NASA Foam Problem

[84porsche]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050728/ap_on_sc/space_shuttle

As a spin off of the NASA employee thread, can someone explain what is the deal with the foam problem? Why didn't this problem exist during all the other launches in the past, did it and we didn't know about it or is it a new problem. What is causing this, are they using a different products now?

[red-beard]

It's part of the problem with deleting the tank paint.

[84porsche]

The paint on the external tank. It still is the same color as I remember it (orangish/red). What's changed?

[red-beard]

White. It was White. They saved a lot of weight (and therefore upped the payload) by getting rid of the external layer of paint over the foam.

Old School:







Neuvo Orange:

[RickM]

Now they tell us (and the crew )....

"NASA Halts Shuttle Flights Over Foam Issue"
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050728/ap_on_sc/space_shuttle

[Jims5543]

Originally posted by 84porsche
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050728/ap_on_sc/space_shuttle

As a spin off of the NASA employee thread, can someone explain what is the deal with the foam problem? Why didn't this problem exist during all the other launches in the past, did it and we didn't know about it or is it a new problem. What is causing this, are they using a different products now?

In the past this was happening but, the engineers at NASA felt it was a negligable problem....until a breakup during re-entry occured.

This is the same as the Solid Rocket Boosters. The engineers knew the "O" Rings were blowing out but felt it was not a big enough deal to warrant grounding and re-engineering. Until one blew out and blew up the shuttle.

They supposidly fixed the problem with the foam falling off the external tank, how? I do not know.

I agree with Red-Beard they should go back to the painted tank. I am sure it holds together better.

I may be wrong but, the only Shuttle to get the Painted tank was the very first mission after that they were all orange. No?

[red-beard]

No. They were that way for the first couple of years. It may have been during the test program, though.

Before Challenger, they changed to unpainted tanks.

[KNS]

They saved 600 lbs by not painting it.

[DustinTarditi]

This morning, Fox News was stating that they recently went to a more environmentally-safe foam (the new stuff didn't require freon in the manufacturing process) and they have had "issues" ever since.

They also stated that this problem is in an area where it's applied by hand due to it's complexity.

[stevepaa]

Originally posted by Jims5543
In the past this was happening but, the engineers at NASA felt it was a negligable problem....until a breakup during re-entry occured.

This is the same as the Solid Rocket Boosters. The engineers knew the "O" Rings were blowing out but felt it was not a big enough deal to warrant grounding and re-engineering. Until one blew out and blew up the shuttle.

That's not quite what I remember. Do you have a link? I remember the engineers warning about low temperature flight and management at NASA and higher pushing for the flight anyhow.

O-rings are tried and true, and very sucessful when used in proper tested environment. They do not work well when cold.

[bryanthompson]

Originally posted by DustinTarditi
This morning, Fox News was stating that they recently went to a more environmentally-safe foam (the new stuff didn't require freon in the manufacturing process) and they have had "issues" ever since.

They also stated that this problem is in an area where it's applied by hand due to it's complexity.

I heard that too. Environmentally unsafe can a little bit of freon-injected foam (?) be... i mean... the thing burns thousands of lbs of rocketfuel. How much difference at all could the foam have made?

[IROC]

Originally posted by stevepaa
That's not quite what I remember. Do you have a link? I remember the engineers warning about low temperature flight and management at NASA and higher pushing for the flight anyhow.

O-rings are tried and true, and very sucessful when used in proper tested environment. They do not work well when cold.

I think your right, Steve. The o-rings worked great - as long as the temperature was above a certain point. There had been evidence of blow-by in the o-rings during launches prior to Challenger (as a result of launching during lower ambient temps), and I think that this ability to function at the lower temps provided a false sense of security that lead to the decision to launch Challenger.

Since MSFC is the propulsion center (here in Huntsville) I've gotten to see alot of this stuff (even though I was not involved in propulsion stuff) over the years. I got to crawl around on one of SRB segments that was used during the investigation back in the '80s (they had it stored in an old warehouse on Redstone Arsenal)...OK, I'm rambling...

Mike

[red-beard]

Data and Stat analysis

http://onlineethics.org/edu/ncases/EE18.html

The real issue was joint temperature, something not measured.

[IROC]

red-beard - great pictures by the way.

[stevepaa]

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/science/space_shuttle

something wrong when they worry about their jobs and not the quality of their work.

[kang]

DEBRIS FALLS OFF CHENEY
Scientists Study Videotape of Vice President Disintegrating

Government scientists were busily scrutinizing videotape of Vice President Dick Cheney today after debris appeared to fall off Mr. Cheney during a speech to a business group in Lansing, Michigan.

While Mr. Cheney’s speech to the group appeared to go smoothly, only later did scientists notice that debris from the vice president appeared to fall from him as he wrapped up his address.

