NASA: Hurricane Damages Shuttle Building

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The third hurricane to hit NASA's spaceport in just over a month blew out more panels and left more gaping holes in the massive shuttle assembly building, but overall damage was not as severe as feared, a space agency official said Sunday.

"Where there's obviously some more damage, it doesn't look appreciably worse than it did," said NASA spokesman George Diller, part of a 206-member team that spent the night barricaded inside the Kennedy Space Center.

"We just had a prayer service with the base chaplain because we all felt so relieved that we came out as well as we did," he said later in the morning.

Hurricane Jeanne struck the space center — still recovering from Hurricanes Charley and Frances — with 79 mph wind, according to unofficial reports. It would have been more ferocious if the storm had come ashore just a little farther north.

All three space shuttles were reported safe in their hangars on Sunday. All space station equipment and new building blocks awaiting launch to the orbiting outpost were also said to be fine.

But chunks of roofing were spotted around the base, along with mangled aluminum panels from the Vehicle Assembly Building, Diller said. At one point, Diller and some others opened a door of the adjacent launch control center, where they were huddled, and peeked outside. "We could see (the panels) fluttering down," he said.

The 525-foot-high structure was built in the mid-1960s to accommodate the towering Apollo moon rockets. It is where space shuttles are attached to their boosters and external fuel tanks prior to liftoff.

Charley tore off about 40 of the 4-foot-by-16-foot exterior panels from the assembly building in mid-August, and Frances ripped away another 820 over Labor Day weekend, turning the pieces into flying shrapnel. About 200 of those missing panels also lost the underlying insulation, leaving gaping holes in the southern side of the building.

NASA did not have enough time before Jeanne to plug the holes. All workers could do was put netting inside, behind the holes, to catch any flying debris. A huge hole in the roof, also the work of Frances, was covered with tarps and sandbags in preparation for Jeanne.

Two other critical buildings lost entire sections of roof during Frances, and workers patched them the best they could.

Anxious to see the latest damage, the space center's director, James Kennedy, took a 45-minute drive with his emergency director late Sunday morning. "He thought that things don't look too bad," Diller reported. Nevertheless, the space center will remain closed Monday.

Jeanne is yet another setback to NASA's effort to resume space shuttle flights in the spring, following a more than two-year stand-down in the wake of the Columbia accident. Shuttle managers are expected to decide in the next week or two whether they will have to delay a Discovery launch planned for March or April.

From Space.com -

"What were the problems with SLC 6 launch pad at VAFB?"

The problems ranged from the sublime to the rediculous. At the rediculous end of the scale, there was a serious problem with the quality control on the project: a lot of the welding work was suspect and had to be redone. And this was on a $6Billion project! Also, the site was more windy than the planners had originally realised so that stacking the Shuttle in the open was not an option. As a result they had to build a shuttle assembly building on wheels so that it could be rolled back to launch the Shuttle (at the time it was the largest movable structure ever built). There was also a serious concern after STS-1 that the shape of the surrounding landscape might amplify the acoustic wave caused by the SRB ignition, so they had to redesign the sound suppression system and also remove a hill.

At the more sublime (though potentially more deadly) side there was the problem of hydrogen entrapment in the flame ducts. These were originally built for the hypergolic Titan-2/3 launch vehicle which meant that gas buildup wasn't factored into their design. As I'm sure you know, H2 that boils off from the ET during the launch countdown is vented through the SSMEs. It was recognised that there was potential for this hydrogen to build up in the ducts and it was widely believed that it would explode on ignition of the SSMEs which would damage or destroy the vehicle. There was an ongoing project to design a system to either vent, neutralize or burn off this H2 prior to engine start.

While the problems with the site were numerous, they were just about solved when Challenger exploded. Up to that point the VAFB site had cost about $6-7Billion dollars (between MOL and STS), I've seen it claimed that it would have cost less than $500Million to fix the problems. However, given the ongoing problems with developing the filament-wound booster casings (which many believed would explode on ignition) and continued weight growth of the KH-11 satellites, the DoD was already out of love with the Shuttle, so they shut down the project.

=======

A far more detailed summary of the SLC 6 boondoggle can be found here: http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/launch/sts_slc-6.htm

I have similar contacts at Vandenberg, and through my former agency's liaison with VAFB. I was aware that the Slick-6 facility was again modified/enhanced to accommodate other launch vehicles, but my understanding was that it had not lost its shuttle capability (not that there are any plans to use it in that way). I had read that they had provided a technical fix regarding the concrete ducts, the fear being there could have been a hydrogen buildup in them. It had something to do with a pre-launch spray of hot water in the ducts.

Here is a good recent article: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0401/18delta4slc6/

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.