Reader's Favorites
Media Casualties Mount

Administration Split On Europe Invasion

Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire

Congress Concerned About Diversion From War On Japan

Pot, Kettle On Line Two...

Allies Seize Paris

The Natural

Gore Book Sales Tank, Supporters Claim Unfair Tactics

Satan Files Lack Of Defamation Suit

Why This Blog Bores People With Space Stuff

A New Beginning

My Hit Parade
Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds)
Tim Blair
James Lileks Bleats
Virginia Postrel
Kausfiles
Winds Of Change (Joe Katzman)
Little Green Footballs (Charles Johnson)
Samizdata
Eject Eject Eject (Bill Whittle)

Space
Alan Boyle (MSNBC)
Space Politics (Jeff Foust)
Space Transport News (Clark Lindsey)
NASA Watch
NASA Space Flight
Hobby Space
A Voyage To Arcturus (Jay Manifold)
Dispatches From The Final Frontier (Michael Belfiore)
Personal Spaceflight (Jeff Foust)
Mars Blog
The Flame Trench (Florida Today)
Space Cynic
Rocket Forge (Michael Mealing)
COTS Watch (Michael Mealing)
Curmudgeon's Corner (Mark Whittington)
Selenian Boondocks
Tales of the Heliosphere
Out Of The Cradle
Space For Commerce (Brian Dunbar)
True Anomaly
Kevin Parkin
The Speculist (Phil Bowermaster)
Spacecraft (Chris Hall)
Space Pragmatism (Dan Schrimpsher)
Eternal Golden Braid (Fred Kiesche)
Carried Away (Dan Schmelzer)
Laughing Wolf (C. Blake Powers)
Chair Force Engineer (Air Force Procurement)
Spacearium
Saturn Follies
JesusPhreaks (Scott Bell)

Biting Commentary about Infinity, and Beyond!

« When Will Kerry And Edwards | Main | A Kerry Mars Program? »

A couple of space links

The Beagle 2 mission team has released its own report on what went wrong - they place a lot of blame on ESA management, but the upshot is that the atmosphere wasn't as dense as they thought. Story via Nature

Nature also has a story on the Shuttle return to flight. One paragraph stands out to me:

The CAIB report said that safety checks were often poorly managed. "The shuttle programme had become comfortable with an operational mindset that treated a developmental vehicle as an operational vehicle, accepting debris strikes as normal, and so on," says Hubbard. This culture is being challenged through increased communication between different areas of NASA, says Hubbard.

The problem of treating a vehicle in development as operational is serious, but the solution is not more communication. Reading between the lines, that looks to me a lot like more forms, more reports, more meetings, more teleconferences. In other words, more noise. The solution I prefer is a single office tasked with both operations and upgrades, and with the authority to take the vehicle off line. The bipod ramp foam shedding was a known issue and it could have been addressed with a number of different fixes had work started when the problem was first identified. Of course this presumes management with an attitude oriented to fixing things before they become problems, which may be asking too much. Certainly expecting NASA to behave in ways which fly in the face of the political incentives imposed by congress is asking too much, but hey, a man can dream, can't he?

Posted by Andrew Case at August 24, 2004 06:42 AM

Comments

Why fly the Shuttle again? NASA is too scared to to fly to Hubble. The only answer anyone can give me is to finish the Space Station. Why? So we can give it to the Europeans?

We only go to the Space Station because it provides a safe haven if we have another incident on the way up. We are told the that the crew can then stay there until another Shuttle can go rescue them. After another incident do you really think NASA will fly another Shuttle on short notice? Maybe in a cheap hollywood, flick, but that's about it. What will really happen is that there will be a fire sale on Souyez's!

The other thing is that when we loose the next Shuttle, which we will if we keep flying, whatever the cause is it will come from out of left field and averyone will be asking where that came from.

It's possible I am wrong, but my guess is that the Shuttle will never fly again.

Posted by Michael at August 24, 2004 07:39 AM

Isn't the real problem that a developmental vehicle is being relied upon as an operational vehicle? Neither forms, reports, office swaps, nor accountability will change this fact.

Posted by Dan Schmelzer at August 24, 2004 08:24 AM

At the Mars Society convention I asked astronaut Scott Horowitz why we couldn't finish ISS with shuttle C. Then come 2010 ISS is complete AND we have a proven HLLV on the launch pad.