“We are examining the tape to determine the nature of the debris that fell from the vice president’s surface,” said scientist Kirk Belsher. “Hopefully these are non-essential parts of Dick Cheney that will have no significant impact on the rest of his mission.”

Even as scientists studied the tape of Mr. Cheney’s mysterious debris, news that parts of the vice president had disintegrated during a routine speech raised fresh concerns about the fitness of the nation’s second most powerful man.

“Dick Cheney is usually stored in a secure, undisclosed location which is kept at a constant temperature of forty degrees Fahrenheit,” said Dr. Ivan Loker of the University of Minnesota, who studies the nation’s aging fleet of vice-presidents and cabinet members. “Every time they wheel him out into the atmosphere for a new mission, we all hold our breath.”

For his part, scientist Belsher remained optimistic that the falling debris would turn out to be a false alarm: “The good news is, when debris falls off Dick Cheney, there’s still plenty of Dick Cheney left.”

Elsewhere, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said today that if dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at Abu Ghraib then the dogs would be court-martialed at once.

[red-beard]

Holy Crap!!!! I did not realize that part of the failure of the O-rings was due to a change in the protective putty material away from one that contained asbestos. And appearently, there is more data than just the shuttle, the Titan-34D failures are also being blamed from changing the putty:

Lost In Space


Posted Aug. 4, 2003


By John Berlau
For Insight Magazine

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA, said in July that it had found the "smoking gun" that caused the space shuttle Columbia to break apart as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1: a piece of foam that had peeled off the external fuel tank and struck the shuttle's wing 1 minute and 22 seconds after liftoff.

But many experts looking at the tragedy that killed seven astronauts say there is a deeper cause. They say that the metaphorical smoking gun should be painted green.

Because of demands that the agency help to front for environmentalism, and under pressure from the Clinton-Gore administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) led by Carol Browner, NASA had stopped using Freon, a fluorocarbon that greens claim damages the ozone layer, in its thermal-insulating foam. NASA found in 1997 after the first launch with the politically correct substitute that the Freon-free foam had destroyed nearly 11 times as many of the shuttle's ceramic tiles as had the foam containing Freon. The politicized foam was less sticky and more brittle under extreme temperatures. But apparently little or nothing was done to resist the environmentalist politicians.

"It was at least a contributing factor, if not a major factor," says Hannes Hacker, an aerospace engineer and former flight controller at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston who is affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. Hacker tells Insight: "The risk of a piece of debris falling off and causing significant damage to the space shuttle's thermal-protection system was [more than] 10 times greater with the new material than with the old material."

Officials at NASA have confirmed to this magazine that the destructive role of the new foam will be covered in a report on the causes of the space-shuttle disintegration scheduled for release in August. "It's a part of the investigation," says Lt. Col. Tyrone "Woody" Woodyard, spokesman for NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "The application of the foam is certainly something the board is looking at." Woodyard said he could not comment on specifics until the accident report was released.

NASA, as well as the EPA officials who pressed it to stop using Freon, may have a lot to answer for. In a 1997 "Field Journal" report of the first shuttle launches to use the new foam, NASA mechanical-systems engineer Greg Katnik noted that "there had been significant damage to the [ceramic] tiles" and "the extent of damage at the conclusion of this mission was not 'normal.'" There had been 308 "hits" to the tiles, and 132 were greater than 1 inch, penetrating more than half of the 2-inch tiles. Some slashes were as long as 15 inches. "Over 100 tiles had been removed ... because they were irreparable," according to the report.

Katnik fingered the new foam as a cause of the damage. "It is suspected that large amounts of foam separated from the external tank and impacted the orbiter," he wrote. Since the beginning of the space-shuttle program in the 1980s, the shuttle tanks had been sprayed with insulating material to keep the nitrogen and oxygen fuels from overheating. But Katnik warned directly that "because of NASA's goal to use environmentally friendly products, a new method of 'foaming' the external tank had been used for this mission." He called officially for "investigating the consideration that some characteristics of the new foam may not be known for the ascent environment."

Katnik wasn't the only one to raise doubts about the new "environmentally correct" foam. According to Knight Ridder News Service, a retired engineering manager for Lockheed Martin Corp., the company that assembles NASA's tanks, said at a conference last September that developing the Freon-free foam had "been much more difficult than anticipated" and that the new foam "resulted in unanticipated program impacts, such as foam loss during flight." The manager noted that on the 1997 launch, the same one Katnik had studied, NASA had to replace nearly 11 times more damaged tiles than after a previous mission that had used the old foam.

With all these warnings from experts, why did NASA go ahead with the less-safe foam? And who is to blame for putting environmentalism ahead of the lives of our astronauts? Much is unclear about where responsibility rests. Browner's EPA aggressively was pushing industry and government agencies to stop using Freon, going beyond what the Montreal Protocol treaty required. Yet NASA scientists also had been drawn into hyping the scare about the ozone layer being damaged by fluorocarbons.

