{"id":67,"date":"2003-04-24T15:19:14","date_gmt":"2003-04-24T15:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:07:54","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:07:54","slug":"grumpy_old_engineers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=67","title":{"rendered":"Grumpy Old Engineers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s L.A. Times takes<\/a> the current NASA team back to school:<\/p>\n

Shuttles’ First Engineers Exasperated<\/b><\/p>\n

By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer<\/p>\n

Some of the original architects of America’s space shuttle program told investigators Wednesday that they never designed the spacecraft to withstand a forceful strike from any object, much less the large chunks of foam insulation that pounded the Columbia 16 days before it disintegrated. At a boisterous public hearing that at times felt like a production of “Grumpy Old Engineers,” several men who helped NASA realize its dream of building a reusable spacecraft 25 years ago said they were flabbergasted that today’s space agency shrugged off the threat posed by the liftoff accident. Independent investigators now believe the foam insulation, which fell from an external fuel tank and struck the edge of the shuttle’s left wing after liftoff, opened a breach that allowed superheated gas to penetrate the craft and bring it down two weeks later. NASA has known since at least 1997 that pieces of foam insulation periodically “popcorn” off during liftoff and strike the shuttle. Robert Thompson, 77, former vice president of the shuttle program for contractor McDonnell Douglas and the manager of the shuttle program in its formative years, said he believes today’s NASA engineers were lulled into complacency because early foam insulation strikes were harmless. The strike on Columbia was crippling, Thompson said, because of the large size of the foam insulation and the fact that it came 81 seconds after liftoff — meaning the insulation struck the wing while traveling at 700 feet per second. Thompson told the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the independent panel charged with finding the cause of the Feb. 1 disaster, that it took an understanding of “high school physics” to grasp the impact of that incident. “That’s a hell of a speed bump,” Thompson said. “There were indications that there was a problem,” he said. “And people didn’t address it fast enough. People didn’t understand: this can do a lot of damage.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“People didn’t understand…” <\/p>\n

Right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s L.A. Times takes the current NASA team back to school: Shuttles’ First Engineers Exasperated By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer Some of the original architects of America’s space shuttle program told investigators Wednesday that they never designed the spacecraft to withstand a forceful strike from any object, much less the large chunks of foam […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}