Gouge Found on Shuttle Endeavour's Underside

SonicSpike writes " NASA has discovered a chunk missing from the underside of the space shuttle Endeavour. It was discovered after the shuttle docked with the ISS earlier today. Technicians theorize it may have been caused by ice ripping free of a fuel take during takeoff. From the article:'The gouge — about 3 inches square — was spotted in zoom-in photography taken by the space station crew shortly before Endeavour delivered teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan and her six crewmates to the orbiting outpost ... On Sunday, the astronauts will inspect the area, using Endeavour's 100-foot robot arm and extension beam. Lasers on the end of the beam will gauge the exact size and depth of the gouge, Shannon said, and then engineering analyses will determine whether the damage is severe enough to warrant repairs. Radar images show a white spray or streak coming off Endeavour 58 seconds after liftoff. Engineers theorize that if the debris was ice, it pierced the tile and then broke up, scraping the area downwind. Pictures from Friday's photo inspection show downwind scrapes."

Comments

Can't be the First Time

[CWRUisTakingMyMoney]

I wonder how many times this kind of thing happened in the 20-ish years before the Space Shuttle started monitoring its underside like this. Surely this can't be the first time (ignoring Columbia) falling foam has taken a chunk out of the shuttle's heat shielding. IMHO, this is a nearly inevitable side effect of the idiotic design of the shuttle, putting the astronauts next to the fuel and not above it. These kinds of tests and precautions can only be good, but if NASA had stuck with what worked up to that point (astronauts on top of the assembly) instead of changing things up, the tests and worries wouldn't be necessary, and lives would have been saved in 2003, and possibly 1986. Here's hoping this turns out to be inconsequentially small, or at least easily repairable.

Re:Can't be the First Time

[Dunbal]

Not only that, but they insist on rolling the shuttle over to fly upside down underneath the main engines which increases the likelihood of debris from the main engines hitting the payload.

      Not at that speed. Gravity becomes negligible when creating vectors compared to the wind resistance. Upside down, vertical, horizontal, it doesn't matter. There's only one real direction: DOWNWIND. That's the only place your debris is going to go.

      Now you could make the argument that some of the streams of air are shaped to blow debris onto the shuttle, that I would buy. Gravity has nothing to do with it, however.

Re:Can't be the First Time

[vought]

The shuttle has become a death trap because NASA has placed image before technological reality.


Oh, bullshit.

The shuttle may have been a flawed design to begin with, and that may have been because NASA was concerned with big-budget DoD and pie-in-the-sky programs during the 70s...but practically everything except the shape of the ship has changed since the Shuttle first flew in 1981.

It hasn't "become" a death trap. Even LEO flight is risky, and the Shuttle is heavy and uses very bleeding-edge technology (still) like throttled H2/LO2 engines. Be honest and argue about the fundamentals of the Shuttle designs, but don't try to bullshit me and claim that things have gotten more dangerous for Shuttle crews now.

Maybe they should have started Constellation ten years ago - but on the whole, the Shuttle is safer now than it has ever been; in other words, still very dangerous, but less so than before Columbia.

I apologize for the brusque tone, but it really cheeses me off when people who do nothing but read NASAWatch.com think they know how complex and difficult manned spaceflight really is - especially with 35-year-old technology.