Shuttle Problems
One of the big news stories today is that another piece of foam fell off of the shuttle. They don't think that Discovery is in any danger, and they'll be performing a full inspection, but this essentially grounds the shuttle fleet again, because the obvious worry is that if this chunk of foam could fall off, then what happened to Columbia could happen again.
I blogged on this last December when the new fuel tank shipped. For the better part of twenty years, NASA used foam on the external fuel tanks that used freon in some way (either in its manufacture, or as an actual chemical component of the material, I'm not sure which). Because of all of the nonsensical hype about "global warming", and in spite of the fact that NASA had an exemption on the foam due to its negligible overall impact on the amount of CFCs introduced into the atmosphere, NASA changed to a different kind of foam. They had no problems with the previous foam.
I'm not quite sure what else to say. The private sector has played a big role in the development of the American space program. It was contractors like Northrop Grumman, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, et cetera who developed and tested and engineered and built all of the hardware. Unfortunately, they did it on the government dime, which made it expensive, and makes it impossible to improve upon. Space needs to be opened up to private enterprise. If a governmental organization can take two and a half years to solve a problem, and still not solve the problem, after they essentially made the problem for themselves, then the difficulties go beyond the immediate issue.
It'll be interesting to see where it goes from here, and I'm starting to believe that manned spaceflight may be in an extreme crisis, beyond anything we imagined previously.
And, for some reason, I can hear Senator Kerry's upcoming unsolicited testimony on the issue in my head...
Ehhhh.
I blogged on this last December when the new fuel tank shipped. For the better part of twenty years, NASA used foam on the external fuel tanks that used freon in some way (either in its manufacture, or as an actual chemical component of the material, I'm not sure which). Because of all of the nonsensical hype about "global warming", and in spite of the fact that NASA had an exemption on the foam due to its negligible overall impact on the amount of CFCs introduced into the atmosphere, NASA changed to a different kind of foam. They had no problems with the previous foam.
I'm not quite sure what else to say. The private sector has played a big role in the development of the American space program. It was contractors like Northrop Grumman, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, et cetera who developed and tested and engineered and built all of the hardware. Unfortunately, they did it on the government dime, which made it expensive, and makes it impossible to improve upon. Space needs to be opened up to private enterprise. If a governmental organization can take two and a half years to solve a problem, and still not solve the problem, after they essentially made the problem for themselves, then the difficulties go beyond the immediate issue.
It'll be interesting to see where it goes from here, and I'm starting to believe that manned spaceflight may be in an extreme crisis, beyond anything we imagined previously.
And, for some reason, I can hear Senator Kerry's upcoming unsolicited testimony on the issue in my head...
"This president rushed to space! He went unilaterally, without building a strong coalition. He rushed to space without a plan to win the peace!"
Ehhhh.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home