Damaris Sarria writes the How I Am Becoming an Astronaut blog, and today she has a post up on her work examining the damaged Shuttle tiles and what’s being done. She is an excellent source of information on this and other aspects of the Shuttle and, uh, becoming an astronaut.
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August 14th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
On the tiles, you might enjoy this Neil Cavuto sound bite:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293154,00.html
I know Fox is a fish-in-a-barrel type of affair for badastro snarkage, but I couldn’t help but think of NASA seeing Cavuto’s commentary and going “OK THEN, YOU’RE FIRED, LOCKHEED MARTIN! AND THAT ORION PROJECT? FORGET IT!”
August 14th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
I admire her enthusiasm. However it doesn’t negate the fact that a) we still can’t prevent items causing damage to the shuttle and b) that a 3.48-inch long and 2.31 inches wide hole is a danger to the integrity of the shuttle.
My enthusiasm for manned space flight has never been lower.
August 14th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
“My enthusiasm for manned space flight has never been lower.”
That’s too bad because it seems to me they are doing better than ever (with the Shuttle) at preventing/repairing damage to maximize safety. The two main reasons we didn’t hear this sort of thing before were:
1) The sort of minor damage that we’ve seen in recent flights wasn’t worried about as much, but mostly 2) no one knew about them until the Shuttle was safely home and sensationalist news outlets couldn’t spin it into something sinister.
Knowing is better than the old blissful ignorance approach, except for the bad PR (although still better than the loss of another orbiter).
August 14th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Speaking of space trouble, I’m working at a camp, and at the begining of each day, we watch skits with these secret agents on a space station trying to stop an asteroid impact. The Bad Astronomy in this is so thick I could cut it with a knife (The hero thinks that a meteor shower made his robot go haywire), but, suposing that the asteroid is the size of the dinoaur killer and the station is the size of ISS, what would happen if the asteroid hit it?
Back on topic, I think that fixing this problem is of the very greatest importance. Lots of people distrust NASA or think that they always screw up, and another disaster could can the whole program.
August 14th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
One flight in particular, where this sort of thing happened in a very bad way was STS-27:
http://astronautix.com/flights/sts27.htm
We were lucky to get that one back.
August 14th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
I think she’s going to be a great asset to the Space program. She’s highly educated, well-spoken, and a serious FOX! (Shades of Dr. Sally Ride)…
But why, oh why, does she list her ass-trological sign in her blog?
Or is that a feature of blogs, that she is unable to prevent?
Personally, I find ass-trology to be pure, unadulterated BS – we Scorpios do…
August 14th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
I like the way she answers the comments on her blog quickly. This repetitive and ongoing problem with the Space Shuttles underbelly is giving me an upset stomach. As an automobile keeps a spare tire in case of a flat, does the Shuttle carry extra tiles? If not—why not?
August 15th, 2007 at 4:46 am
Fellow Space Travel lovers,
Now, I like a good space travel vehicle like anyone else, but the Shuttle is inherently flawed, outdated and has kept the American Space program in low Earth orbit for too long.
What’s old is new, and the upcoming Orion C.E.V spacecraft proves that keeping the volatile and potentially dangerous parts of the vehicle below the crew is smart thinking, ala the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Not a single tragedy occurred during those flights. (Apollo 1 was a ground mishap).
I have handled Shuttle tiles, and they are so light and fragile, it’s a wonder they all don’t crumble and disintegrate in re-entry. Confidence in the integrity of the STS’s is low and we have lost two crafts and astronaut crews in this design failure, a political compromise during the Nixon administration.
Let’s repair the Hubble and place the remainder Shuttles (Space trucks), in museums and get on with the next stage of true space exploration.
The return to the Moon and onward to Mars.
Chicago Astronomer Joe
Administrator
http://www.chicagoastronomer.com
August 15th, 2007 at 4:58 am
yoshi wrote: “However it doesn’t negate the fact that [...] that a 3.48-inch long and 2.31 inches wide hole is a danger to the integrity of the shuttle.”
What a silly remark.. by definition, any hole, no matter how small, means a degradation of the integrity of the shuttle. Or did you mean structural integrity?
It depends on location and depth of the hole whether it poses any danger to structural integrity. In many cases leaving damage unrepaired may be safer than risking a dangerous improvised spacewalk and having lots of heavy equipment very near the heat shield.
Sergeant Zim (damn i need to read that book again): I believe that it is indeed a blog ‘feature’ that shows up as soon as you enter your date of birth (another skeptic blogger mentioned it).
August 15th, 2007 at 6:50 am
*headmeetdesk*
August 16th, 2007 at 2:10 am
Ray, there are no spare tiles on board, because if I remember correctly they are almost all different in shape, and it would take an enormous supply of tiles to have a spare for each one. Instead they have the three repair methods that Damaris Sarria described on her blog.