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| Shuttles grounded, again |
| 2005-07-28 |
| Posted in full. Emphasis added. In an astonishing setback for the shuttle program, NASA on Wednesday grounded future flights because the foam debris that led to the Columbia disaster still poses a risk to space missions. During Shuttle Discovery's liftoff, a chunk of foam flew off the external fuel tank just two minutes into the flight. NASA does not believe the debris hit the shuttle, but had it come off just a bit earlier it may have caused the same damage that doomed Columbia 2 1/2 years ago. Even though the space agency doesn't think the lives of the seven astronauts are in danger, it plans a closer inspection of the spacecraft. "You have to admit when you're wrong. We were wrong," said shuttle program manager Bill Parsons. "We need to do some work here, and so we're telling you right now, that the ... foam should not have come off. It came off. We've got to go do something about that." Since the Columbia tragedy, NASA has spent over $1 billion on making sure shuttles would be safe from falling foam debris. "We won't be able to fly again," until the hazard is removed, Parsons told reporters in a briefing Wednesday evening. "Obviously we have some more work to do." Parsons said, "Call it luck or whatever, it didn't harm the orbiter." If the foam had broken away earlier in flight, when the atmosphere is thicker, it could have caused catastrophic damage to Discovery. "We think that would have been really bad, so it's not acceptable," said Parsons' deputy, Wayne Hale. Engineers believe the foam was 24 to 33 inches long, 10 to 14 inches wide, and just a few inches thick, only somewhat smaller than the chunk that smashed into Columbia's left wing during liftoff in January 2003. NASA has said all along that Discovery's mission was a test flight designed to check the safety of future shuttle missions. Parsons refused to give up on the spacecraft that was designed in the 1970s. "We think we can make this vehicle safe for the next flight," he said, declining to judge the long-term impact on the manned space program. "We will determine if it's safe to fly." Atlantis was supposed to lift off in September, but that mission is now on indefinite hold. Parsons refused to speculate when a shuttle might fly again. "Until we're ready, we won't go fly again," Parsons said. In less than 36 hours, the euphoria of what initially looked like a picture-perfect launch on Tuesday evaporated thanks to images shot from just a few of the 100-plus cameras in place to watch for the very problem NASA announced. [sigh] I really think space stuff is cool, even if it's "wasteful." But here, we are spending billions and getting nothing. Time to scrap NASA and start over. Not just a reorganization, but RIF everyone and have the new organization hire them on their merits (or lack thereof). |
| Posted by:Jackal |
| #26 sorry for the typos... striding, weaklings,pamby but... look at the cost matrix in this spreadsheet $/Ton to L5 Shuttle: $9,480,410 Zenit: $7,200,000 Orion A/C/JD: $34,064 Orion B 5000 TEU: $2,865 |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-07-28 22:41 |
| #25 Let's quit this mamby pamba shit. Re-activate PROJECT ORION. Orion Links and more ORION LINKS Go into space as sriding men not weeklings. Example with mass not being a real problem they were going to use 50s style cast iron barber chairs as acceleration couches. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-07-28 22:30 |
| #24 From what I've read the USAF/NASA combination was what screwed up the shuttle. Both had an entirely different set of requirements so the shuttle was built to satisfy everyone and thus wasn't particularly good at any one task. Then the USAF walked away after the Challenger and NASA was stuck with the boondoggle. To be honest they should have started rethinking everything back then. Instead we've seen a lack of vision and a refusal to change plans because we've already spent so much. Luckily the private industry will get America out of the space hole at some point. NASA should do whatever it takes to help them out, use them if they can do something cheaper, and provide access to infrastructure. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2005-07-28 22:23 |
| #23 I'll tell you my solution - turn the manned spaceflight program over to DoD. USAF people who had to work with the NASA people in the early days of the shuttle, when it was used to launch a few military satellites, HATED and DISPISED the NASA folk. Couldn't wait to take back launch mission to rockets they could control so things got done right. |
| Posted by: space observer 2005-07-28 14:03 |
| #22 Ah! okay, on second reading..... yeah. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-07-28 14:02 |
| #21 Heavy Launch vehicle is a chimera. Don't need it. Orbital assembly has been proven during the Apollo Missions Well yeah, but Apollo used Saturn Vs and Ibs which many people would consider heavy lift. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-07-28 14:00 |
