Word: foamings
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Only hours before the docking, NASA announced that the entire shuttle fleet was being grounded again, after evidence that four pieces of insulating foam--the largest the size of a skateboard--had spun off the ship's external fuel tank during lift-off, just the kind of debris that damaged Columbia's wing and doomed the ship. Only one small piece may have struck the shuttle this time, glancing off a wing with so little force it didn't register on impact sensors. But a camera mounted on the shuttle's 50-ft. arm as well as photos taken from...
Others are asking why, if a piece of foam was known to have hit the ship, an astronaut wasn't sent outside during the course of the 16-day mission to determine whether any damage had been done. Dittemore explains that this crew was not trained for that kind of extensive space walk, and even if they were and they found some damage, they could have done nothing about it anyway. "We had no capability to go over the side or under the spacecraft and look for an area of distress and repair a tile," he says...
TIME.com: Despite two years of intense work on safety precautions, the space shuttle again lost pieces of foam on liftoff. Why has this happened again? Jeff Kluger: It will never be possible to entirely prevent foam from flaking off the shuttle during liftoff - NASA administrator Michael Griffin has been quite candid about that. There's simply too much surface area on a fuel tank 15 stories tall, carrying more than 535,000 gallons fuel. There's too much wind and vibration during liftoff to prevent at least some foam from breaking off. What NASA engineers have done over the past...
...this may well be a problem that they can't fix, although the fact that NASA has stopped future flights also signals the much tighter safety standards that are now in place. Shuttles have been shedding tiles and foam for years, but luck and careful maintenance prevented tragedies. Then Columbia happened. Since then, NASA has narrowed the aperture of danger it is willing to tolerate. The current shuttle, by comparison to some of the previous missions, is remarkably clean despite the foam that fell off. In that respect, it shows that the work of the past two years has produced...
...Well, there is some cause for concern, but it remains minimal. And not as a result of the large piece of foam that spun off relatively safely. The photographic inspection has revealed three divots on the underside of the craft, one of which is 1.5 inches long, adjacent to the wheel-well where the front landing gear is stored. If superheated gases stream into that open space during reentry, it can create a kind of vapor bomb inside the ship. But the photography suggests the divot isn't deep enough to cause that danger. So far, it looks like they...