Space Shuttle Endeavour Peppered with Damaged.

[interstellaryeller]

Space shuttle Endeavour peppered with damage, about 1:30 into the launch debris from the external tank damaged Endeavour's ceramic tiles, see the damage @ Astronomy pictures - Telescope set up guide illustrated

 

[jimglenn]

OH NO! Not again. Did they know this could happen? Who approved this vehicle?

Should have taken a Saturn V.

 

[AndyLP]

OH NO! Not again. Did they know this could happen? Who approved this vehicle?

Should have taken a Saturn V.

A Saturn V? Right... lol

I kinda feel bad for them.. But they say that if you persist.. you will make it.. so, make it happen!

 

[vogon13]

Just on Fox:

with 7 flights remaining, all shuttle launches are on hold till the foam problem is solved.


My take: if the foam can't be fixed, we have seen the last shuttle flight. Period

 

[jimglenn]

Nonsense. Too many jobs are at stake. They have to spend our tax money, or they won't get anymore
next year. Already millions have been spent on the foam problem. I told them what was wrong. The
treehuggers made

them stop using freon to puff up the foam insulation. Now they use some green crap that causes it to fall
off. Check the history, the foam started falling off badly after they stopped using freon.

About the same as when THAT ONE woman in Nebraska that complained about the bible reading on the first Apollo
flight around the moon. NASA never again allowed ANY religious events in space. One astro wanted to do
communion on the moon. But the wine would boil in a vacuum, and the wafers would have to be a special
material, you probably have it somewhere.

My plan is to train death row inmates to fly that obsolete spacetruck. WTH, if it blows you save a few KW
off the electric chair, or some vials of deathdrugs!

 

[R1]

Well the foam problem has been able to be fixed in the past. I would almost
find it fishy, if decades of progress leads us to be unable to fix the foam problem suddenly.

Or is it related to the recent economic collapse?



By the way, Jesus does not ask for money, he told someone to take his Ceaser coin back to Ceaser or something like that.
Downtown, he flipped over a table with money or something on it, too, iirc.

 

[jimglenn]

Dude, the foam problem has never been fixed, it is a bad design. Normal rockets that use cryo fuel
don't have foam insulation, the Saturn V just let the frost build up and fall off, you can see it in the old
videos.

The problem was aggravated when they stopped using freon. Designing a spacecraft that can be
bombed by itself during takeoff is a bad idea, a compromise to save money. It is not todays economy
that caused this, but the economy of the 1970's, when the shuttle was designed. There was high
unemployment, and gas lines. Doh. Congress did not want to pay for an all liquid fuel shuttle, that
certainly would have worked better. The booster looked sort of like a supersonic airliner, had dudes
in it to steer and land it, pretty sharp. But the beancounters got to it. End of story. And another shuttle.

 

[R1]

I could not find some good pictures of the damage.

I did find this live Endeavor mission video, though:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/22886841#22886841

 

[jimglenn]

They are going to launch this guy on a Soyuz, to fix da tiles!

 

[MasterComposter]

I'm looking at this thread title, "Space Shuttle Endeavour Peppered with Damaged." And I'm thinking that cannot possibly be gramatically correct. Shouldn't it be, "Space Shuttle Endeavour Damaged by Pepper"?

In the design for the next generation of spacecraft, I would hope they would learn from their mistakes with the shuttle and not use pepper.

 

[docm]

Reuters is confirming that the shuttle fleet has been grounded until an investigation is completed.

As I stated in M&L: time to bite the bullet. Fund COTS-D, including an LAS for Dragon (SpaceX is cutting metal), move STS funding to getting Orion on the Atlas V or Delta IV and use the change and Ares I funding to build Ares V Lite or Ares IV, whichever you want to call it, for lunar missions.

 

[R1]

High speed pepper is dangerous.

 

[jimglenn]

Due to required Federal hiring quota's, this tri-sexual, pakiranian pepper engineer was hired. He mixed up

metric ingredients for the ablative stealth coating, I can't talk too much about it, highly secret.