| #20 Heavy Launch vehicle is a chimera. Don't need it. Orbital assembly has been proven during the Apollo Missions. It doesn't have to be really expensive, we just make it that way because the space station has become an international jobs work program that has not even kept the Russians from dealing with the Iranians. Launch fuel as payload. Launch it on risky rockets if you have to to keep the cost down. 90% of most launch weight is fuel. Once we've got some kind of gas station up there the options open up drastically. Hydrogen burns off too easily and it's a bitch to transfer so we should use kerosine as Bob Zubrin the Mars Direct guy suggests. It's less explosive and easier to handle. Kerosine has the added advantage of being available at every airport in the world so any kind of launch system wouldn't require special emergency runways. Use the current space station as an assembly point. Just hang things off of the struts in open space until they are ready to be transfered. Use the space station as a dorm during construction. At least let it be used for something practical. Follow the space station up with a simple Transhab space station more along the lines of skylab. Lots of internal space, inflatable so the whole thing is up in one shot. Set it up high enough that we don't have to adjust the orbit all the time and low enough that orbital space plans can reach it. Use comercial space planes when available to get the people up there. Use existing rockets to get equipment up there. Use the risky shuttle to get the fuel up there. NASA needs to start thinking outside the box and abandon the "not invented here" bullshit. They should work with but not depend on the Air Force or any other military and everything they do should be a step towards creating space infrastructure so the next stuff is easier. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2005-07-28 13:05 |
| #19 The Shuttle has never launched from Vandenburg. The whole design was a kludge from day one. Certain elements are useful though. THe SRB/ET combination is certainly adaptable to a heavy launch vehicle (which will be needed for any thing beyond LEO anyway but the orbiter was a compromise from the start. And the DoD was part of the problem in the design phase as the shuttles cargo bay was designed to their size requirements. Originally NASA wanted a simple manned winged orbiter to make launching crews easier. Both from a logistical standpoint and a physical one. The accelerations on the crew during a shuttle launch/re-entry are far lower than capsule type vehicles. The foam problem is actually a pretty well known item. The foam composition was changed to a non-CFC based foam and the problems started soon after that. As to whether NASA turned down an EPA exeption or was overruled by someone in the Clinton Administration I really don't know. But if they were forced by some politician or a NASA administrator made the decision then I think they should be sued in court by the families of the Columbia crew. |
| Posted by: Cheaderhead 2005-07-28 12:50 |
| #18 Are the Vandenburg launches grounded as well? That won't be popular. |
| Posted by: mojo 2005-07-28 10:14 |
| #17 Or better yet, Rods of God! |
| Posted by: Edward Yee 2005-07-28 09:41 |
| #16 In other woids we f**ked around enough with microgravity dip shittery and riding the damn stationary bikes. Let's build something that goes somewhere, who cares how many perfect drugs and crystal are gonna come out of this pathway? It would already have happened! Let's go. /End Joseph M sub |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-07-28 09:05 |
| #15 It was a pile of crap from day one, a money saving short term screw up. Stop it all, abandon the ISS (or give it one really good shove to a safe orbit) and get ready to go back to the moon. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-07-28 09:00 |
| #14 I would say it's time to bring"Aurora"out of the closet. |
| Posted by: raptor 2005-07-28 08:40 |
| #13 The Canadian Space Agency has been involved with the shuttle program from the beginning. Information on Canadian Built Shuttle Arm and OBSS Comments by Commander Eileen Collins during flight ops yesterday. "And we just flew over Europe, had a beautiful view, and the crew is all saying that the Canadarm is just amazing!" BTW: CapCom (Or primary shuttle communications from Mission Control) for this whole mission is Astronaut Julie Payette from the Canadian Space Agency Canada's whole political landscape is completely embarassing, but their robotics programs are top notch. |
| Posted by: gp 2005-07-28 08:17 |
| #12 ..From what my Dad told me (he retired as an design engineer from NASA Lewis-Glenn in '02) the PC culture at NASA had virtually paralyzed the agency. Even when there was both a clear technical problem and solution, the rules mandated a Byzantine decision making process that insured political, sexual, racial, environmental and gender politics trumped science and knowledge every time. I'll tell you my solution - turn the manned spaceflight program over to DoD. (Read Tom Wolfe's classic The Right Stuff as to why this never happened in the first place.) DoD manages to send up more rockets every year than NASA does in any two or three years, and failure - though not unheard of - is rare, to say the least. Second - and this may actually be more controversial than letting the military run the whole show - the 'no-risk' culture has gotta go. We have to strive for perfection, but present NASA policies now mandate a nearly unachievable level of safety before flight. We have to admit that in space flight, people are going to die, just as they died in the early days of ocean exploration. If you're going to insist on no risk before we launch, then the NASA manned space program is doomed. And quite frankly, I think they just killed the Shuttle program anyways with the decision to ground any further flights while they sit there with their fingers up their asses and try to figure out why the foam that never worked still doesn't work. $1B USD and the damn foam is STILL coming off? Screw that. Change the foam or admit defeat. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2005-07-28 07:45 |