Horowitz said the ISS payloads couldn't handle the thermal stresses of being outside the orbiter payload bay so orbiter was the only route to finish ISS.

The follow up question I didn't ask:

The molds for the orbiter already exist so why not build an orbiter cargo bay as skimpy as is safe and sufficient for the ISS payloads just no ceramic tiles, no crew quarters, no wings or tail. Copy orbiter to the extent necessary to fly, but remove the SSMEs and go with RS-68 or other less expensive main engine.

Include the OMS engines with a rudimentary heat shield and parafoil for recovery. This gives you last mile guidance and station keeping.

This SDV can carry 2 ISS payloads by volume and 3 ISS payloads by mass. SO carry 2 ISS modules and cram a whole lot of granular supplies in the nooks and crannies.

Place 2 SDVs on orbit and have them maintian station. Later, launch 1 SDV and one orbiter. Use the robot arm on the orbiter to install SEVEN (7) ISS payloads!!

And deliver spares and supplies and use the shuttle C payload fairings to dispose of surplus refuse accumulating at ISS.

4 flights of orbiter will allow 28 ISS missions to be completed. Then orbiter is retired.

Otherwise, if we lose another orbiter before ISS is complete, we lose ISS and we might lose America's manned spaceflight program.

Posted by Bill White at August 24, 2004 08:57 AM

I find the claim that the shuttle is "developmental" to be - at best - disingenuous, and at worst an outright lie.

Picture this: Ford introduces a new concept car in 1982. Then they make no major design changes in two decades, but run that car every year in the Paris-Dakkar rally. Can we by any stretch of imagination still call that car "developmental" in February 2003?

This "developmental" excuse is nothing more than CYA.

Posted by Ed Minchau at August 24, 2004 09:21 AM

Again its all a question of paper work, Ed. We could sit here and debate all day on whether the Pinto was a developmental vehicle or not. Its when that vehicle gets signed off, licensed, etc that it changes category. If they say the shuttle doesn't fly till the paper work stands as tall as the vehicle stack then it would probably take paper work to the moon and back just to get it licensed as a production vehicle.

Posted by Hefty at August 24, 2004 01:37 PM

As someone familiar with materials science theory, in particular composites, I've never heard this addressed, and I wonder if any lurkers can enlighten:

As I recall, composites suffer from catastrophic failure modes. That is, they work and work with no sign of stress or fatigue, until one day they all of a sudden fail. In polymers we used to call this the "wrench test failure mode," because I believe it was the case that military composites would occasionally fail bizarrely just because a mechanic dropped a wrench on them, an impact normally ludicrously far from any critical failure mode.

I remember thinking this was relevant when that Airbus crashed in Long Island after the tail snapped off inexplicably when exposed to nothing more than some mildly higher turbulence (the Airbus was flying in the wake of a 747). That tail was pure composite, the only part of the plane that was.

I remember also thinking it was relevant when I heard how the engineers were shocked by the huge hole blown in the Columbia spare RCC panel in that test done by the CAIB. Indeed, it seems ludicrous that they failed to *design* the RCC panels to resist such mild (relative to general launch stress) impacts, so it must have been an age/fatigue weakness. But so far as I know in this business predicting failure of composites is so much blind guesswork even in 2004, because there is no known nondestructive test method that reliably predicts failure. (It's not like metal, where you can look for microcracks, etc.)

I could be wrong about this, but if not, it suggests there was no way even in principle to predict the failure of the Columbia RCC panel, and that no management or engineering solution exists to the problem short of simply tossing the orbiters (or at least their composite parts) and building anew.

Any engineers here can enlighten me further?

Posted by George Bush at August 24, 2004 07:27 PM

"I remember thinking this was relevant when that Airbus crashed in Long Island after the tail snapped off inexplicably when exposed to nothing more than some mildly higher turbulence (the Airbus was flying in the wake of a 747). That tail was pure composite, the only part of the plane that was."

You might want to look further into this. As I recall, this was a pretty significant stress event, not "mildly higher turbulence." In fact, I also recall reading a letter in Aviation Week once about the B-47 and how it was actually possible for the pilot to break the tail off by stomping too hard on the rudder pedals.

"I remember also thinking it was relevant when I heard how the engineers were shocked by the huge hole blown in the Columbia spare RCC panel in that test done by the CAIB. Indeed, it seems ludicrous that they failed to *design* the RCC panels to resist such mild (relative to general launch stress) impacts, so it must have been an age/fatigue weakness."