 

[drwayne]

Article at SpaceFlightNow

http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts12 ... ndex2.html

 

[CalliArcale]

Just on Fox:

with 7 flights remaining, all shuttle launches are on hold till the foam problem is solved.


My take: if the foam can't be fixed, we have seen the last shuttle flight. Period

The odds of that seem slim; it seems more likely to me that this is a defect with the specific tank, but I'm glad NASA is doing due diligence and requiring that this be understood before the next mission. Pity it's not possible to inspect the tank after use; hopefully they can find enough information in the preflight data (x-rays and such) and comparison with data on older tanks and on the remaining tanks in inventory.

Please note that although the media have apparently decided to get all scary about this, it's not that unusual for the mission controllers to declare a particular issue as something that *must* be resolved (one way or another) as a prerequisite for the next flight. Strangely, when issues were flagged that way with the SSMEs, it didn't get a "SHUTTLE FLEET GROUNDED!" freak-out from Fox, but when it's foam, OMG! THE SHUTTLE'S DONE FOR!!! Thing is, the editors at Fox know that Columbia failed because of foam, and they know that Challenger failed because of the SRB O-rings. So they wig out if anything affects the foam or the O-rings, and often let much more serious problems go by as if nothing was amiss. I mean, did we see a wig-out like this over the LOX feed line debris concerns not too long ago? That problem had the same restriction -- next flight cannot go unless the problem is resolved. And rather than possibly damaging the heat shield (a definitely survivable condition, since they have the ISS "safe haven"), that problem had the potential to make the entire vehicle *explode* on liftoff. Yet I didn't see it even *mentioned* in the mass media. (Space news media carried the story, of course.)

How many people know that Columbia was almost lost on her second-to-last mission, to deliver the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, because of an SSME problem that led to a hold on all subsequent missions until the anomaly was understood?

I think NASA is doing the right thing. I also think some people are making more of it than is warranted at this time.

 

[dragon04]

NASA doesn't have the time for a very long "investigation" without starting to cancel missions on the back end, IMO. There's less than 18 months now left in the STS Program and 7 remaining missions.

If my math is correct, every 2 months of investigation means roughly one less Shuttle Mission. Barring a decision to simply take the risk and fly the missions after the investigation, there would have to be "fixes". For each ET. My opinion? Best case, 4 more missions fly. Worst case, the STS Program is effectively terminated here and now.

I'm with docm. Let's pump SpaceX with all the money and support they need, and look at other boost options for NASA. Sure, it will mean the loss of lots of jobs, but that's inevitable anyways.

My main concern will obviously be getting Endeavor and her Crew back on the ground safely. Really, that's all that matters at the moment.

 

[CalliArcale]

NASA doesn't have the time for a very long "investigation" without starting to cancel missions on the back end, IMO. There's less than 18 months now left in the STS Program and 7 remaining missions.

Losing another Orbiter would be worse than delaying a few weeks -- if a delay even ends up being necessary. Why assume this would mean a "very long investigation"? For all we know, the engineers may work it out before Endeavour even lands. All NASA is saying is that understanding this problem is a prerequisite for the next flight. Many other things are also prerequisites, like the routine testing that every Shuttle undergoes as part of prelaunch processing. What's happening is that NASA is not jumping to a conclusion, and I think that's wise.

I suspect prelaunch processing for the next mission won't even be held back significantly.

 

[CalliArcale]

Addendum: pumping SpaceX full of money will not make a new heavy-lift vehicle capable of delivering the remaining ISS payloads appear out of thin air. You can't just throw money at a problem and expect it to be solved. I think SpaceX is a fine organization, and NASA has chosen wisely in backing them. But they can't work miracles. If it does come down to a lengthy investigation and significant delays resulting in cancellation of some Shuttle missions, I would prefer that over losing an Orbiter and thus having to cancel *all* remaining missions and have no American manned spaceflight capability for another five years or so.