Posted on 07/14/2003 8:21:50 AM PDT by DWPittelli
Earth Worshippers Cause Death in Space
By Hannes Hacker
Ayn Rand Institute | July 11, 2003
Now that a dramatic new test has confirmed that a piece of thermal insulation flaking off of space shuttle Columbia's external tank during launch was the most likely cause of its destruction during reentry, the typical second-guessing in the press has focused on NASA engineers, asking: "What did Mission Control know, and when did they know it?"
Somehow, NASA engineers should have guessed about the damage done to Columbia's thermal tiles and pulled an Apollo 13-style rabbit out of their hat. The implication is that they should have been omniscient and omnipotent.
Having heroes like NASA's mission controllers around to quietly brave the world's criticism certainly serves to divert attention from those who have done the most to contribute to this disaster--and who regard themselves as omniscient and omnipotent enough to command the entire American economy and the lives of its citizens: the environmentalists.
Why did the shuttle's foam insulation flake off? In response to an edict from the EPA, NASA was required to change the design of the thermal insulating foam on the shuttle's external tank. They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, in order to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster.
But it was the elimination of the old foam that led to a real disaster for the shuttle program. The maiden flight with the new foam, in 1997, resulted in a ten-fold increase to foam-induced tile damage. The new foam was far more dangerous than the old foam. But NASA--a government organization afraid of antagonizing powerful political interests--did not reject the EPA's demands and thoroughly reverse their fatal decision. Instead, they sought a compromise, applying for a waiver from the EPA that allowed them to use the old foam on some parts of the external tank.
NASA notes that it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether it was the old or the new foam that caused the recent disaster, and environmentalists will no doubt say this means that we can't pin the disaster on them. But any unnecessary increase in risk in an enterprise so unforgiving of error, is unacceptable. The bottom line is that NASA took a much greater risk in order to comply with EPA demands. Environmentalist junk science trumped sound engineering.
This is not the first time that has happened. The cause of the 1986 Challenger explosion is officially established as hot gases burning through an O-ring joint in one of the solid-rocket boosters. NASA was roundly criticized for its decision to launch in cold weather over the objection of some engineers, but there was a deeper cause that was not as widely reported.
In 1985 NASA had switched to a new putty to seal the O-ring joints. The new putty became brittle at cold temperatures, thus allowing Dr. Richard Feynman to teach NASA a famous lesson. At the congressional hearing investigating the accident, he simply placed some of the O-ring putty in a glass of ice water and crumbled it in his fingers.
NASA had changed the sealant because its original supplier for O-ring putty stopped producing it for fear of anti-asbestos lawsuits.
Had NASA not run out of the original putty, the Challenger disaster would not have happened. Indeed, when the Air Force ran out of the same putty and replaced it with the same brittle substitute, their Titan 34D heavy-lift boosters suffered two sudden launch failures, after a string of successes that had lasted as long as that of the space shuttle.
These accidents are not primarily the fault of careless engineers, nor are they merely the unintended consequences of bureaucrats blindly following federal rules. They are the result of a philosophy that hold human needs--such as the need for a safe shuttle launch or re-entry--as less important than a concern to preserve the purity of nature from the products of industrial civilization, such as CFCs and asbestos insulation.
Had 2000 presidential candidate Al Gore had his way, Columbia's last mission would have carried a spacecraft called Triana into space. Triana was meant to beam continuous images, via the Internet, of a very small Earth as seen from a point between the Earth and the Sun. The idea was to convey the message of how small and fragile the Earth is, and consequently how small man is, compared to the vastness of space.
That's the theory: man is small and should sacrifice for vast nature. The practice? Fourteen dead astronauts.
Hannes Hacker, an aerospace engineer and former flight controller at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, is a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute (www.aynrand.org/medialink) in Irvine, Calif.
| How about the new highway named for Clinton in his home stste of Arkansas? It's a little crooked, and has a long yellow streak down the center. Be careful if you drive on it, it's a little slick. Manufacturers announced today that they will be stocking America's shelves this week with "Clinton Soup, to honor one of the nation's most distingushed men". It consists primariy of a weenie in hot water. |
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What a huge waste of taxpayer’s money and even greater waste of scarce shuttle space this would have been.
