smarts, guts and vision setting one direction and also someone will to make some deep and painful cuts to get NASA on a course that isn't broken, which the current one surely is, and get rid of all the dead wood and dead weight.
If you let Congressman set the policy their #1 priority is to turn NASA in to a jobs program to create jobs in their districts. Costs balloon, nothing gets done, reference Shuttle and ISS. That is all our government does anymore, churn out pork to create jobs and line pockets.
At one point there were 6,000 people directly employed full time just on the Shuttle not counting contractors making parts. The Shuttle has over its life averaged $1.3 billion per launch far in excess of what was advertized.
Congressman with big shuttle and ISS pork, especially Florida and Texas, are already making threats Griffin's way if he tries to cut back jobs on the the shuttle and ISS to free money for CEV and beyond.
Politicians need maybe need to set the target, and insure adequate funds for the long haul and then get completely out of the way for the execution.
@de_machina
Hmmm, I have always wondered, why is it so hard to avoir the debris from the tank? Why not just flip the orbiter over and connect the tank to the top of the orbiter? The debris would then fall where heat is no concern during re-entry... I guess aerodynamics during liftoff are not that big of a deal given the huge power the solid boosters provide...
It just seems to me they are looking at the problem from the... wrong side (no pun intended).
You forgot to mention the Boost Protective Cover, or BPC. The BPC was part of the Launch Escape System (LES) which included the jettison motors. The BPC protected against heat buildup during launch and also protected the crew during a launch abort. They jettisoned the whole assembly around 270K feet. There's some really great footage kicking around of Apollo 6 losing its BPC as viewed from the inside of the cabin.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Except, you know, the Russian Buran Shuttle with 20 tons return capacity vs the shuttle's 15 - and 30 tons of launch cargo capacity vs the Shuttle's 25.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
Best of all, the Buran could fly to orbit and back on autopilot without a human crew if needed (as it successfully did on a test flight).
From the Wiki article, the final version of the Buran has a single, solitary flight and this flight was unmanned. Hardly an impressive record, no?
The best thing that NASA could have done at the time to replace their shuttle fleet would have been to fund or buy Buran from the Russians when they ran out of money. the Russians built an amazing robot spaceplane in the 80's, something that NASA still has not achieved.
Again, from the Wiki article: "The U.S shuttles landings are also mostly automated (there has only been one manually flown re-entry so far), but deployment of the landing gear requires a human to physically press the button. The manual step was added at the insistence of the astronauts, who claim that early deployment of the landing gear due to a computer error would be fatal." Geee... which flag are you waving?
NASA's shuttle is a bastard design created from political compromise: the military wanted it, the scientists wanted it, the politicians wanted it. As a result it works for almost nobody and is a 30-year old deathtrap. I'm suprised the loss rate has been so low - I have no idea what drugs NASA is ingesting, I'll be very suprised if this one isn't lost as well. The shuttle should be killed and replaced ASAP, preferably taking some serious clues from bulletproof no-compromise brute simplicity Russian space engineering - which is currently the best in the history of the world (until the Chinese or commercial sector catches up and passes them).
Reading this is funny (in a dark way) in light of a recent article over at MoFi concerning the R-16 accident. Possibly the worst rocket accident in history and it was caused by... political and symbolic concerns trumping scientific ability.
If the shuttle's re-entry angle is wrong, EVEN WITH NO DAMAGE, airframe stress becomes critical, it breaks up and everybody dies.
If a Russian space capsule's re-entry angle is wrong, they experience slightly higher G-forces and the pickup helicopter takes a couple of minutes longer to reach them after parachuting to earth.
You've switched gears and are comparing a shuttle to a capsule. What happens if a US capsule's angle is wrong? What happens if the Buran's angle is wrong?
Modern metal alloys are tough enough to survive re-entry without protection from heat tiles. Get that? In a modern design, NO HEAT TILES ARE NEEDED. Which completely eliminates the cause of one shuttle disaster (when the heat tiles failed).
I'm hardly an expert, but I thought the purpose of the tiles wasn't to simply survive heat but to prevent its conduction. Can you take a modern alloy of similar weight and thickness, heat one side with a torch and hold your hand on the other? Then you have a fair argument.
Photographs show that the area has sustained surface damage (the black surface is missing) and potential heat shield tile shear. The "not hitting" the shuttle bit is merely that the debris didn't cause additional damage elsewhere.
You have obviously completely missed the point.
It's common for shuttles to lose a few sections of tile during missions - it has happened many times before (once, a shuttle came back with a pretty large section of its nose tiles missing - perhaps as many as 20. I don't remember the mission, but I saw the photos afterwards). This does not necessarily mean anything, and could in fact be completely normal. The fact is tile damage of one sort or another happens on every single mission.
Debris hitting the shuttle is a different story altogether, because it was conclusively proven that Columbia was brought down by a piece of foam impacting the reinforced carbon carbon leading edge of one of the wings at more than 500mph. The headline here suggests something similar happened on this launch, which it clearly did not, and nobody has suggested as much except whoever submitted this article. That is sensationalist, not to mention basically an outright lie.
It is worth mentioning and remembering that Columbia's disintegration had nothing to do with tiles. The reinforced carbon carbon on the leading edge of the wings is a completely different material than the tiles are made of and in fact it is structural material, not simply a cover on top of structural material (as the tiles are). The hole in Columbia's wing was blown through the leading edge of the wing - this would be equivalent to blowing a hole through the fuselage in the area we're talking about now. That did not happen.
