Re: '04 Report Faulted Application of Shuttle Foam: NY* Article
- From: "Laughable!" <slakcer@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 02:52:27 -0500
Off topic.
John Steinberg wrote:
> '04 Report Faulted Application of Shuttle Foam
>
> By JOHN SCHWARTZ
>
> HOUSTON, Aug. 3 - An internal NASA report last December warned of
> deficiencies in the way insulating foam was being applied to sections
> of the fuel tank to be used on the shuttle Discovery's current mission.
> The report was provided to The New York Times by a person outside the
> space agency who is part of an informal network of people concerned
> about shuttle safety, and it did not recommend against launching the
> Discovery. But it delivered a harsh critique of the quality control and
> practices at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. That plant,
> managed by a major space contractor, Lockheed Martin, had come under
> intense criticism after a foam accident at liftoff led to the loss of
> the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts in 2003.
>
> While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent two and a
> half years and some $200 million to address foam problems after the
> disaster, they resurfaced on July 26, when a piece of foam as much as
> 33 inches long broke from the tank two minutes after liftoff. Future
> shuttle flights have been suspended until the problems are resolved.
> The December 2004 report, by Conley Perry, a retired NASA division
> chief for quality engineering at the Johnson Space Center here, said it
> was obvious that Lockheed's external tank engineers "did not do a
> thorough job" of identifying the quirks and variations that can occur
> when foam is applied by hand. And despite the space agency's insistence
> that it would not allow scheduling pressures to dictate a return to
> flight before it was safe, Mr. Perry wrote, its reluctance to
> re-evaluate the quality-control problems "stems from the
> 'schedule-first' attitude" of Lockheed Martin management. According to
> the report, even after two years of effort to correct the foam debris
> problem, "there will continue to be a threat of critical debris
> generation."
>
> "This variable could reasonably be eliminated," the report went on,
> "and yet it continues." The 23-page document was initially sent to
> safety managers by e-mail and came to be distributed more broadly. The
> person who provided it to The Times did so on condition of anonymity,
> saying he had not been authorized to read it. Mr. Perry declined to
> discuss the document when reached by telephone. The report was also
> reviewed by the independent group that monitored the space agency's
> progress in improving safety. A spokesman for that group referred
> questions to NASA. David Mould, the agency's assistant administrator
> for public affairs, said a point-by-point response to the report was
> prepared but could not be released at this time because the information
> fell under confidentiality rules of the export controls that govern
> space technology.
>
> But Mr. Mould added: "NASA and its contractors have made a number of
> process and quality improvements in the manual application of foam on
> the external fuel tank which have resulted in substantially less debris
> coming off the tank at launch. But as we saw, we still have work to do
> with the foam." He continued, "There are still issues that we need to
> address and we will do that." Marion LaNasa Jr., a Lockheed Martin
> spokesman, said, "We will defer to NASA regarding specifics of the
> memo, but would strongly emphasize that safety and quality are the
> guiding forces behind our workmanship on the external tank."
>
> A former director of the Johnson Space Center, George Abbey, said that
> he had seen the paper and that its conclusions were cause for concern.
> "You would think that American industry could solve and fix this whole
> problem when you look at what they've done to develop the technology
> that's gone into the rest of the shuttle," Mr. Abbey said.
>
> As they prepared for the shuttle fleet's return to orbit, officials
> said they expected to see no foam bits larger than 0.03 pounds fall off
> the new tanks during the launching. The foam that broke away two
> minutes into the Discovery's liftoff, narrowly missing the craft,
> weighed 0.9 pounds. At least three other pieces also exceeded NASA's
> safety limits. The agency administrator, Michael D. Griffin, has
> appointed a "tiger team" of engineers to find the causes of the
> incident and ways to fix the problem. Attention has focused on the
> manufacture of the tank and on the area where the largest piece of foam
> fell off, a long aerodynamic feature known as the protuberance air load
> ramp, or PAL ramp. The agency had long recognized that the PAL ramp
> could be a source of foam debris. Like the part of the tank in the
> Columbia's last mission, known as the bipod arm ramp, the foam on the
> PAL ramp is applied by hand. Those areas have tended to lose more foam
> than the large surface areas of foam that are applied by machine.
> Although flight histories showed only two incidents of foam loss from
> that ramp, the last in the early 1980's, there were dozens of night
> launchings in which falling foam would have been missed.
>
> We'll be right back after this commercial break:
> http://www.metacafe.com/item28900/ipod_flea_video
>
> After the loss of the Columbia, NASA considered removing or redesigning
> the PAL ramp. But agency officials said that no good alternatives
> emerged, and ultimately decided not to change it. Instead, the ramp
> would be examined through an internal scan that would not require
> cutting into the material, to look for the air pockets, or voids, that
> are the leading cause of foam shedding. Agency officials have broadly
> admitted since then that this decision was a mistake. As Dr. Griffin
> said in a television interview on Sunday, "We goofed on that one." Mr.
> Perry's report did not dispute the decision to fly the tank with the
> hand-applied foam. According to the document, "there is no credible
> information available to bring into question the existing areas that
> have been designated as 'use as is' foam areas." The paper concluded:
> "Notwithstanding the concerns discussed herein, I am comfortable with
> the decisions made by the various groups that identified the areas that
> required redesign and those that can be flown 'as is.' "
>
> According to the report, Tank 121, which would be put on the Discovery
> flight, was "ready to support the resumption of flight operations." As
> a test engineer, Mr. Perry worked on the investigation of the Apollo
> launching pad fire that killed three astronauts in 1967, and he
> conducted the test in which NASA burned a mockup of the capsule. He
> retired in 1993 but was called back in the aftermath of the Columbia
> accident by the space agency's return-to-flight office of safety and
> mission assurance and was asked to monitor the quality of the operation
> at Michoud.
>
> Mr. Abbey, the former Johnson Space Center director, said he was not
> surprised that Mr. Perry would not call for long delays over the PAL
> ramp issue, even though his overall criticism was so strong. "I think
> he was probably torn between his recognition of the urgency to fly
> again and his concern about the tank," Mr. Abbey said. He added that
> the problem with foam and the tank had needlessly undercut the
> successes of the return-to-flight mission. "You've got a complex system
> that's working amazingly well," Mr. Abbey said. By contrast, there have
> been persistent problems with "this essentially passive element that
> doesn't do much more than hold the fuel" for the eight and a half
> minutes it takes to reach orbit. "That's given the shuttle - a great
> system - a bad name," he said. "And that's not fair."
>
> --
> -John Steinberg
> email: not@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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