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Pastimes : Shuttle Columbia STS-107 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James F. Hopkins who wrote (124)	2/2/2003 7:02:35 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 627

Hi Jim, Re: Both factors together are to complex for me to come up with a good guess..but I'm not going just buy into their " it was of no consequence " ...I think that will be proven wrong." I'm reminded of the eventual Congressional hearings into the Challenger disaster. NASA was stonewalling the investigators then, similarly to the way that they are with a statement like "it was of no consequence". Richard Feynmann finally blew away the NASA kabuki act of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" when he took a section of the "o-ring" that was eventually implicated and chilled it and demonstrated its lack of malleability at low temperature. All discussion of what went wrong pretty much ended with that graphic demonstration of material failure. einsteinconspiracy.co.uk <SNIP> Unpublicised audits had found deception and spending abuses costing many billions of dollars. The shuttle had achieved being a reusable craft, but the cost of refurbishing it after each flight far exceeded the cost of standard rockets. [8] i.e. it was not cost effective The shuttle could barely reach a low orbit; high orbits were out of the question. The missions flown were a small fraction of those planned, and-despite NASA's public claims to the contrary-the scientific and technological products of the shuttle were negligible. [9] i.e. it was pretended to be a success when it was not really. Faced with all this difficulties , NASA then systematically misled Congress and the public about the costs and benefits. As Feynman states it NASA , as a matter of bureaucratic self preservation, found it necessary "to exaggerate; to exaggerate how economical the shuttle would be, to exaggerate how often it could fly, to exaggerate how safe it would be, to exaggerate the big scientific facts that would be discovered." At the time of the challenger disaster the program was breaking down internally: by the end of the year both a shortage of spare parts and an overloaded crew-training program would have brought the flight schedule to a halt. [10] The cumulation of this farce, was the failure of the O rings, which Feynman then demonstrated at a press conference. He explained that the material that the O rings were made from once put in ice water, was slow to bounce back its shape after pressure was placed on it. i.e. for a few seconds at least and more seconds than that there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees. [11] Thus letting a dangerous gap for fuel to come through. ( Official tests later confirmed Feynman’s TV demonstration, that the failure of the cold seals had been virtually inevitable not a freakish event, but a consequence of the plain physics of materials. [12] ) Footnotes: einsteinconspiracy.co.uk

To: James F. Hopkins who wrote (124)	2/2/2003 10:00:15 PM
From: J.B.C.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 627

I'm not really sure what you're after and I really don't care to get into speculation. These things I know: -They apparently weren't aware of the foam issue until launch film review, even today they're not sure if it was foam or ice. -At that altitude there's a lot less atmosphere to slow things down (I believe the foam incident was about 90 seconds into the launch.) -The shuttles acceleration increases as fuels are depleted and it becomes lighter, then the equation changes again once the solids drop off.. -Orbital velocity is 17,000 mph, not 8,000mph Good luck on your quest. Jim P.S.- The amount of scientific/ physics knowledge Raymond Duray has would fit into the period at the end of this sentence.