This is truly typical of the Clintoon/Gore philosophy of government; style over substance, no cost is to great, it’s the message stupid.
Heck, I'm sure there are zillions of "types of putty". NASA originally used a certain type of putty (let's call it their First Choice). The problem was that its manufacturer had to stop making it to protect against risk of lawsuit. So, NASA was forced by circumstances to switch away from its First Choice, due ultimately to the actions of "environmentalists".
Since they couldn't use their First Choice, it follows that they were using their Second (or worse) Choice. It doesn't matter that there are "lots of types of putty", the point here is that even if NASA chose the best possible type of putty available, it still wasn't their First Choice, so it was bound to be worse.
The question is: why should NASA have been prevented from using their First Choice? You don't even seem to understand that this is the issue which is being raised in the article.
It's NASA's responsibility to develop products/equipment to the shuttle's unique requirements. Same for the foam.
But they did develop foam suited to the shuttle's unique requirements. Then "environmental" regulation prevented them from using it (their First Choice)!
Thus they had to use their Second (or worse) Choice, which was bound to be worse than their First Choice.
Again, the question is why they should have been prevented from using their First Choice?
I suppose the question is one of trade-offs. Is the trade-off worth it, to prevent NASA from using its best materials on the space shuttle, for the supposed "environmental" gains in question? If not, you should be outraged at the wasted lives and shuttles and money (these "environmental" regulations cost you lots of money, since the shuttles were effectively destroyed by them). Why aren't you?
These facts remain:
1) Asbestos holds up extremely well to flame
2) Coming up with new materials is not a trivial process
3) Materials science has always progressed based on failures. Sometimes conditions can't be fully recreated in tests, and sometimes failures in the field are tragic ones.
4) There are a limited number of materials, and adding new parameters can make it difficult or impossible to work as well within the existing parameters. The O-ring material has to be formable, noncorrosive, strong, resistant to heat, and resistant to cold while maintaining solidity and yet not getting brittle (and perhaps I am missing others). Adding any one parameter (e.g., "environmental friendliness") that's not met by an existing formulation makes it harder to meet all of the above.
5) If it works, don't fix it. Abandoning an existing formula, even if there is no real increase in any of the design parameters, means there's always a chance you'll make a mistake which you might miss in the lab. Or that the fabricators will make mistakes when they make their copies of your lab prototype.
So for a number of reasons, in dealing with life or death matters (not to mention a major government program and huge amount of money), it's a mistake to let a trivial amount of asbestos or freon dictate a design change.
The only way this is not a scandal is if it appears that the new designs are no worse than the original ones.
To a certain extent I will agree with you. Where I work equipment is required to operate in extremes of radiation, heat or cold. Our engineers must evaluate equipment to be installed in these areas and certify them prior to their installation.
However you may be wrong concerning the putty. Chemical compatibility of the O-ring may have limited the choices of putty that could be used. An engineer then may certify the temperature sensitive putty with the knowledge that very few days at the Cape will reach the low temperature to impact a launch. The true problem is that concerns of engineers were overridden by internal managerial politics that were pushing the launch schedule.
No, we don't. We did, however, raise the lowest-acceptable temperature for launch to accommodate the shortcomings of the O-rings.
-Jay
Well to bump does a few things...
... first "bump" means to bump a thread to the top of the stack in the "Latest Posts"....
it a way keep a good story in play when comments might be slowing down...
even if you have a thread that been dormant for months, if you bump it its gets seen again in"Latest Posts"
but it also a quick way to mark a thread for a later read because your bump will come up under a “My Comments” search
You see that when someone posting “bump for later read”
but also you can bump a thread as a recommendation as in “good read bump”
Also sometimes a bump is really a "ping"
(and a ping here is if your not sure is a post to several people you want to give a quick heads up to about a thread because it will come up under there “My Comments” search...
the term "ping" is a take off on IP ping command used on a network to "ping" a devise to see if its alive and there)
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