Foam Gluing Flaw Killed Columbia Astronauts

Freshly Exhumed writes "Now it can be told: NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board has blamed the faulty application of insulating foam for the loss of the Columbia orbiter. From the chief engineer for the external tanks project: '...NASA concluded after extensive testing that the process of applying some sections of foam by hand with spray guns was at fault.' And further: 'It was not the fault of the guys on the floor; they were just doing the process we gave them'."

60%?

Gaps, or voids, were often left, and tests done since the Columbia accident have shown liquid hydrogen could seep into those voids. After launch, the gas inside the voids starts to heat up and expand, causing large pieces of insulation to pop off.

NASA said this happens on about 60 percent of its shuttle launches.

Sixty percent of the time? I don't pretend to be an expert, but that number seems a bit high, especially when this can cause such damage. Can anyone shed some more light on the situation here?

Re:60%?

Sixty percent of the time? I don't pretend to be an expert, but that number seems a bit high, especially when this can cause such damage. Can anyone shed some more light on the situation here?

Luck basically. 60% of launches lost foam, and the foam has a miniscule chance of causing damage

It might hit at an acute angle and bounce off easily. the foam might not hit the orbiter at all. The foam might be tiny tiny pieces.

It's because of this experience of the foam falling off so often and not causing damage that the idea foam could be to blame was originally discounted. It was just too outrageous - but when foam was actually tested on the most dangerous possibly spot, the leading edge of a wing or right into the flat of the nose, then the damage became obvious.

It's like the experience of riding a bicycle, and saying being hit by bugs isn't dangerous - and 99% of the time it's not, until you happen to get a rather sharp angry beetle right in your eye. Blinded and in pain riding along at 30kph and you're suddenly on the pavement.

Re:Core Problem: Lack of Competition in Space

The Russians still have the best technology in space. While the Americans were speculating about where the MIR would land, the Russian scientists were confident that it'd land on target. Indeed it did land 1.3 km within the targeted area. As usual, the Americans simply congratulated them. Russians are the only link to the ISS. They realized long long ago that the space shuttle was way too expensive...but they had one of their own that flew and landed within feet of its intended target on the runway.

To understand this, the Russians only have to prepare to sell some of their [space] tech to the Chinese, then Americans will come out screaming.

They also produce some of the deadliest weapons on earth, and all in simple production houses...and ohh...they also have the heaviest and biggest flying aircraft in the world. Please google for the Antonov-225.

Russians just need more organization.

Re:Core Problem: Lack of Competition in Space

Let me get this straight... you're evidence for your claim that the Russians are the 'best' was the accuracy with which they predicted their broken space station would crash?

Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to belittle the Russian space effort, they are without a doubt the leaders in the areas of heavy lift and long duration manned space flight - but predicting a crash and abandoning a space vehicle as too expensive are not the best examples of Russian space dominance.

Re:Core Problem: Lack of Competition in Space

The Russians still have the best technology in space.
That is a broad statement, Russian and U.S. spacecraft where designed for different purposes. Each type of spacecraft has it's own advantages/disadvantages. For example, the shuttle can release, dock, and bring back satellites in it's docking bay. Also, what about GPS, US Satellite imaging, Mars rovers, etc?

...their [space] tech to the Chinese, then Americans will come out screaming
Can't disagree with you there. We are not on the greatest terms with China, but the US governent would probably complain about any country selling significant technology to China.

heaviest and biggest flying aircraft in the world. Please google for the Antonov-225
The U.S. has found that using several smaller cargo aircraft such as the C-130 Herc is typically more efficient for military use. The Herc uses a smaller runway, requires less maintenance, and is a smaller target for those nasty SAMs. In this case, bigger does not mean better. Don't get me wrong, a big aircraft is cool, but how practical is it?

Re:Core Problem: Lack of Competition in Space

The Antonov-225 was designed back in the Soviet era, and like many of the USSR's military concepts was expected to be useful in non-conventional warfare or "police action" programs. It took Afghanistan to teach the USSR that there would likely be anti-aircraft assets in the hands of local rebels and resistance movements.
One of their assumptions was that there would be need for a military controlled asset in areas without anti-aircraft weapons deployed. The US typically relies more on civilian assets for such functions as disaster relief. We would also normally pay (in both time and money) to pre-position really large industrial equipment by ship instead of plane. The USSR wanted to be able to fly in enough gear to resume oil production and refining on very, very short notice, for just one example. The time involved was much shorter than would be needed to restore an oil based economy post war, and more a matter of having fuel for Soviet armored divisions still in full active combat mode. It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide just where the USSR hoped to use this capability.

