http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-03p1.html
Just a point that I`d like to add, my 2 cents.
I don`t advocate grounding the shuttles because of loss of life per se.
Exploration, pushing back human boundaries etc etc is dangerous, but needs to be done. The men and women who do are brave and I respect them. I`d love to have been there and do it too.
What does make me angry is seeing the project ruined and compromised by the machinations of management and politically biased parties, plus reckless costcutting and basic operational flaws.
Notable Quote -
Major Gen. John Barry of the Columbia Board asked Thompson, "Was the Space Shuttle designed to accept debris hits from foam, either at the RCC [wing-edge panels] or at the belly with the tiles?"
Thompson relied, "No. The spec for the [External] Tank is that nothing would come off the Tank forward of the 2058 ring frame [low down on the Tank], and it [the Shuttle] was never designed to withstand a 2-pound mass hitting at 700 feet per second. That was never considered to be a design requirement."
...
"We paid an awful lot of attention to making sure that nothing came off, because we knew that if we fractured the carbon-carbon on the leading edge of the orbiter, it was a lost day.
"We could take a fair amount of damage on the silica tiles and still be all right, but it was a maintenance problem...People have gotten locked up on the fragile nature of the silica tiles.
"The silica tiles are fragile to damage, but they're actually pretty forgiving. You can take a lot of damage right there. You cannot take any damage that knocks a hole in the carbon-carbon leading edges."
George Jeffs, the Shuttle program manager before Thompson, interjected that the RCC panel designers had gone to some lengths to make them "as strong as possible...We really had a rugged RCC...They're taking a pretty good [strain] load up in that front end. So they're not wussies."
Thompson: "They are strong, but they're still a ceramic. What you don't do is hit a ceramic with a real sharp, high-energy low-time blow. Anything going 700 feet per second -- even if it's a soft piece of insulation -- if you look at the force-time curve that we put onto that insulation, we didn't do a dead-chicken test [i.e., firing any significantly heavy objects at the RCC panels with a gas gun]. We knew well that you could knock it off if you hit it with enough kinetic energy."
He seemed surprised that his successors had not been aware of this fact, and added: "There was never any thought that those [RCC] panels would withstand a 20,000 foot-pound kinetic energy strike [such as Columbia's foam fragment produced]. They were not designed for that. The whole intent was not to let it happen....I wouldn't know how to design the leading edge of that wing to take a 20,000 foot-pound kinetic energy strike."
Milton Silveira, his deputy program manager, said, "Not many airplanes are designed that way." Thompson added, "I think we might have had to abandon the program, had that been a requirement."
Ivan.
Linear Mode
