Columbia

by Bryan

7 comments

1 cookie jill { 02.01.09 at 9:38 am }

You’re just all brightness and sunshine.

cookie jill´s last blog post..More Peanut Problems

2 Bryan { 02.01.09 at 11:11 am }

Winter is a bad time for flying anything.

3 Badtux { 02.01.09 at 12:21 pm }

Sadly, when this one happened, I just shook my head unsurprised. When Challenger went up, when we found out that the Shuttle wasn’t ready for prime time but rather was a bunch of half-baked technologies some of which worked well and some only barely working in a flying experimental test bed, it was clear that only a complete re-design and starting over from scratch with the lessons learned from the Shuttle program would produce a Shuttle that didn’t blow up from time to time. Yet they still continued to fly the thing with little more than a few mods to the way the SRB’s were sealed, even tossing up a space station dependent upon regular Shuttle re-supply to guarantee that the deathtrap would continue to fly.

As far as I’m concerned, everybody who has flown on that deathtrap since Challenger deserves a medal for bravery, because they *know* it’s a deathtrap… yet they still step on board.

4 Bryan { 02.01.09 at 4:31 pm }

Well, we all know how difficult it is to build a insulated tank. We’ve only been doing it for a century. The things are recovered and reused, so it would obviously be too expensive to build something that didn’t shed foam.

Of course, the same goes for the guys in the Air Guard who fly F-15s older than they are.

5 distributorcap { 02.01.09 at 5:49 pm }

thanks for remembering. and what badtux says

distributorcap´s last blog post..Is our children learning?

6 Badtux { 02.01.09 at 7:09 pm }

Ask yourself what anything capable of shedding foam or ice (it was probably ice, not foam, that did the dirty dead) is doing above the leading edge of a wing, and you understand the crux of the design problem. There should never have been any junction above the wing slat capable of shedding foam or ice. But at the time the Shuttle was designed, nobody thought of that, because the cryogenic tanks in previous launchers were *below* the orbiter and thus any foam or ice being shed would fall harmlessly away. And BTW, insulating tanks is easy. Insulating break-away struts is the hard part, because a break-away strut has to, well, break away — and when you do that, it tends to tear any insulating foam that got sprayed on the strut as well as on the tank, especially if ice formed within that junction.

The Shuttle is still filled with problems like that, and we’ve known this since Challenger. It’s an experimental test-bed, not a production-quality vehicle. But having sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into the orbiter program, they aren’t going to stop flying the damned things until the last one blows up, regardless of any announced retirement date you may have heard…

7 Bryan { 02.01.09 at 9:14 pm }

They should have moved the whole thing to the desert where they don’t have the problems of humidity, but they needed Southern Senators to vote for the program.

It always looked liked too many compromises to me. It’s a miracle that it can be launched as often as it is.