Re:Core Problem: Lack of Competition in Space

From this [nasa.gov] page:

"In November 1995, the partially completed (Russian) shuttles were dismantled at their production site. The manufacturing plant is scheduled to be converted for production of buses, syringes, and diapers."

Gotta love capitalism.

Heroes

Let's remember the heroes who died that day. I think it's very sad something like a little glue can cost lives in the blink of an eye. What a horrible mistake. There is an interesting article [newscientist.com] on the safety upgrades for the spring 2005 launch.

Not Heroes

It is a terrible tragedy, yes. They're not heroes. Enough of calling anyone who dies in a well publicized disaster a hero.

Re:Not Heroes

I agree the term "Hero" is tossed around all too often. However, these men and women put themselves into some very extreme and dangerous conditions in order to advance the human race as a whole in countless different areas, and paid the ultimate price. These modern explorers definately earned the title "Hero" in my books.

So many minds...

I'm of so many minds about this. Yes, we needed to know in order to fix this process. I'm glad no one tried to pass the buck. I'm disappointed that it took so long to figure this out.

I hope that we can use this as evidence the next time someone says, "Oh please, somebody thinkg of the children.. ehrm.. astronauts!" We know know what caused the problem, and we can avoid it in the future.

On the other hand, I'm already looking forward to the privatization os space, because I think the days of NASA are declining. For as great an agency as it is, it's got a terrible public opinionation...

Re: So many minds...

I think part of the problem is the expectation of people that space travel is more science than art, when this is not true. It requires more than crunching numbers, it requires a lot of guess work and estimation, as well as intuitive individuals to impliment the science in the safest way they know how.

Yes, the science makes it possible but there is no way to fully test theories until you put them into practice, thus there will always be significant risks with space travel. I think most people know this, and the crews that actually take the risks certainly do.

Space travel is similar to travel by submarine, being submersed in an atmosphere that is hostile and will kill you if you are exposed to it, where you are totally dependent on what you have on board to deal with any situation. With all the experience and science we have regarding submarines, we still have accidents and should expect no less with space travel, where you can't simply surface. There simply is not, and never will be, a 100% solution to guarantee total safety for either.

This is part of the reason I still awestruck by those who are willing to take this extreme risk.

Same old shit

They will just launch another investigation into how this procedure was come up with to glue these tiles on.

They will find out that some budgetary advisory panel recommended these procedures against the wishes of some NASA engineer in order to save a buck.

Eventually this will fall out of the public eye (as most things usually do). In the end, no action will be taken against the people responsible for this horrible tradgedy. In fact, the same contractor will probably be hired again to advise them for the next-gen shuttles or whatever they come up with.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat is not the standard I want when the lives of some of the best and brightest people this world has to offer is hanging in the balance.

[/rant]

Amazing

It's amazing how something like the method of gluing on insulation tiles can cause a shuttle to blow up, yet for all the serious damage done to Apollo 13 they still managed to get back alive.

Re:Amazing

Yes but they had Tom Hanks

Not Amazing; porkbarrel.

The notion of the, "reusable space plane," is simply stupid. If the astronauts ran NASA, we would have vehicles, like Saturn V, that lifted mass into space and capsules that bring down only what we need. The shuttle is a boondoggle to throw money to the aerospace industry. The Progress M-50 craft is vastly superior to our shuttle when it comes to lifting weight to orbit. We lost a shuttle because Senator Orrin Hatch (Bush-loving republican, natch) overrode the engineer to throw work to Thiokol. The original design called for one piece boosters which would be transported by barge. Orrin made them cut the booster in half so Thiokol could bid. (There aren't many barge routes in Utah.) The two haves were joined by -- o-rings. In the United States, there is only one agency with the tradition, tradition and ability to explore. Let's turn the space program over to the Navy and go back to the moon.

Re:Amazing

Apollo 13 had one advantage: it may have been severely damaged, but IIRC none of the damage was to the reentry vehicle.

True. The Command Module wasn't damaged. However, the loss of electricity and oxygen in the Service Module following the explosion did deplete the batteries and reserve oxygen tank in the CM, and these supplies had to be replenished from the Lunar Module. What saved the Apollo 13 crew was the fact that they had an second independent spaceship. Had the SM oxygen tank explosion occurred on Apollo 8, where there was no LM, the astronauts wouldn't have survived.