Again, you might want to do some more research. The force that hit the RCC panels was significant. The RCC panels are in fact quite tough. They are simply not tough enough to withstand a 2 pound object traveling at 500+ miles per hour. In fact, you'd be pretty surprised at what materials cannot withstand this kind of force.

"I could be wrong about this, but if not, it suggests there was no way even in principle to predict the failure of the Columbia RCC panel, and that no management or engineering solution exists to the problem short of simply tossing the orbiters (or at least their composite parts) and building anew."

Here you are completely missing the point. The issue is NOT one of designing RCC panels to withstand such impacts. The issue is reducing the probability that such impacts will occur in the first place.

Posted by at August 24, 2004 10:14 PM

That's a singularly useless response. What the hell is "pretty significant" stress and a "significant" force, for example? Micropascals and millinewtons if you're a bug, eh? Something different if you're a Space Shuttle or Airbus or 200 km nickel-iron asteroid. Without a reference scale such statements are 100% content-free.

You also talk like (1) stuff like ice and foam hadn't been hitting the Shuttle routinely for years, and (2) as if oh my God a 500 mph impact is the obvious equivalent of firing a Sidewinder at the wing. FYI stopping 900g traveling at 220 m/s is roughly a 22 kJ event, equivalent to the detonation of 10 grams (one-third ounce) of TNT, about as much as would fit in a teaspoon.

This isn't a trivial stress, to be sure, depending very much on the time and wing area over which it's distributed, but, yeah, it does seems a *little* surprising a priori that it would wreck the wing or that the original design engineers didn't plan for routine small impacts like this on the leading edge. After all, no one could ever guarantee the Shuttle wouldn't hit a pigeon on the way up, right?

D'ya suppose this is some wild outlying event for aerospace engineering? That your generic 747 would be blasted out of the sky if it ran into a 2-pound migrating snow goose at 500+ mph? Give me a break.

Of course, obviously the Shuttle is made of different materials than a 747, with radically different material properties requirements. Nevertheless I find it hard to believe, a priori, that one of those circa 1978 requirements wasn't the ability to handle minor impacts like this one. But, as I said, all fabricated structures decay in their ability to handle stress, and it's well known that composites decay in ways that are exceedingly difficult to predict. So again, I wonder if a better-informed scientist or engineer than I could say whether there's any suspicion that this unfortunate feature of composites was suspected in the accident.

Posted by George Bush at August 25, 2004 01:41 AM

"So again, I wonder if a better-informed scientist or engineer than I..."

Okay, so why not start by _making_ yourself better-informed and actually read the CAIB report?

You act like you've decided that you're a genius and everybody else, from the shuttle designers to the people who investigated the accident, are morons.

Posted by at August 25, 2004 07:00 AM

If I recall correctly, Airbus research into the crash concluded that the tail had been subjected to something like 3 times the maximum theorectical design stress for the material when it failed.

Like many Airbus failures it appears to have been a problem with pilot training and the Airbus "full envelope" control system. In flight mode the rudder pedals behave differently to how they do on the ground, with a non-linear actuation in flight mode.

THe airline trained pilots to handle wake turbulance with full rudder extensions. Basically the first officer rammed his foot down on the rudder during the turbulance - which was actually the 3rd set the aircraft had passed through. This massively over stressed the tail section leading to the catastrophic failure.

In my mind this is something of a design flaw with the Airbus control system, they had something similar in the early days with Controlled Flights into Terrain because the flight control system flipped to landing mode on slow approaches and did not allow the pilot proper engine control. They dealt with that with some software fixes and improved pilot training.

I'm still not sure about the use of composites in aircraft, but we're stuck with it.

Posted by Daveon at August 25, 2004 07:35 PM

A Google search on "columbia carbon-carbon" will turn up a great deal of information on the event. I'm not going to repeat the details you can find easily enough yourself. There are issues with the carbon-carbon panels, but not specifically because they are composites. The tragedy occured because of a combination of events - impact itself didn't "wreck the wing." Part of NASA's failure was that they didn't do the obvious tests, and didn't worry much about foam and ice because it hadn't hurt too much SO FAR.

Posted by VR at August 26, 2004 05:11 PM


Post a comment

Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember info?