[red-beard]

Con't

The sad thing, critics say, is that NASA and policymakers seemed to have learned very little from the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986, where the switch to another eco-friendly material - due to another hyped scare having become politically correct - also played a large role in the tragedy. "The bottom line is that in both of these cases NASA made or was forced to make design changes based on claims that are not scientifically established," Hacker observes.

The nation was stunned by the explosion of the Challenger minutes after liftoff for a mission that eagerly had been anticipated by the public because one of its crew members was Christa McAuliffe, the first schoolteacher in space. When she and her six fellow astronauts were killed immediately the cause was established as hot gases burning through an allegedly faulty O-ring joint in one of the solid rocket boosters. NASA was criticized for launching in cold weather, and some in the media found a way to blame President Ronald Reagan by speculating that the administration wanted the shuttle to be in orbit during the State of the Union address. (The respected and independent Rogers Commission that investigated the Challenger explosion found no evidence of political pressure for the launch.)

At a Washington hearing a few months after the disaster, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman put some of the O-ring material in a glass of ice water and then demonstrated that it no longer was flexible. But largely overlooked was the fact that NASA had just switched to a new type of putty to protect the O-rings from hot gases.

Why had NASA risked using a new type of putty when the old stuff had worked successfully on nine previous missions? Because the previous putty contained tiny amounts of politically incorrect asbestos, and its producer, the Fuller O'Brien Co. of San Francisco, stopped making the product for fear of lawsuits after asbestos was made the subject of media scare stories and alarmist claims by environmental groups. Malcolm Ross, who had studied asbestos as a research scientist for 41 years at the U.S. Geological Survey, notes that the U.S. Air Force also suddenly had two launch failures with its Titan 34-D rockets after substituting for the asbestos-based putty. This followed a string of 50 successful launches with the old putty.

"Fuller O'Brien made this product going back long before World War II," says Ross, now a scientific adviser to the free-market Consumer Alert organization. He tells Insight, "It was putty used in the aircraft industry for all sorts of purposes." Like Feynman, Ross did his own experiment by putting the old and new putties in his freezer to simulate the cold temperatures of the fatal shuttle launch. "The [asbestos] putty was still quite puttylike, quite pliable," Ross recalls. "The substitute putty got very hard and wasn't sticky. You can imagine that under cool temperature the Fuller O'Brien product was much superior."

The space shuttle isn't the only instance where the replacement of asbestos with more eco-friendly materials may have resulted in tragic loss of life. As veteran journalist Ralph de Toledano detailed in Insight, the decision not to use the heat-retardant asbestos to protect steel supports on the highest floors of the World Trade Center when they were built in the 1970s meant that they collapsed faster than they otherwise would have, leaving less time for people to escape during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 [see the last word, Dec. 3, 2001].

And the really tragic part about it, says Ross, is that the use of asbestos in the space shuttle and in office buildings, and other modern employment of it, poses only minimal risk to the public. Indeed, removal of asbestos poses a greater risk of exposure in many instances, critics say. In the Word War II shipyards of the 1940s, "there were indeed a large number of asbestos workers who were greatly harmed, but as usual the environmentalists take this to a point where they want to abandon the use entirely because of a little bit of misuse," Ross says. "The trouble with the environmentalists is they keep twisting the screw, and there's no end to it."

Insight tried to talk to leading environmentalists about the space tragedies but to no avail. A spokeswoman for Environmental Defense, which has sounded the alarms against both asbestos and Freon, told this reporter, "We're not really working on this." A spokeswoman for former EPA director Browner said she was "out of the office" for a few days. The publicist for Al Gore's office in Nashville said Gore wasn't giving interviews at the present time.

In the years between the Challenger and Columbia explosions, NASA lent its name and prestige to many green crusades, particularly those of Gore for "spaceship Earth." And ironically, critics say, in the early 1990s the politicians at the agency curried favor with the left by playing a crucial role in hyping the ozone scare that led to actions partly responsible for the predicament it found itself in with the Freon-free foam. In February 1992, for instance, NASA announced that satellite and other measurements showed chlorine-monoxide molecules - thought to be derived from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and to destroy ozone - were increasing inside the arctic polar vortex. At a press conference, NASA raised the specter of a rapidly approaching hole in the ozone layer, which deflects the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

"We believe now that the probability of significant ozone loss taking place in any given year is higher than it has been before," said James Anderson, the NASA project leader. Media stories immediately followed with horrific scenarios predicting hundreds of thousands of cases of new skin cancer resulting from ultraviolet exposure. Then-senator Gore, who chaired a Senate subcommittee responsible for NASA funding, captured the moment to warn that there soon would be an "ozone hole over Kennebunkport," the Maine summer home of then-president George H.W. Bush, if Congress didn't rapidly phase out Freon and other CFCs. Spooked by an international campaign to bless all this as indisputable and scientific, the Senate passed a resolution 95 to zero to phase out CFCs by 1995, five years sooner than the 1987 Montreal Protocol required, and Bush issued an executive order requiring a phaseout by this date.