The Russians were right

Yes they were. I remember a Russian Scientist noted this but a NASA official was simply saying..."...no confirmation nor denial...". This is the usual western [political] rant. It was clear from the photos that it had to do with the insulation. The arcitecture of the shuttle is very well known.

Just one thing...

"It was not the fault of the guys on the floor; they were just doing the process we gave them," Otte said. "I agree with the (accident investigation board) that we did not have a real understanding of the process. Our process for putting foam on was giving us a product different than what we certified."

Kudos to Neil Otte for coming up like this.

I reflect back on several things...

... on Alan Sherpard's thoughts at lift-off of our first manned suborbital flight that here he was, sitting on a huge container of explosive materials, built by the lowest-bidding contractor. Yep these people truly have "The Right Stuff", and the ones who have died have paid the dues for all of us.

... and that what other nation on this planet would allow the news f the disaster and subsequent investigation to be covered so openly? Sure, "stuff" happens -- but if it's not given a thorough airing, how do we expect "stuff" to ever get fixed? I am both thrilled by the images and amazed by the political boldness when our government* allows real-time webcasting of events on the space station and space walks. At least with this revelation that we have a faulty process for applying the foam insulation, there's some reason to expect it will be fixed.

*rotten and corrupt it certainly is, but (I think) it's still better than the rest -- we'll see in November if we can change course or remain headed for the pit.

There is no GLUE!

Nor are there any tiles, as more than two [slashdot.org] fool [slashdot.org] implies.

The foam is sprayed on, and it adheres directly to the External Tank's aluminum substrate (and itself, of course). Some metallic sections of the tank are coated with epoxy before being sprayed. But the process is slightly different on the bipod structure:

The insulated region where the bipod struts attach to the External Tank is structurally, geometrically, and materially complex. Because of concerns that foam applied over the fittings would not provide enough protection from the high heating of exposed surfaces during ascent, the bipod fittings are coated with ablators. BX-250 foam is sprayed by hand over the fittings (and ablator materials), allowed to dry, and manually shaved into a ramp shape. The foam is visually inspected at the Michoud Assembly Facility and also at the Kennedy Space Center, but no other non-destructive evaluation is performed.
-- excerpt from CAIB report vol. 1, p. 51

You can get all the CAIB reports here [www.caib.us].

This is bogus....

The thing that doomed the shuttle was not the glue process. It was the way the organisation reacted to the clue that something was wrong. There were many people pushing for a pro-active inpsection of the shuttle, either by camera or EVA and the "suits" obstructed it.

Let's suppose it wasn't a chunk of foam that hit the wing but some unlucky bird. Nothing would have changed - the film would show "something" hitting the wing and all the decisions form that point would be made the same way. Would we then be having an inquiry that decided the bird scaring process was flawed?

The issue is that something unexpected happened and the process for dealing with that went wrong. That needs fixing, not the glue..

YMMV

Re:This is bogus....

The glue needs to be fixed too. Had the glue worked, even with the disaster response problems Columbia would have made it home fine.

Yes, they need to fix the way they respond to problems and potential problems, but they also have to fix the direct cause of the disaster, which is the glue.

the real cause

Its great to find the point source of the failure, but after reading the report of the committe, it was clear that the real cause of the failure was systemic, going back many, many years.

Enviro-weenies at fault?

Is it not the case that they changed the formulation of the foam in an attempt to be "environmentally friendly"?

And that the foam did not have these problems when they used the original, non-green formula?

Political correctness is going to kill this country. It already killed those astronauts.

These guys forgot Kindergarten

Clearly, the NASA engineers just need to consult with their 5 year-olds:

1. If at first it doesn't stick, use more Elmers
2. If you're going to snap somebody with a rubber band, make sure it's nice and warm or it won't work (a/k/a the Calvin and Hobbes rule)
3. Don't stick your tongue on the liquid nitrogen tank. Just don't.
4. Always remember to put on your rubbers before going outside.

Who quashed the suggestion?

What I want is the name of the executive who quashed the suggestion voiced by a NASA engineer who'd watched the launch and seen the foam debris bashing the leading edges that the attitude of the shuttle be adjusted to allow ground telescope imaging of impacted leading edges.

Sorry, but I really think that the real fault was

...with the people who made the decision that they didn't need to inspect the orbiter using satellites before having it return. If the extent of the damage had been properly evaluated, perhaps we'd still have seven brave talanted people and one very expensive piece of equipment.

