Space Shuttle

I watched an interesting programme on the Columbia Shuttle disaster today.
It looked at the possible explanations and the history of the shuttle and how safety issues have taken a back seat to other demands put on NASA.

It showed how the design of the shuttle was pretty much forced on NASA by the budget office of the Nixon administration because the military wanted a big payload capacity for its satellites. NASA had wanted a much smaller vehicle which would have meant it was only exposed to the really hot re-entry temperatures for four minutes versues twelve with the shuttle.

The original design also had the smaller crew vehicle on the top of the launcher not fixed to the side of the booster like the shuttle. It seems amazing but on the first ever shuttle launch the crew had ejecter seats but after the fifth mission they were removed.
When Challenger exploded the crew were still alive two minutes after but couldn’t escape. The ejection seats were put back in the rest of the shuttles.

An engineer showed how easy the heat tiles can be damaged, the very light material comes away if you scratch it with your finger which NASA would have known was a problem on the wing because of the film of the booster foam hitting it.
Because the crew compartment of Columbia was found over a small area they think it stayed in one piece after the shuttle broke up and if it had made it to 40,000ft the astronauts may have been able to eject.

The design of the next generation of space vehicle to replace the shuttle looks very much like what NASA wanted thirty years ago.
I saw the other day they’re hoping to resume flights this autumn, anybody going up is taking a big chance.

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Space shuttle

Sad news about the space shuttle yesterday. Those missions are so common you rarely take any notice nowadays, I remember the very first shuttle flight back in about 1980/1. At school all the kids where gathered in a class with a tv for a couple of hours waiting for the liftoff but it got postponed for a two days.
Watching the first shuttle come back to land was also pretty awesome, they showed it live on tv one evening. They had air force jets flying up to meet it and you slowly saw this little speck getting bigger as it came into the atmosphere.
Let’s hope they figure out the cause of this accident.

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