Word: foams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...NASA starts trying to pinpoint the cause of all this horror, investigators will have a lot of places to turn. The mission began with at least one anomaly when, at the moment of launch, a piece of foam broke from the insulation on the giant external fuel tank and struck the left wing of the ship. "We spent a goodly amount of time reviewing the film [of the launch] and analyzing what that might do," says shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore. "From our experience it was determined that the event did not represent a safety concern...
...falling foam did damage the ship, the most disturbing possibility is that it chipped or broke one or more of Columbia's heat-absorbing tiles. The spacecraft is protected from the hellish heat of re-entry by thermal blankets and about 24,000 black and white ceramic tiles. The jigsaw-puzzle pieces have given the space agency fits since the very first flight of the very first shuttle--Columbia in April 1981. Handfuls of them often flaked away during lift-off, leaving NASA with nothing to do but wait out the flight and hope that the skin had not been...
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...