NASA's Michael Griffin Interviewed 146
richvan writes "NASA administrator Michael Griffin was recently interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel about his first nine months on the job. He covers topics such as foam, Challenger, Mars, the budget, the astronaut corps and intelligent design. Describing the reasons for the foam loss, he states 'Cycling of the tanks with cryogenic propellants - in fact, [super-cold] liquid hydrogen, because we don't see this problem with liquid oxygen - causes or exacerbates voids in the bond between the foam insulation and the tank and produces cracks in the foam. If and when those cracks propagate to the surface, with a crack connecting a void to the surface, then you have a mechanism for cryopumping. When the tank is cold, air is ingested. It liquefies and goes into the voids. Then as the tank empties and the [air] warms up and evaporates, the resulting pressure blows the foam off.'"
Fix foam again? Start anew? (Score:2, Interesting)
Has anyone heard or read of any new technologies to replace the current foam application completely? Does anyone have any percentage or statistical data illustrating the success to failure ratio of past Shuttle deployments to (say) Saturn rockets (or past similar systems)? It would be a nice graph comparing the ~20 years of shuttle incident vs. ~20 years of Saturn incidents (or similar). Surely, those studies have occurred somewhere.
Re:Fix foam again? Start anew? (Score:2, Interesting)
There were no operational failures. How's that for a quick statistical comparison?
KFG
New Foam Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
BTM
What about Propellant Cycling ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Were there any launch aborts before the final Columbia mission?
Re:Hubble mission still a possiblity! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hubble mission still a possiblity! (Score:3, Interesting)
To make that happen, it has to have a capacity of evacuating the entire staff in case of emergency.
To make that happen, it has to have a vehicle(s) capable of carrying back 10+ humans to the Earth. Also it requires more ports to hitch vehicles.
Since we have no vehicle capable of doing such in a foreseeable future, you can imagine the fate of the ISS in the next decade or so.
Re:Fix foam again? Start anew? (Score:5, Interesting)
While working level engineers who work directly for NASA are paid fairly competitively, government rules cap salaries of management. Everything is defined by the federal payscales, available here [opm.gov]
An engineer with 10 years of experience is typically a GS-13. In Houston, for example, he's making somewhere around $90,000/year. His immediate manager is probably a GS-14 making around $105k, and that guy's boss is probably a GS-15 who makes around $130k. The numbers vary depending on years in service. Most astronauts are falling into these ranges as well.
Griffin, as the head of NASA, is paid on the SES (Senior Executive Service) scale, which caps out at $162,000. That's here. [opm.gov]
Contractor management is a little better (the CEOs of the likes of Boeing and Lockheed can pull in over $10 million annually with bonuses and stock), but it's very unusual to run into a NASA contractor (manager or otherwise) making more than $200,000/year.
13 Years to go the Moon?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
What about using a net? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Old freon based foam was best. (Score:3, Interesting)
The foam had been causing problems since mid eighties.
The NASA was given exempt on the freon ban (of 1997?), and even thought they did change the formula, the pieces of foam believed to have caused the Columbia disaster were using the old formula (with freon).
Re:New Foam Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Larger tank means more metal. More metal means more weight. More weight means more fuel. More fuel means more cold. Tricky balance there. Remember, this is the tank where they stopped painting the foam because the paint added too much weight.
Also, it'll be hard to find a porous material that doesn't absorb hydrogen, the smallest atoms in existence.
Re:13 Years to go the Moon?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
In the eyes of the layman, science has been dead for quite some time. I'm not saying we can't still use the scientific method. I certainly will, its the best way of learning and doing things that I know of (science has not ended dangling prepositions:). But we know absolute zero, the speed of light, how to put a man on the moon, how to land on Mars, how to go beyond our solar system and still receive communications. What more is there to really do? Bare with me, I know I'm burning my karma on a few nerds here.
There is little that is new or interesting that a layman can talk about science today. The only frontier is really science to make better entertainment for people to include CSI kinda stuff. "Normal" people simply don't care about particle physics. Sorry. Normal people got bored with going to the moon back in the 70s. Normal people stopped caring about the space shuttle after the 2nd or 3rd launch, and only gained interest when they started blowing up (car wreck phenomenon).
Seriously, what is really new to discover? A list of one or more things would be suffice to justify my flamebait mods.
Major NASA cock up (Score:2, Interesting)
This could of course happen anyway, if the economy crashes and there is more war and NASA gets slashed, but even so, science and the other stuff that is really very good and cost-effective, like space probes, hubble and satellites will get less money.
I still think exploring other ways of saving the ISS should be explored, though I'm not sure its possible. The Russians do have a heavy lift rocket, it might be possible to use that and would save money, for sure.
I say NASA has painted itself into a corner with the shuttle, the reason being lack of vision and the inability to stop using the shuttle when they should have.