The damage is close to the upper limit of what they could repair in space, if it does prove to be tile shear. This may force a rescue mission.
Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt. I mean I have about as much evidence for that as you do for a rescue mission. Nobody has said any such thing either at NASA or in the press. Hell, not even Drudge has suggested as much - that oughta show you how far out the statements you're making are.
Debris is inevitable, this is perfectly true. This is why such systems SHOULD have the best monitoring that money can buy, including internal sensors that can detect anomolous conditions.
So your solution is to put a sensor under every single tile on the shuttle? Or maybe more than one under each tile, to check for temperature anomalies under tiles that are partially broken? That's what it would take to do what you're suggesting.
There is a point at which more data is just more data. It doesn't tell anybody anything; in fact it is more likely to result in an error because the humans that are required to interpret such data can only process so much. (And as we all know, trying to program computers to interpret such data is even less reliable.) And it really doesn't make a difference is the temperature is 2 degrees higher in one spot than it is a millimeter and a half away.
In the case of Columbia, the damaged sections would have cooled faster than normal, due to being open to space,
News flash: the entire shuttle is in open space. The wings are not pressurized, nor are they heated. In the vacuum of space, the interior of the wings would have cooled at the same rate regardless of whether there was a hole there or not (and the hole only exposed metal structure until plasma melted it on re-entry, so the rest of the wing was still as shielded as it was going to be from temperature changes on launch).
You're so far off in your analysis here I really am not sure why I'm even bothering to argue the point, except for the fact that you write in a style that suggests more knowledge than you possess, and I do worry that some people may actually take you at your word. But rest assured, everything you have said
Too bad the Buran was copied, almost exactly except for the lack of engines, from the US shuttle. Its enhanced capacities are due to the removal of the on-board engines and the capacities of the Energia booster stack, which we should buy, as it is a very good Big Dumb Booster. However, BDBs aren't sexy, and Not Invented Here Syndrome brings its own problems.
So, you have a simple pressure guague and measure the difference between observed pressure drop and your expected value of R. If the total discrepency exceeds some critical threshold, then there is a problem with the wing that would create a serious problem.
Now, measuring the temperature. There's this thing called a thermocouple. Dunno if you've come across these. It requires a couple of strands of wire, which you can run down the length of the wing quite easily. Alternatively, find a piece of metal in the wing that joins to a piece of metal that runs into the cockpit. Two types of metal, a temperature gradient, sounds like a cheapskate peltier device to me. Check the potential difference and you can detect unusual gradients with minimal effort.
Rescue mission: Uh, NASA themselves said that if there was a problem with launch that they would have Atlantis on standby for a rescue mission. Drudge might not have said it, but I don't give a damn about Drudge. I do give a damn about NASA's own statements.
The fact is, I've worked there and know how NASA operates. I know several of the contractors who build components for the shuttle. I've seen round their workshops, I've talked with their engineers. This doesn't sound like a lack of knowledge to me.
I don't need to defend myself in the face of those who really do know less than me, or even less than those who merely read the newspapers and bother to remember what was said by the people involved.
I don't need to defend how much I know. Repeatedly, as none of this is unique to this posting, I've said all of this in prior Shuttle and/or NASA debates when people have asked for my sources. Why should I keep telling people stuff that they could have looked up for themselves? All my postings are searchable on Google, same as everyone else's. If you wanted to know the extent of my knowledge, you wouldn't need to troll for it.
Can I prove I worked at NASA? Sure. You'll find my old NASA e-mail address on a number of Open Source projects I helped out with at the time. You don't know what those are? Seek and ye shall find. It's not hard to figure out.
Let's see. So, I have inside knowledge of the engineers, inside knowledge of the construction of the Shuttles, and inside knowledge of the political machinations of NASA. And I am the one with the faulty assumptions, working from knowledge I don't have?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It first flew in the early 80's, the designs are from the late 60's early 70's.
The problem with a new design is that new problems come with it. New unknowns. The shuttle is a very well known, and for space travel, reliable platform. New doesn't necessarily mean safe. Improvements could be made, but as with software, the newest software isn't the most reliable.
The real issue is that they are taking large amounts of fuel, and converting it into large amounts of kinetic energy in a very short time, then after floating around for a bit, try to dissipate that energy in a very short time. It's about like a car designed to hit a wall at 200 miles per hour without injuring the passengers. It's probably feasable, but probably not so safe.
Space flight will become safe when we can either use more time to convert the fuel to kinetic energy, and also put the breaks on a bit slower or have much greater control of the energy sources and dissipation we use. I think a space elevator is the best bet currently, but that has a lot of unknowns at this point, and is minimally a few decades away from reality.
While you're certainly right that Soviet politics caused a lot of harm to the Soviet space programme (The N1 Lunar rocket is a good example as well), the Soviets generally overengineered everything they designed, possibly because they were used to such low quality engineering and workmanship. The results became obvious later with the Soyuz boosters performing remarkably well with no serious problems even in the chaos of post Soviet Russia.
And if you take a look at the Energia booster (the most powerful booster ever, I believe), the thing just looks extremely robust, even if it only flew twice. Once to launch a military payload, and once to launch Buran.
But you're dead right about Buran. It's laughable to judge on the basis of one single flight.
Doesnt it hit anyone that attaching a rocket tank to a space shuttle and blasting is way to space is kinda archaic ? here we in the year 2005 and we got all this tech guy toying around with the principles of matter and that kind stuff and humanity is still blasting his way to almost anywhere.i dunno i think is about time they ditch that and start seriously researching for a more secure / cost effective way of reaching space. just my lousy 2 cents