But, as Micah Morrison documented in Insight [see "The Wizards of Ozone," April 6, 1992], many prudent scientists, including some who worked for NASA, dissented from the dire predictions. They noted that natural factors such as storms, winds and volcanoes affect ozone measurements. When chlorine monoxide went back to normal levels in a few weeks, NASA stood silently by without issuing so much as a press release to put the anomalous "crisis" in perspective. "We aren't going to put out [another] press release until we have a complete picture and a complete story to tell," NASA spokesman Brian Dunbar told Morrison.

In the Insight article, Morrison noted that NASA, which in the early 1990s was "concerned to preserve its share of the federal budget and carve out a new role for itself ... reaped a bonanza of publicity as guardian of the ozone." After Gore became vice president, no doubt with an eye on its appropriations, NASA continued to raise the alarm for various environmental scares. "Earth is a planet on fire! The Earth is burning," proclaimed NASA senior research scientist Joel Levine in a 1995 speech quoted by the the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk.

So when its own foam was declared to be environmentally unfriendly, NASA officials apparently rushed to change it, even minimizing some of the safety consequences, according to some critics. "They wanted to be super-green," says S. Fred Singer, the atmospheric scientist who invented the ozone-meter device to measure the ozone layer in the 1950s. He now is a critic of environmental alarmism as president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project.

Even so, NASA reportedly applied for an "essential-use" exemption from the EPA in the face of resistance from the Browner-led agency. The exemption did not come through until 2001, according to the New York Times, after President George W. Bush had taken office and Browner was out. Her EPA went beyond even what the Montreal Protocol required and gave out essential-use exemption for CFCs very sparingly. The agency even tried to ban lifesaving asthma inhalers that contained CFCs [see "EPA and FDA Put Ecology Above Kids," Oct. 20, 1997]. A NASA spokesman says he does not recall the 2001 exemptions.

The mills of the gods grind slowly. When NASA finally got its exemption, according to the New York Times, it used the Freon-based foam only "in a few spots on the shuttle fleet." And a spokesman for the company that makes the new foam, North Carolina Foam Industries, told the Los Angeles Times in February that NASA never called the company about any problems. Aware of all this and reflecting on the space-shuttle tragedies, former NASA flight controller Hacker concludes that NASA and its regulators must disabuse themselves of the theory that "nature has intrinsic value and it is evil for man to tamper with nature. In practice, this results in death."

John Berlau is a writer for Insight magazine. Summer reporter Adam Heieck contributed to this article.

[Jims5543]

Originally posted by stevepaa
That's not quite what I remember. Do you have a link? I remember the engineers warning about low temperature flight and management at NASA and higher pushing for the flight anyhow.

O-rings are tried and true, and very sucessful when used in proper tested environment. They do not work well when cold.

Neither Thiokol nor NASA expected the rubber O-rings sealing the joints to be touched by hot gases of motor ignition, much less to be partially burned. However, as tests and then flights confirmed damage to the sealing rings, the reaction by both NASA and Thiokol was to increase the amount of damage considered "acceptable." At no time did management either recommend a redesign of the joint or call for the Shuttle's grounding until the problem was solved.

The Commission has concluded that neither Thiokol nor NASA responded adequately to internal warnings about the faulty seal design. Furthermore, Thiokol and NASA did not make a timely attempt to develop and verify a new seal after the initial design was shown to be deficient. Neither organization developed a solution to the unexpected occurrences of O-ring erosion and blow-by even though this problem was experienced frequently during the Shuttle flight history. Instead, Thiokol and NASA management came to accept erosion and blow-by as unavoidable and an acceptable flight risk. Specifically, the Commission has found that:

Source:

Primarily - My memory as the company I worked for was contracted by Thiokol to help develop QC devices for future assembly. It was admitted to us and also brought out in commision hearing that it was well know the o-rings were failing on all flights not just cold weather ones. Although the cold weather did amplify the problem.

Seconday:
http://www.awesome80s.com/Awesome80s/Tech/Space/Shuttle/Challenger_Tragedy/Presidential_Report_Part3.asp

[stevepaa]

The rapid pressurization of gas within the segmented rocket motor acts against the o-ring and pushes it to block any flow passage. So it is correct to say that one would not expect to see hot gases touch the o-ring or burn them, as that would imply hot gas being able to flow.

If they saw hot gases then a complete seal was not accomplished. Thanks

On the 34D. I don't recall the investigator who I know personallly ever mentioning putty as a cause. Is that really documented?