All posts by Rand Simberg

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Eureka Day

Jim Oberg emails:

ALERT: Tomorrow may be ‘Eureka Day’ — the solution to the Columbia catastrophe.

At a one-hour briefing this morning by Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) member Scott Hubbard, the results of last week’s air-gun-fired foam impact test were summarized.

Basically, the investigators were astonished at the amount of damage when a fiberglass panel was used as a target, and they expect a better-than-even chance that tomorrow, using an actual shuttle leading edge panel (‘RCC’), they will break a hole in it.

The test will take place, weather permitting, in San Antonio. If the impact is as powerful as expected — like getting hit with a 500-mph basketball is how Hubbard described it — the ‘missing link’ in the causal chain that doomed Columbia Feb 1 may finally be on hand.

The experiment was surprising, Hubbard said, because the investigators (and NASA, which never even thought to perform such a test in the 25 years before this disaster) didn’t appreciate how an entire mechanism of thermal protection hardware bolted together could flex and vibrate under the impact, suffering much more stress than just one piece of the system held firmly in place on a test stand. This ‘missing link’ has frustrated investigators for months.

Last week’s test was using fiberglass, to verify the aiming of the air-gun. tomorrow’s test will use an actual RCC panel from a flown shuttle. The RCC material is stiffer than fiberglass but four times weaker. If a piece breaks loose, it could be the explanation for the mystery orbiting object that was tracked falling away from the shuttle in orbit.

If a piece breaks loose tomorrow, ‘pieces will fall INTO place’ on the investigation.

The full presentation and dramatic photos are now on-line.

Further impact tests are planned through the end of June, but if the impact tomorrow shatters the leading edge panel, it will be THE most important day since the spaceship and crew were lost, more than four months ago.

So they may finally have the smoking gun. It’s been pretty clear for weeks what happened. What remains unclear is what we do about it.

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Whiners

The LA Times has an article today about dissension within the ranks of the astronauts over whether or not the Shuttle should have a crew escape system (registration required).

“We can’t afford to lose another crew,” said former chief astronaut Robert “Hoot” Gibson, who attended Tuesday’s meeting. “We have to put in place an escape system. The young astronauts say we don’t need it, but we shouldn’t listen to them.”

Yeah, what do those stupid youngsters know? Well Hoot, maybe they know something that you apparently don’t–we can’t afford a crew escape system, at least one that’s practical and useful. The Shuttle in its current form simply cannot accommodate one, despite the fact that it probably can’t be made much more reliable than it is (yet another reason to retire it). Entire fleets of new vehicles could be built for the costs of trying to knit this sow’s ear into a silk purse (at least if done by the private sector).

Indeed, astronauts are divided on the issue. Some have said crews deserve a fighting chance to survive, given the frailties of the space shuttle. But other astronauts have rejected the idea, saying they accept the high risk and that placing an escape system into existing orbiters is not practical or affordable. Putting too high a premium on their safety could kill the space program, some worry.

They should worry. Charles Bolden and Norm Thagard have it right:

“The reason we don’t have a crew escape system is that it has been thoroughly assessed and the people who did the assessment said it wouldn’t work,” Bolden said. “We need to educate the public that the astronaut business is dangerous work.”

Norm Thagard, associate dean of Florida State University’s School of Engineering and a former astronaut, agreed with Bolden that the costs would be prohibitive and the benefits uncertain. Thagard, who once flew combat missions over North Vietnam, said, “Historically, it was acceptable that astronauts could die too. I wonder what kind of a world we live in if the public can no longer accept that kind of risk.”

But some don’t want to accept reality.

Rhea Seddon, a medical doctor in Tennessee and veteran of three shuttle flights, said she remains open-minded about the need for an ejection system.

“Some people say we have to suck it up and we have to take our losses,” Seddon said. “I am not sure everybody is real comfortable with that approach.”

If you’re not comfortable with that approach Rhea, you can go get another job. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, and there are many people waiting in line to take your place if you don’t like the odds now.

The ego of some of these people just infuriates me. They’re stuck in the sixties, when people actually cared about the space program, because we were in a death struggle with communism. They think they’re irreplaceable, but don’t think through the consequences of losing another third of the orbiter fleet, which would be much more devastating to the program.

There are some other dirty secrets revealed in this article.

…the shuttle is mostly flown by computers already and the few manual flight duties performed by pilots, such as the final landing approach and space docking, could also be automated. The only reason pilot astronauts have any role in flying the shuttle is that they exercise enormous clout within NASA.

“They don’t call them the astronaut mafia for nothing,” Nelson said.

Not surprisingly, astronauts have rejected Nelson’s idea.

In this case, the astronauts are right, in the sense that the escape system being proposed doesn’t make any economic sense, but this shows the tension between spacecraft engineers and astronauts that goes all the way back to the early sixties, and the umbrage that test pilots took at being “spam in a can.”

The problem is that Shuttle, despite its airplane-like appearance, was designed based on a heritage of transportation-by-munitions that came out of Apollo. It cannot be redesigned to be either safe, cheap or reliable. A truly piloted vehicle will be a new vehicle, from the ground up (and no, that doesn’t mean Orbital Space Plane). Private enterprise is finally working on the problem, no thanks to NASA, or the government in general.

But if we want to simply continue the farcical and costly charade that is our “manned spaceflight program,” Shuttle is good enough, just as it has been for twenty plus years, and NASA will never have trouble finding people to fly it as long as it flies, with or without a pointless and outrageously expensive bandaid solution of a “crew escape system.”

After all, it’s clear that no one in a position to make policy really cares that much about affordable or routine, or even safe access to space, as long as the money flows into the right congressional districts and countries, and the Shuttle (and the space station) have both proven to be world beaters when it comes to that.