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NASA's Michael Griffin Interviewed
richvan writes "NASA administrator Michael Griffin was recently interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel about his first nine months on the job. He covers topics such as foam, Challenger, Mars, the budget, the astronaut corps and intelligent design. Describing the reasons for the foam loss, he states 'Cycling of the tanks with cryogenic propellants - in fact, [super-cold] liquid hydrogen, because we don't see this problem with liquid oxygen - causes or exacerbates voids in the bond between the foam insulation and the tank and produces cracks in the foam. If and when those cracks propagate to the surface, with a crack connecting a void to the surface, then you have a mechanism for cryopumping. When the tank is cold, air is ingested. It liquefies and goes into the voids. Then as the tank empties and the [air] warms up and evaporates, the resulting pressure blows the foam off.'"
How, exactly, to you go from discussing the technical aspect of space fuel tank construction, to starting a debate on friggin intelligent design?
Orlando Sentinel = troll.
From my perspective, this is possibly the best news here. Hubble actually generates science whereas the ISS seems to do less interesting things.
- AlanH
Well, if you see ID for what it really is, a front for religion, mightn't finding intelligent life well outside the scope of religion (which talks about man on earth as being God's little LEGO guys) pull a bit of the rug out from the ID folks?
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There were no operational failures. How's that for a quick statistical comparison?
There were also only 13 flights. The Space Shuttle also experienced zero operational failures within the first 13 flights. (It was the 25th flight, I believe, when the Challenger was lost.)
I'm not really saying that the Saturn V would have seen as much failure (it certainly wasn't as sophisticated of a design as the Space Shuttle), but it certainly wasn't flown for as long or as often. If you take the Apollo capsules into account as part of the complete space vehicle, it actually has a much poorer track record.
The truth is that the Space Shuttle is a marvel of engineering. The problem is that it was supposed to be a very focused piece of equipment (a shuttle to get people up and down) and ended up having to fill the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none role. Thanks Nixon.
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A micro crack occurs.
Atmosphere fills the voids.
The atmosphere liquifies inside the voids.
When the LH is removed, the liquified atmospheric gases are returned to gaseous form.
The change in pressure blows out the foam from the inside, because the liquid air is gasified within the foam crack and has nowhere to go.
Result: sporatic delamination.
Where I come from we have to deal with this all the time. They are called pot-holes!
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Any problem can be made unsolvable if there are enough meetings made to discuss it.
"The truth is that the Space Shuttle is a marvel of engineering"
I think the Space Shuttle is a marvel of Congressional pork barreling, Air Force mission creep, barely held together by the heroic efforts of some sharp engineers, working under hostile management.
Marvel of how not to do engineering if you ask me.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Shame that you don't require the same for presidents and congressmen! (Patriot Act, DRM, software patents, Iraq, Lewinsky)
"Griffin may have an engineering degree..."
Three, actually, plus Physics, Applied Physics, Aerospace Science and an MBA, just for the hell of it.
"...but he's a cold-hearted politician."
And if he weren't, and didn't deal with the organizational and political situation as it is and triage NASA priorities, NASA would actually achieve less. If he were king and could do anything he wanted and had an unlimited budget, then yeah, you'd be right, but the fact is NASA does not turn on a dime, in fact it is a deeply screwed up organization.
Technically, he needs to be more cold-hearted and admit that manned space exploration demands expecting and bugeting for astronaut deaths and not trying to make everything perfectly safe. Treat astronauts as hundred-million dollar pieces of equipment for purposes of deciding how much to spend in paperwork and engineering on extra safety. The politics is totally on the soft-hearted side on this issue. Over 5,000 miners died in China last year -- how many of those to feed factories that make stuff we buy but don't even need? Big projects that push the limits of the species always cost lives, and not that many by conparison.
Another issue on which M.G. could do some good is: costing out the opportunity costs of not having rapid development cycles in launch vehicles and associated systems. This is where the waste is. The failure to take risks, to have multiple production craft, to have a development pipeline of craft that will have a good chance of actually getting built, to change the insanely expensive way things are currently done in contracting and to set rapidly improving $/kg/reliability targets are the reasons why NASA has made essentially no progress in Earth to orbit capability in forty years.
For the $600,000,000+ that it costs to lauch the Shuttle once, a lean private firm could create a fully realized new launch vehicle, and with a few iterations it would be intrinsically safer than anything built with the traditional approach of attempting to manage rather than engineer risks away. Once the price to orbit comes down, the payloads become much cheaper, too, the demand goes up, expanding the industry, thus leading to far more science payloads.
The problem is, with limited resources and with the Shuttle still eating cash, to achieve long-term goals some stuff has to go now and that is going to be painful for the people affected, butiven the situation as it is, I don't think anyone else could do more than Michael Griffin to get maximum NASA improvement.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry