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Fewer Heat Shield Dings on Shuttle Discovery
According to NASA, the amount of damage to thermal tiles noted on Discovery was significantly lower after the latest mission. According to the report, there was a 33% reduction in the number of dings on the belly of the orbiter and an almost 50% reduction in the number of hits greater than one inch. This would seem to indicate that the new foam is working better. "The vehicle looked very good," Thomas Ford, a member of NASA's ice-debris inspection team at Kennedy Space Center, said Wednesday. "It's definitely gratifying."
Wouldn't that be great. I really like this new administrator.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Does any other country's space program have a farce^Wproblem like this, and if so why aren't we getting 10 articles a month about them too?
"amazing"? NASA was promising this level of launches over 20 years ago.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Where's the data on all flights prior to that one? What are the maxima/minima and standard deviation? A 33 or 50% variation might be expected.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Thinking of fixing, there was a famous incident in WW2 where a supposedly ruined American aircraft carrier was repaired to battle-worthiness in three days. Its presence in a subsequent engagement created enough confusion among the Japanese commanders to cost them the battle. And you know, America really did once have a reputation for precisely this kind of engineering awesomeness, which helped build America into the industrial giant it is. Could America ever regain this prestige? Maybe... if they'd ditch their hero worship of illiterate business school and start celebrating their genius Scientists and Engineers again, if they tried to be the kind of Country that Einstein immigrated to, rather than the kind of country he emigrated from, if the very idea of someone having a degree other than an MBA didn't make the average American vomit with an intense anti-illectualist rage.
This was never a problem until NASA had to change to a non-freon coolant in the 90s, in order to comply with EPA regulations. Can't NASA get an exemption from this? Is freon that so bad that we can't even afford to allow the Shuttle to use it, at the expense of a kludgy workaround that has, to date, claimed 7 lives?
Tcl my Pico! There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Yet, I couldn't believe they never inspected the orbiter fully while still in orbit until after they lost Columbia.
I always imagined someone did a spacewalk (even as spacewalks are dangerous) during one of the first flights to inspect the spaceship for damage done during lift-off. This is not the way to do engineering - building something extremely complex and expensive and not learn every tiny bit it has to teach.
The sad part is that lives could have been saved.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Agreed. And in 1985, they had 9 launches in 12 months. Then they had the Challenger Accident and shut things down from about mid 1986 to late 1988. From 1989-2002, they averaged a little over one every two months. Then they had the Columbia Accident that shut things down from early 2003 to mid 2005.
So I'd say that, barring accidents, NASA has managed to launch one every two months.
NASA needs to scrap the shuttle. Then scrap the CEV. Then with the freed up money build a 'true space exploration vessel' that will be docked and serviced at the ISS. You use the current crop of heavy lifters to get the parts and supplies up there and the Soyuz to transport the people up and down. Why wast money reinventing what we have already.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Everyone generalizes all the time. If you didn't generalize about absolutely everything, you'd be incapable of any action or thought whatsoever. Generalizing about the majority, of course, is particularly appropriate, since the majority is precisely the group about which generalizations are accurate. And reality is that Americans are an extraordinarily anti-intellectual people. Not at the nearly the same level as the totalitarian regimes of the 30s and 40s (where intellectuals were sometimes jailed or killed) or modern Islamic states (where intellectuals are consistently jailed or killed), but definitely far worse than other modern industrialized western nations. Some nations actually put scientists on their currency. I think Fermi would look quite smashing on a $50 bill, don't you? Edison could be on $100, Tesla could go on dollar coins (heh). Feynman, being an accomplished safecracker as well as a scientific genius and brillian teacher, could get the $1000 bill. It makes a lot more sense to celebrate these people that actually improved the world in a very real way, rather a bunch of jackasses whose only redeeming quality is that their lies were relatively consistent and easy to fall for.
I still don't see why they can't put like a protective liner or coating on top of the fragile graphite/ceramic tiles to protect it.
I can think of one amazingly obvious reason why they don't do it: weight (or, more precisely, mass). Every pound of stuff you put on the tiles to protect them is a pound less the shuttle can carry into orbit. It already can't carry very much (compared to unmanned rockets that are far less expensive to operate), so slapping a few hundred (or perhaps thousand) pounds of stuff on the tiles to protect them is not going to work.
Now perhaps you'll say that such a coating wouldn't have to weigh much because it could be thin. I will remind you that the foam that brought down Columbia slammed into the wing at about 550mph relative to the shuttle's speed. Any coating that's going to do any good would have to be able to withstand such an impact or it's not worth the weight of the coating. I think you should now realize that any protective coating would have to be (a) very thick and (b) very heavy in order to do any good, which would therefore (c) make the shuttle's cargo-carrying capacity more pathetic than it already is.
It's a bad design. You can keep applying band-aids all you want, but having the heat tiles exposed to debris damage during ascent is a fundamentally bad design than can't readily be corrected. Ever see a Saturn V launch? Tons of ice shed from the ascent stages, crashing all over the place, yet no Apollo mission was ever in any danger whatsoever because of it. The "valuable" part of the stack was at the top, away from debris, and the heat shield itself was tucked away inside the stack. Until we come up with a way to launch things without cryogenic propellants, this is going to be the preferred arrangement for getting stuff into space.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky