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Shuttles Grounded Once Again
PipianJ writes "After discovering that the piece of the shuttle that fell off mysteriously, not actually striking it, (as reported earlier) was a piece of foam insulation not unlike the piece that ended up in the destruction of Columbia, Yahoo News reports that NASA has once again grounded the shuttle fleet."
... It's DONE.
Time to send 'em to museums, and develop a modern, robust system based on all we've learned from 20+ years of 'experimentation' with reusable spacecraft.. Maybe see if the Skylon has merit...
Dont know about you guys but a 1 in 113 chance of a massive catastrophy sounds pretty high to me. 15,000 bits in 100 or so missions? 150 pieces per mission ?? wtf do they use to hold it together? flour and water? Is it really that hard not to have things fall of it. I understand that there must be quite a bit of vibration but the G forces involved are not very high. My food processor vibrates a lot too and it doesnt fling things off every time I use it.
Still a disgrace. Nasa is a joke, the Russians could do so much better. The Russian budget is miniscule compared to Nasa's and they are the only people getting things done in the name of manned space flight.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Harmless? Modded Informative? WTF? Do you not remember that foam falling off is what damaged the last shuttle resulting in death and destruction???
It was harmless *in this case*. It wasn't last time, and may not be next time?
One of the major changes this flight was new foam that was supposed to NOT fall off. Obviously it didn't work, so it is a MAJOR setback. Seems to me that they need to add some webbing (carbon fiber mesh or something) to the foam so it CAN'T break off in chunks. This would be much like the mesh they embed in concrete to add strength. Concrete, like this foam, handles compression fine, but has virually no sheer or tensile strength.