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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."
But, we can hope! If they can make the launch every 2 months or so, that's going to be amazing - they have fewer orbiters than before, so it's pretty agressive. The question is, what comes next?
It looks to me that the Asian countries are going to take over real space exploration. That's both good and bad. China isn't exactly known for sharing information, but at least they are doing it.
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.....of course, the coating will harmlessly burn away on re-entry (I was thinking LineX...as they advertise it as being really strong and I think it was Dateline or 60minutes where they showed a concrete cinder block that was coated that survived a 2 story drop)....maybe even make a coating that when it does burn, it leaves a thin carbon film for added heat protection (and fills any micro-cracks in the heatshield).
Or add a second layer of the super-light tiles that are half the total thickness (not half the protective black but of the backing material).
o well...maybe it's a cost thing...but I would think the cost of lives far outweighs the cost of the materials, not to mention the cost of the shuttle itself that is saved.
Can anyone explain to me how, as the article suggests, less heat shield dings = better foam? I understand that foam falls off and CAUSES these problems, but surely, in orbit, there are a lot of other small things flying around? Like that spatula?
Check out the UFO on the latest shuttle launch
It's not much, but it's another one NASA missed.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-9107467
I know a guy who is a subcontracter at one of the research centers. He is an IT technician. I get to hear all sorts of stories about these so call 'brilliant rocket scientists'...stuff like "what do you mean I shouldn't store my email in the deleted items folder?" or "my laptop doesn't work when I hit the power button" meaning the power button on the monitor that isn't even connected to the laptop. He also relayed a story of a conversation that happened around the lunch table, they were talking about the mission to Mars. After some debate about "they could do this or that" he had this to say "You know the engineers and scientist that we work with? You do realize that THEY are the ones working on this stuff? Having worked with most of them...you can have my seat on that rocket...". Remember that these are also the people that 'forgot' to convert metric to standard messurements once. It's one thing to 'forget' to do laundry but to forget to translate metric or forget to even include it in the checklist?!?! Until space travel/exploration becomes a private venture there will be slow progress. NASA doesn't get sued when it's human cargo get vaporized, a private company...will.
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
So the foam has been damaging tile for a long time. Would we have had better turn arounds with fewer tile repairs if we had fixed the foam a long time ago? And saved lots of $$$ in the mean time?
I think maybe what we're going to see is a rather serious shift in how we think about space travel. I'll bet China is going to come up with some very innovative ideas as they develop their space program. There's the vast amounts of existing expertise available in NASA, the ESA, and what's left of the Russian space program. The ESA and NASA are still pumping out cool new ideas. And now we have the private sector trying to get its foot in the door. With all of this knowlege, skill, imagination, and toil, the dam is probably getting close to bursting, ushering a new age of space exploration and technology. History has shown rather clearly that when you get this much competition (or cooperation -- in science, they're basically the same thing) going on, big stuff happens.
This would seem to indicate that the new foam is working better.
The foam itself hasn't changed at all, so that comment is misleading. What's been changed is where the foam is applied.
Oh, and there's two types of foam btw. There's the stuff that gets sprayed on the acreage areas of the tank (which is applied by machine), and there's the foam that's hand applied to stuff that needs a bit more precision. The acreage foam is the new environmentally friendly stuff you hear blamed for the Columbia accident. Which is ironic, because it's the other foam, the hand applied variety, they've had so much trouble with. And guess what? It's the older, non "evironment friendly" type, and it's also the type that caused Columbia's disaster.
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