| #11 The real culprit here is the Clinton Administration's give-in to the enviros back in the mid 1990's - letting the politicians tell NASA what they could and could not use for insulation. The EPA even offered NASA an exemption to the enviro regs. The problem is that politics of the Green/Left in the Clinton Whitehouse triumphed over engineering and you have the mess we see today. The Clinton administration ordered the NASA change of the design of the external tank's insulating foam to stop using Freon Chloroflourocarbon (CFC-11) so that Clinton could trumpet that his administration would comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocols. These protocols were set up to address the Ozone depletion, which looks now like it was not man related but a cyclical natural thing in the upper atmosphere -- i.e. they were junk science. Since the design changes to placate the enviros (1997 I believe), some reports say that there is up to ten times as much & ten times more often damage to the shuttle's tiles, for each and every flight, as compared to before. Put this one squarely on the enviros - the blood is visibly on their hands. Then say screw the nutjobs enviros and green weenies, and go back to the old design with the Freon process. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-07-28 05:11 |
| #10 They shelved it. When the first shuttle blew up they transfered their shuttle to NASA. Theirs was to be launched from Vandenburg AFB not Florida. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet 0’ Doom 2005-07-28 04:58 |
| #9 ... they ever had a shuttle program? What happened to it?? |
| Posted by: Edward Yee 2005-07-28 04:41 |
| #8 That is why the USAF abandonded their shuttle program Edward. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet 0’ Doom 2005-07-28 02:42 |
| #7 So the Canadian company's not so bad, eh? I say MILITARIZE SPACE - the USAF has an actual interest in quality control and keeping its personnel alive! |
| Posted by: Edward Yee 2005-07-28 02:28 |
| #6 The real culprit here is mulit-culti. NASA (during the Clinton admin) sought to push itself to the front of his PC agenda, and thus secure more funding. The crux was that they would formulate a new foam insulation production process that did not involve CFCs. The result was, and is, a vastly inferior product which has cost lives and put the entire NASA operation at risk. And still, they persist. PC is the cancer of our time and it is going to kill us if we can't summon the fortitude to call it for what it is. C'mon! |
| Posted by: Rex Mundi 2005-07-28 02:11 |
| #5 I guess the Canadians built this iteration of the shuttle arm because the canadians (as a joint funding project between NASA and I think Canada's government) built the original shuttle arms back in the late 70's. I'm disinclined to complain about the situation as it appears to be one of the only shuttle subsystems that's relatively trouble-free. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2005-07-28 02:07 |
| #4 Re: The Canadian connection...A friend of mine (and occasional RB reader) in Canada works for the comapny that built the robot arm (and the camera at the end of the arm.) His company also developed IMAX. From his description, this company knows what it's about. The International Space Station also has one of these arms. You can see a good picture of it in the IMAX film about the ISS. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2005-07-28 01:01 |
| #3 Before I actually worked at NASA (but not the space-flight part of NASA) I thought they could do no wrong. After I worked there for a couple of years I found out that the civil servant part of the workforce is just terrible. I would NEVER trust my life to these bozos. The NASA civil servant workforce is probably as bad or worse than the teachers union. No matter how little work ethic you have or aptitude for your job... as long as you meet the pre-requisites of political correctness to get the job initially - you can keep the job. It's a sad, unhappy, unhealthy workplace. I'm glad I'm done with it. |
| Posted by: Leigh 2005-07-28 00:49 |
| #2 Who is responsible for this? Which companies is NASA hiring? I heard today that the idiotic, clumsy camera-arm-thing that is looking over the undercarriage for damage was built by some Canadian company. Why are my tax dollars going to Canada? NASA has almost zero accountability, and for the same problem that costed LIVES to have happened again is beyond the pale. NASA uses a huge assortment of unaccountable, politically-linked companies, scientists, and individuals to put together their "projects" and nobody calls them on it. They seem to think that science and progress can only happen thru "committee" when it is perfectly obvious that that brand of thinking invariably leads to catastrophe. Scrap NASA, let the telecommunications companies launch their own space programs, and if the gov needs a satellite or two sent up or worked on, hire someone to do it. NASA has overstayed it's welcome and I am tired of paying for a bunch of incompetent One-World-ers. |
| Posted by: Chris W. 2005-07-28 00:31 |
| #1 Damn it! I thought we had this corrected? Its the same problem that brought down the former crew. Who is NASA hiring these days? The Kerry bunny? |
| Posted by: Captain America 2005-07-28 00:21 |