NASA Probes Shuttle Oxygen Leak

Cherita Chen writes "NASA is investigating the possibility of a gaseous oxygen leak, posing a serious fire risk, during the launch of the space shuttle Discovery in July. From the article: 'Engineers uncovered possible evidence of high concentrations of the gas in the rear engine compartment about two minutes after lift-off. A leak could lead to a fire or even an explosion in flight.'"

Comments

500 parts per million?

[Lord Byron II]

What is the significance of the 500 parts per million figure in the article? What is the rest of the gas made up of? As a reminder, normal air is 20% oxygen, or 200,000 parts per million.

Re:500 parts per million?

[RayBender]

The engine compartments are filled with pure N2 to prevent the possibility of fires. 500 ppm of O2 is quite small, but it shouldn't be there at all - clearly something is not right...

By the way, the inert-gas fill of the engine spaces has caused problems - I think a couple ground crew were killed some years back when they entered the spaces before they had been properly vented.

Re:Scuttle the Shuttle

[drinkypoo]

Dude, they knew all this before they even fucking built it. The Shuttle was a decent (if suboptimal) design before the military got at the specifications. It had to carry and be able to deploy cargoes of a certain size to get the write-off from the military.

The shuttle was supposed to be a prototype and we were supposed to move on. Instead, we got the shuttle, and it was "good enough" so we hung on to it. The fact that we A> discard the main tank, B> have to totally rebuild the SRBs, and C> have to rebuild the main engines, and all of this for each flight makes it just as cheap (if not cheaper) to use rockets as compared to the shuttle. The only thing the shuttle has that rockets don't is that it can be used to bring things back from space. Well, if those things are the right size and shape for the cargo bay, anyway.