From: Trish & Carla (wa6ube@tactical-link.com)
Date: Sun Feb 02 2003 - 23:28:28 PST
In a press conference today, NASA administrators had
passed the info that previous launches have had incidents
where debris from the booster rocket had hit the underside
of the space shuttle..
One comment also elaborated that inspection after landing
indicated minor damage to tiles that needed to be repaired,
and other instances where "popcorning" of the insulation
from the main rocket booster would show up as pitting of
the tiles on the underside of the shuttle ..
In both of these types of damage, the shuttle had no
problems with re-entry and landing..
NASA also indicated that the loss of an entire tile would
not result in heat rise to an extent that the shuttle
would suffer major damage upon re-entry..
Based on this past history, it seems that some minor scarring
of heat-shield tiles, or the absence of an entire tile was
found to not seriously effect the performance of the shuttle
on re-entry..
This history would seem to be part of mission control's rationale
that what happened during launch was not felt to be a major problem.
It is surprising, however, that while the shuttle was in orbit,
an EVA could not have been made in order to inspect the underside
of the shuttle. It is also surprising that some number of additional
tiles, and fastening media of some type is not kept on board in
order to replace one, or a few, if a few tiles were found to
be missing via an EVA inspection.
-- Patricia E. Gibbons & Carla Satra Tactical Link Systems In California: "She sells D-cells by the seashore" <ICQ#: 72818195> <http://www.tactical-link.com> see my comvan at: <http://www.tactical-link.com/wa6ube.htm> ...................................... My Public Key is available at: http://wwwkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=index&search=0xedecb44f Key ID: 0xEDECB44F This key is RSA, NOT Diffie-Hellman !!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Apr 23 2003 - 13:25:24 PDT