Images of Endeavour's Damaged Tiles

Roland Piquepaille writes "Neptec Design Group, a Canadian company and a NASA prime contractor for 25 space missions, was kind enough to send me exclusive images of Endeavour's damaged tiles during its last take-off. So here are some of these pictures" The pictures are pretty amazing and make the urgency of this whole thing much more amazing.

Comments

How long has this been happening?

[GodfatherofSoul]

This kind of damage MUST have been occurring throughout the history of the program. And, if it has been NASA would have been aware during the regular retiling of the Shuttle. My question is why wasn't the ice impact problem wasn't addressed long ago.

Re:How long has this been happening?

[tgd]

But his overall point is quite correct -- every single shuttle mission came back with missing and damaged tiles.

Most of the shuttle is not under the same level of thermal load as the front edges of the wings during re-entry. Columbia got unlucky that the damage was at the worst possible spot.

Its a bad design, but the whole shuttle is an awful design. Most of the time it works, though.

IMO, this is a reaction to Columbia and a dramatically reduced interest in the shuttle program. For ten years launches barely got reported. Its nice (for the continuance of the shuttle program) for people to be talking about it.

Plus, for those who haven't seen a shuttle tile up close, they're not very big. Thats not a six inch gash in there.

Re:How long has this been happening?

[tgd]

If you think that hundreds of engineers sitting down and designing it is how the Shuttle came into existance in the early 70's, you should go read up on some history of NASA.

The shuttle design (and the program) is one set of bad decisions after another made for corporate welfare and political reasons shoehorned through Congress based on a huge number of known lies (like the shuttle-launch-a-week they claimed they'd have). It was continued as a way of getting to the Space Station, even though the construction of it was delayed 15 years.

There were dramatically better designs considered during the 70s that would've been cheaper and more reliable, but wouldn't impact various Senator's home states as much. There were bad decisions made even after the Shuttle was picked (using aluminum skin not titanium, which is why the heat shield is needed anyway).

Seriously. Read some histories of the shuttle program. You'll learn why it happened and not the Apollo-based Mars mission, why the Saturn V (and future solid fuel boosted versions) were dropped in favor of a much more expensive per pound STS.

NASA has smart engineers. Thats why the design for the shuttle's replacement looks nothing like the shuttle. Its also a big reason why the Buran was killed in the USSR, and the Soviets/Russians dominated manned space flight for 25 years.

Re:How long has this been happening?

[Gr8Apes]

The half-disposable design was a direct result of the military's insistence on increasing the payload carrying capacity by an order of magnitude combined with cutbacks in original funding targets. The increased size caused other design issues for re-entry and landing. It was also to have been replaced roughly 10 years ago.

Hence you have the bloated obsolete pig we use today.

Re:How long has this been happening?

[moosesocks]

Right on all accounts apart from the last one.

Buran was dropped due to a lack of funds because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left their space program strapped for cash.

Although Buran was essentially a copy of the Shuttle, the Soviet engineers were able to surmise its shortcomings and address those issues. For starters, it wasn't as vulnerable to the mess we had with Columbia, and are having again with Endeavour.

The crew compartment was supposedly reinforced and structurally isolated from the rest of the ship, suggesting that a Challenger or Columbia type disaster could have been potentially survivable.

Buran was launched piggybacked on an Energia booster (which is the closest thing Russia had to a Saturn V) -- economies of scale suggest that this would have been cheaper in the long-run, not to mention that it kept a large multi-purpose launch vehicle in Russia's "arsenal", something which the US currently lacks (not to mention that an Energia could have sent up huge portions of the ISS in one go, rather than expensively constructing it bit by bit as we are doing now.

Buran could fly and land automnously. The space shuttle gained this ability only recently, and to my knowledge, it's never been attempted. This combined with the continuation of the Soyuz program hypothetically allows the crew to stay aboard Mir/ISS, and return via a Soyuz capsule, while the Shuttle lands on its own in the case that it was damaged during takeoff, and would be risky to land.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if NASA uses a similar strategy to get the crew of Endeavour home.

It still wasn't a great idea all in all, but it made a hell of a lot more sense than the Shuttle does. Kliper looks very promising at the moment, and may be a "best of both worlds" compromise between traditonal capsules and shuttle-type craft.

Without a scale...

[argStyopa]

Without a scale to compare to, the gouge looks HUGE and devastating.

I've heard on the radio that they are discussing a roughly 3" scrape....which, if scaled to the longest axis, is objectively pretty small, but when considered against the turbulence, heat, and pressure that those belly tiles are faced with? It looks huge and devastating again.

Those astronauts have balls of steel if they ride that thing down again.

Re:wrong

[everphilski]

Ignoring air resistance, which won't be much different for similarly-shaped pieces, once detached from the shuttle, pieces of ice and foam would accelerate towards the ground at the same rate.

You can't ignore air resistance at low altitudes (the impact happened in the first 2 minutes) at supersonic speeds! Acceleration due to gravity is negligible due to the timeframe, we are talking fractions of a second. So for similarly shaped pieces, the drag force will be similar. The lighter piece, foam being much lighter than ice, will slow down very quickly. Now we approach the shuttle which has not slowed down. We have a large speed differential between the foam and the shuttle, whereas between the ice and the shuttle, there is very little speed difference.

... and built by the lowest bidder (original?)

[argent]

OK, what's the original quote, and was it Shepard or Glenn? Or was this just too good a line for any of the Right Stuff mob to pass up?

"When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, 'The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.'"

"I felt about as good as anybody would, sitting in a capsule on top of a rocket that were both built by the lowest bidder." (Senator John Glenn, Colonel USMC, Retired)

"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract." -- Alan Shepard.

Re:Err on the side of caution...don't you think?

[jafac]

I still feel strongly that they should attempt a repair, in this case.

First and foremost - if there is a small chance of catastrophic loss of vehicle, then measures should be taken to prevent that.

But Secondly - and possibly more importantly; how many more shuttle flights will there be? What if there is more serious damage on the next flight? And we still have never tested the repair techniques?

I think that this damage is a perfect opportunity for NASA to do what it does best: testing new aerospace technologies - and in this case, repair of shuttle heat-shield damage. The repair job will be a great opportunity to learn new EVA skills and techniques. After the shuttle is safely down, the repair job can be studied, and evaluated for how it held up during re-entry, and I think that is valuable science that wouldn't otherwise be done.

To *not* repair this damage, is short-sighted in two ways: It's hoping that the damage to Endeavor isn't fatal, and it's hoping that the next mission to get damaged, also does not require repairs, and if it does, that we will get the repair right the first time, when we've never ever done anything remotely like it before.