Foam Impact Test Blasts 16" Hole in Shuttle Wing Assembly.
Wow. Just…wow. At least we know for sure what happened now.
What astounds me is how they blew this off so casually while the shuttle was still in orbit, to the point of declining to have photos taken. Foam breaking loose has been an identified problem for years. That they did not perform this test years ago is shameful.
Agreed. I’m watching a Dateline Primetime program about this now. They did the same thing, essentially, with the o-rings that did in the Challenger, too.
What’s scarier is the space junk the shuttle has to avoid while in orbit. How would you like to be performing experiments and have an errant bolt whip through your windshield at 17,000 mph?
I heard, but never saw it in print, that Discovery once came back with a big chunk missing from a forward window, caused by a paint chip from an old rocket.
Wouldn’t you hate to be one of the bureaucrats that said, “Nah, it’s nothing to worry about, let’s not worry about taking pictures, happens all the time” right about now?
Cripes, so they finally have a probable failure mode. If some insulation can cause that much damage, think about the chunks of ice, explosive bolts and other crap flaking off. And that’s not including all the space junk.
At least they’ve learn from this accident and are planning to improve safety.
Really makes you appreciate how lucky those shuttle launches are, doesn’t it?
They had a very likely failure mode, even before the accident happened. The press made a big deal of the footage showing the chunk of insulating foam striking the wing at the time, and from what I saw tonight, that event did not go unnoticed by NASA shortly after the ill-fated launch.
I heard a radio report today that said the hole was just below the size that would have shown up on a photo.
I did notice all the kaffuffle from the TV news, but I tended to take them with a pinch of salt, since they’re likely to be scenarios based on incomplete evidence. Admittedly I did believe that debris was the most likely cause, but you never know what NASA might have turned up.
What really surprised me is the fact that they did micro-meteor impact testing in the early days of Skylab and the ISS, so there should have been alarm bells ringing.
I agree that this seems to have been the primary working hypothesis since early after the accident, but this does not give me any more confidence that the actual cause (rather than a “fully vetted for plausibility” minimal blame scenario) has been found. There has been substantial coverage of other possible causes, but none has recieved the same degree of coverage across media outlets, or even sustained coverage in most outlets that mentioned them. Moreover, as of July 1, there was substantial physical reason and operational experience that suggest this was a ’ sufficient hypothesis’ but not as directly conclusive as many think. We’ve seen similar damage on earlier launches, with little cascading damage.
I concede the plausibility of this mechanism, and I fully believe that a few of those ‘alternate hypotheses’ are immediate unthinking CYA (“cover your a$$”) disinformation by contractors or subunit teams (i.e. It’s common to go the CYA route without knowing if your area of responsibility is truly at fault. Let’s face it, most people just want to avoid trouble/blame).
However, when I read passages like (from the cited article): “The board’s goal was to connect the dots between the foam-shedding event and the proximate or the direct cause of the accident, and that’s what this whole test program has been about. I think today we made that connection” – I smell a cover-up. That is absolutely NOT how science or forensic engineering is done; it’s the attitude that is fought most strenuously by conscientious investigators. It IS, however, how cover-ups are constructed. I can’t believe a conscientious investigator would say such a thing (but well-meaning people say some pretty dumb things sometimes)
It would be funny, if it wren’t tragic: when I say I suspect a cover-up, I don’t necessarily mean that I feel the proffered hypothesis has been discredited. I merely suspect that the choice was made, consciously or not, that certain conclusions were desirable, and others, undesirable. In short: we may never know.
Any student of NASA history can name dozens of issues where the official explanation was later, openly, considered to be in error, and where gov’t or subcontractor politics played a role * according to NASA’s own current documents and websites. It’s just not a scandal, if many years have passed, and a bid deal isn’t made of it now. We can derive more immediate satisfaction from gloating over how naive people were 30-40 years ago, and concluding (without justification) that we are so much more impartial now.
My point is: we needed an answer more for political and social reasons than for operational ones (the indicated problem has been present since the beginning of the shuttle program, and one hopes the current design won’t be in use another 25 years) We may learn iof other equally plausible hypotheses in a decade or two, or we may not. The conclusion of the article (if it ends up being official, and not a lazy redaction of the “most likely hypothesis” from earlier reportage) may be correct, even if the reasoning isn’t, but accurate or not, the official conclusion WILL become a fable/example for future engineers (Bad examples can be used to teach good lessons) – that doesn’t mean we know, or will ever know, the cause. Most of us can think of dozens of major revived controversies (unsolved in he end) from the 20th century. That’s just how society works.
I think the real cause of the accident was incredible stupidity.
All they had to do was rotate the shuttle in front of a space station view port while someone examined the hull and wings with a small pair of binoculars. There were sufficient provisions to maintain the entire shuttle crew in place long enough to transport them safely back to earth in another craft.
Too bad no one will ever have to answer for this in open court.
Somewhere I heard that the probability of a space shuttle failing/crashing is 1:70.
Someone should be in charge of focusing the cameras.
Quoted from…Newsday.com
That’s insane. Imagine if cars had a 1.6% chance of spontaneously crashing everyday.
Neither shuttle crash was “spontaneous.” Both were the result of stupendously bad and completely avoidable decision chains. Considering the mechanical stress these craft go through, they are absolute marvels of engineering.
When the shuttle lands and rolls to a stop, the first thing they do (even before getting the astronauts out of the craft) is roll up a tanker of liquid nitrogen and begin pumping it throughout the hull. This sinks the thermal pulse that would otherwise penetrate the spaceship’s frame, melting its wiring and interior.
From looking at the video I was surprised how thin the reinforced-carbon-carbon looked. Obviously, weight is a major issue, but I would think that the leading edge of the wings would be worth a little more thickness. Hitting a bird would have decimated that structure.
In front of A space station? Just how many space stations do you think are in orbit? 
There’s only one (the ISS) and Columbia was in a totally different orbit with no way to get there.
More likely, the could have used any one of several spy satellites to examine the shuttle. There was discussion on the program last night about whether they should have done so, and the consensus seemed to be yes, they should have, given the obvious violence of the impact seen on the liftoff footage.
But how could they have rescued the crew before their air ran out? There wasn’t another spaceship close to ready, here or in Russia. I assume that the bigwigs at NASA knew the probability of burnup on reentry but, since there was nothing they could do to save those poor bastards, put on a happy face and crossed their fingers.
I heard one NASA guy remaking casually that the Shuttles NORMALLY hit some space junk, natural or manmade. Eeeek.