It's good to know what caused the problems with the insulation in the first place, but unless there are procedures in place that insure that the orbiter is properly inspected if there are problems during launch we'll see this happen again. The shuttles are incredibly complicated machines that are quickly reaching the end of their design life because of procrastination on designing replacements. We need to make sure that we take that into consideration when evaluating problems in the future.

A solution?

For all of you /.'ers out there there's an interesting new technology out there to detect these types of flaws. I'm a nuclear student at UF and some in our department are working on lateral migration radiography. It's a rather cool process, shoot x-rays into the foam and get an image of what's inside and find out where delimanation or debonding has occured. http://www.nre.ufl.edu/facilities/backscat.php [ufl.edu]

killer budgets

The damage might have been due to faulty foam glue. But if that flight had included the usual arm/camera, the crew could have inspected the damage from the impact on liftoff. The shock was noticed at the time, but the extent of damage was unknown. The low budget of that mission cut the camera from the gear, so they took their chances on reentry. If they had inspected the damage, they might have had a chance to do something different that could have saved their lives, and the shuttle program itself.

News?

I'm confused at why this is news, and the article states "now it can be told". The CAIB report [www.caib.us] long ago determined that the method of applying foam, including by hand, was part of the problem that caused it to sometimes come apart. Chapter 3, page 52 of the CAIB report states:

The way the foam was produced and applied, particularly in the bipod region, also contributed to its variability. Foam consists of two chemical components that must be mixed in an exact ratio and is then sprayed according to strict specifications. Foam is applied to the bipod fitting by hand to make the foam ramp, and this process may be the primary source of foam variability. Board-directed dissection of foam ramps has revealed that defects (voids, pockets, and debris) are likely due to a lack of control of various combinations of parameters in spray-by-hand applications, which is exacerbated by the complexity of the underlying hardware configuration. These defects often occur along ?knit lines,? the boundaries between each layer that are formed by the repeated application of thin layers ? a detail of the spray-by-hand process that contributes to foam variability, suggesting that while foam is sprayed according to approved procedures, these procedures may be questionable if the people who devised them did not have a sufficient understanding of the properties of the foam.

On page 53 it also concludes

The precise reasons why the left bipod foam ramp was lost from the External Tank during STS-107 may never be known. The specific initiating event may likewise remain a mystery. However, it is evident that a combination of variable and pre-existing factors, such as insufficient testing and analysis in the early design stages, resulted in a highly variable and complex foam material, defects induced by an imperfect and variable application, and the results of that imperfect process, as well as severe load, thermal, pressure, vibration, acoustic, and structural launch and ascent conditions.

The news report is wrong when it says the CAIB "left the matter open". All this new work seems to be related to test and certify a new process.

Re: lack of competition, POS shuttle

The shuttle was always a POS since 1960s conception, biggest strategic screw up since the Portugese pissed away an early lead in the colonial sailng race to the Spanish over 500 years ago. The AN225 is just a one off transporter hang over from the USSR's cheap clone of the shuttle. I hope the Ukranians can do something with it - a stick in Airbus' eye. But remember the US has had "the biggest" since 1944 (the H4). Soviet/Russian aerospace superiority? Ha, ha we won - we could afford over 100 flushes of the $2 billion bill shuttle crapper before our country goes broke (vs just one flush for the USSR)! (yes, all totaled, we have spent well over $2 billion per flush avg since 1960s on the shuttle program, see 1st sentence)

Re:riiiiiight

Actually, I took that as the guys who designed the process actually taking responsibility, rather than shifting it to the poor techs who were doing the gluing. I agree that PC sucks, but this didn't look like an example of it.

Re:riiiiiight

No... if I give you instructions on how to build a house and you build it EXACTLY to my specifications, following my instructions perfectly, who's to blame if it sucks? Me or you? Me. They're saying that it's not the fault of the guys who work on the floor, as they were just doing what they were told to do. Unfortunately, the method that they were told to use has now been discovered to be faulty.

Re:riiiiiight

How about.....no.
It's like saying the guy knocking nails into the wood is at fault when they give him a badly designed nail. The DESIGN people are taking the blame. The guys on the floor don't do design.

Uhm?

Uhm, just like the workers who applied asbestos are to blame for all the lungcancer it caused? Uh?

It was just their job, and nobody knew it was bad.

