Columbia tragedy 1

[cranekiran]

Dear all,

First of all I want to express my sincere condolences to the families of the brave crew of the columbia shuttle.I feel the space exploration should continue despite the setbacks at present simply because the sacrifice of the magnificient seven would go in vain if the project is stopped.
But as Engineers we have to discuss the possibilities & reasons of this disaster so that in future this should not happen again.
I am not a Aeronautical engineer but as a design engineer I feel something quite not right in the positioning of the shuttle w.r.t the booster rockets.
See,From the looks of the shuttle taking off I felt the positioning of the shuttle too low & too close to the booster rocket jets,It was almost as if the flames of the booster rockets were touching the orbiter during the take-off.I may be wrong but Is there a chance that the shuttle was getting over-heated due to this reason? Can the shuttle be shifted to the top of the arrangement without affecting the overall performance?
I have written the same to the CHICAGO TRIBUNE about my opinion,I am doing the same here hoping to get some answers from this community.
I would be glad to read other opinions as well.
bye!

 

[JayMaechtlen]

..."amount of Aluminum"...

AFIK, the solids have steel casings!

Just like great, big chunks of water pipe with very expensive machining at each end...

cheers
Jay
Jay Maechtlen

 

[GregLocock]

A dutch team has proposed a system similar to the watercooling idea above

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993551

Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[Metalguy]

How interesting. Maybe they'll throw me a red star. <g>

 

[IRstuff]

Just for giggles, let's figure out how much water we'd need to carry based on that description:
10 liters water -- 1.6 m^2 surface area of DART

shuttle minimum surface area = 100 ft*50 ft = 464 m^2

==> shuttle would need to carry about 290 times more water or 2900 kg of water or about 6400 lbs of water.

Oh, the DART description implies approximately equal amounts of air volume as water volume, so we'd also need about 5.8 m^3 of volume, not counting the plumbing and material need to contain superheated steam at 5 atmospheres of pressure. TTFN

 

[GregLocock]

I'd guess they only intend to cool the hot bits (ie leading edge of wing, front lower panel on nose), so I'd expect more like 40 m^2, so they'd only need 300 kg of water by your figures. 5 atmosphere is a trivial pressure for plumbing, shop air is about that.

Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[IRstuff]

The problem is that on the Shuttle, there's only hot and hotter.

The leading edges and nose run above 1260°C, while the remainder of the fuselage and wings are simply somewhat below 1260°C. These are the black parts of the Shuttle.

Parts of white parts are still hot, running up to 650°C. TTFN

 

[CusterWilson]

The &quot;260 Inch&quot; Solids blew out windows 20+ miles away
Every Titan or even Delta (despite its 2% loss rate) has failed when built large enough to carry a Shuttle's cargo.
The unpredicatable explosions &quot;for no reason&quot; are called &quot;combustion Instability&quot;.
To reduce the Problem, Physicist Fletcher suggested 1/20th size Solids, stacked 4 on each side (only 8/20ths, so the Liquids are run 8.5 minutes not the original 3 -- that is why they have to be off to one side.
Be happy though -- because the thrust goes at an angle they put the heaviest part, the &quot;Lox&quot; atop so the LH2 underneath has its ullage-- a 3 foot layer of Helium -- on top & so BETWEEN the fuel & oxidiser. The reason cameras were removed from Shuttle was the Moon rockets blew up too fast to take pictures -- but the Shuttle doesn't!
Note the Farming out of the Foam question to Boeing 'caus all the Rocket Scientists at NASA got fired.
Notice their total lack on the Panels.
It would be easy to make Escape systems that work, NOW, but I -- or anyone else -- can't get a Scientist to change the rulings made in the 1960s -- because they DON'T EXIST.
Engineers are not really trained to anyalyze from basic principles ... but it disgusts me that I have proposed methods that would have save BOTH crews we lost, BEFORE the losses, and ones that (a) were mostly designed already, they just had &quot;show stoppers&quot; that I can evade, PLUS the false impression ALL accidents would vaporize the astronauts instantly (obviously, if we can recover live Worms , or Pieces of our crews, we can recover them intact). Yet the official Dictum is still that of the next 1000 accidents, 1000 will be too quick for sensible response.

I am so tired of recovering PIECES of Astronauts !

 

[GraviMan]

Wish NASA would throw me a line. I'm pretty darn sure I could find a way to stop crews taking risks with high speeds and temps.

I sympathise with the rocket Scientists though, since I've seen too many bungling attempts at management in the auto industry. You'd have thought the wheel would be about right by now.

Still if I document my ideas, and bung 'em in a time capsule, future generations could dig 'em out and say &quot;hell they figured that out then!&quot;...

Maybe I'm jus' gettin' cynical. ;-)

Mart