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Shuttle Atlantis Launched Without Incident
forkazoo writes "Space.com is reporting the successful launch of the space shuttle Atlantis. There were no major incidents or problems during the launch, except that there was some concern about the weather at the two European abort landing sites. The weather cleared up and the launch was pretty much perfect. 'Preliminary analysis of images taken by onboard cameras revealed expected "popcorning" foam loss during ascent but none that appeared to strike the orbiter. NASA has kept a close watch on the shedding of fuel tank foam insulation during shuttle launches since the 2003 Columbia accident, which claimed the lives of seven astronauts, and made modifications to reduce the amount of debris shed during liftoffs.' The launch was broadcast live NASA TV stream."
It is sad that a Shuttle launching with no problems is major news.
Is it only me wondering why the foam thing wasn't a problem in the 80s and 90s, and then after it came up as an issue, the people who pulled off some fantastic stuff with the Mars rovers are surprised when they don't have a problem with the foam, and everything is so tenuous?
...wouldn't it be safer/smarter to have it INSIDE the tank its self? The problem is, I think, simply a decrease in volume for fuel. The tank has two separate sub-tanks ( H2 plus LOX, plus a third section for control stuff ). Each one would have to be lined. They would probably want to line the third compartment too to prevent stresses from unequal thermal expansion.Then there is also the problem of foam acting chemically with the fuel or oxidizer. It now needs a liner. That is a lot of volume, and now the shuttle does not have enough room for fuel and oxidizer.
Anyway, that's my best guess.
> The problem is, I think, simply a decrease in volume for fuel.
[...]
> Then there is also the problem of foam acting chemically with the fuel or oxidizer.
[...]
> Anyway, that's my best guess.
Good guesses. Reality is stranger.
The tank is made of aluminum alloy. Very thin metal. At supersonic speeds, the tank would heat up. The increased temperature would cause the walls to become weaker, and the tank would buckle and rupture. By putting the insulation on the outside, they keep the metal of the tank walls super-cooled. Neat idea. The Delta rockets do the same thing.
Another reason is that if you think foam falling off the outside of the tank is bad, just imagine what foam falling off the inside would do. yup, it would get sucked through the engines. The turbopumps which inject fuel into the main engines are high-energy bombs, just waiting for an excuse to fly apart. So rockets (like Atlas and Saturn) with internal insulation require filters on the fuel lines to make sure they don't ingest any foam.
Hey the paris hilton story was entertaining, she completely cracked. I love it.
But I agree with you without incident? Wow! so you mean everything worked... like It has 90 percent of the time with the shuttle? Like why they test and rest the shuttle before launch?
Tell me when another one blows or we find aliens, sadly space has once again become boring. I'm sorry to say it but until I'm going up, I really could care less, the rate we are going (people afraid to fund it) we'll not even land on mars in my life time. I'm only 25! Even the stephen hawking and lord british space flight was only mildly entertaining (lucky bastards).
But this is hardly the worst article. The political section has very little "news for nerds" it's been turned into biased propeganda like many other websites. Your rights online is more about small corporations business rather then people. We have "fuck microsoft" over 90 percent of the site. Fuck Sony on games. Books mostly talk about books that are passing. And the rest? Either the news of the day (which you can read on any other site) or agenda pushing. A little benign good news isn't a bad thing in that case.
It's not a bad thing, but slashdot has turned from a very niche site into a propeganda site. But even there it's still a little less biased than most others. Though any fight about global warming or politics has the same ways to get karma (attack bush, go pro global warming). So it gets tired after a while.
We weren't always the pathetically-risk-averse society you know as a young person.
In my great-grandparents' lifetime, they probably saw seven people die of dysentery on the boat over to America, and you know what? They got over it. (My great-grandparents, not the dysentery victims.) Losing a space shuttle now and again wouldn't have distracted Grandpa Joe from his craps game.
If we lose that tolerance for risk altogether, we're done as a species.
The best part of the NASA TV coverage is no idiotic commentary from the news stations. FOX, CNN, MSNBC, etc all figure that they have to talk over the NASA Public Affairs officials to explain what's going on. If they would just shut up, we could actually listen and figure it out for ourselves. It was a good launch, now I'm looking forward to the HD video.
He who laughs last is at 300 baud.