Re:riiiiiight

Ummmmmmmm, if you are building a bridge according to plans for some very innovative design, and the engineers certify that if you follow their plans exactly the bridge will work correctly and then the bridge fails because of an "unknown" in the behavior of the concrete, whose falt would it be that the bridge failed? You certainly can't rail against the guys "on the floor" and sometimes, no matter how much we think we know, there are things that slip through our comprehension until catastrophic failure occurs. This is why most bridges are built according to accepted norms with changes to design occuring incementally. They couldn't do this when they were designing the shuttles, the very specifications called for a radical new approach. This isn't anyones fault, it's just the price we as a species must pay if we are going to continue to push out the envelope.

why this is slashdot..

that's we have the:
from the didn't-use-krazy-glue dept

You must be new here (sans Low UID)

Yup

And those shuttle crews always knew that. The shuttle couldn't somehow 'magicly' be safer to launch and use than unmanned spacecrafts.

Re:riiiiiight

This is an obvious troll. If it isn't a troll...

If you can't bring yourself to read the article, at least try to comprehend the article summary before making blanket accusations. That last sentence you tacked on the end of your post references 'functional thinking'. I suggest you try it sometime.

Re:riiiiiight

Murderers? schoolyard bullys? I hate PC too, but I don't see how your example applies here.

If you have a job at NASA, I would guess that the procedurs put in place to perform a task such as gluing foam to the shuttle are followed exactly how you were trained to do it.

I think the engineer(s) that developed the process of sticking foam to the shuttle should be looked at before those that do what they were instructed to do by the engineers..

Perhaps budget constraints didn't allow them to thoroughly test their design is to blame.

I think it is a horrible accident, a very hard lesson learned. This is rocket science, it is not easy and accidents do happen. The most important thing to get out of these accidents is, did we learn our lesson? And have all measures been taken to prevent it from ever happening again?

This is not to say that investigations looking for negligence are unwarrented. If true negligence is discovered then I will give the murderer analogy you posted a lot more consideration.

Re:riiiiiight

This is from the infamous Saven Marek, the boy genius who insists that his middle school science textbook is right [slashdot.org] and everyone else is wrong and then stomps off and refuses to listen [slashdot.org] when they try to explain to him that the same side of the moon does not always face the sun. "Foe" him now, dudes; he's either an irredeemable idiot or a troll.

Re:"There is no Foam", and Ray Guns. . .

Wow, what shitty math. Ok, first you quote 400 km/h:
The 'Foam' couldn't possibly have been traveling at the 400 km/h when it struck the Columbia's wing, as claimed. Consider. . .

Then you quote 400 km/second:
The Shuttle lifter, while enormously powerful, certainly doesn't accelerate at 400 km/second.

I think we can all argree the shuttle doesn't accelerate at 400 km/SECOND.

That, and your accelerations are listed as velocities. Of course, the fact that air resistance could have played a role in accelerating the foam into the shuttle probably never crossed your mind. Finally, the shuttle is not an aircraft. It is primarily a space craft. Space craft tend to be "fragile." The heat shield tiles tend to be "fragile" as well.
Try again, with more math.

Re:"There is no Foam", and Ray Guns. . .

You are probably a troll, but I'll bite.

The problem was that air was trapped under bubbles in the foam. When the engines were fired the temperature suddenly went from liquid oxygen temperatures to several thousand degrees, causing the trapped air to expand and blow the pieces of foam off explosively.

Thats how the foam was travelling at supersonic speeds relative to the shuttle.

Re:"There is no Foam", and Ray Guns. . .

This means that the relative speed of the foam when it struck could only possibly have been the same as the amount of increased velocity

What happens to a very draggy chunk of low density foam in a supersonic stream of air? It will rapidly decelerate, right?

Imagine you impale a cheap styrofoam cooler on your car's hood ornament and head out on the highway. At 70 MPH, the cooler pops off the hood ornament. What happens? Does it keep coasting along with little relative velocity with respect to the car? No. It smashes into your windshield at close to 70 MPH. Whether the car is accelerating or not has almost no effect on the outcome. It's the rapid deceleration of the foam that causes the significant relative velocity when it strikes the car. Only the relative velocity is important. Sorry the NASA engineers confused you by not suspending a block of foam motionless in the air and hurling a section of wing at it.

As for the bulk of your post, containing that half baked ranting, UFOlogy and conspiracy theories, I'd have to say you get the tin foil hat award for the rest of this century. I imagine you with your tinfoil hat, wrapped in tin foil from head to foot, in a titanium submersible on the bottom of the ocean. And the mind control waves still get through. All that trouble, and all you really need to do is...

UP YOUR DOSAGE.