by CKR
What none of us are saying about the space shuttle Endeavour is, "Haven't we heard this before?"
The frozen foam breaking off and gouging the heat-resistant tiles.
The assurances that no, it won't be a problem.
We're all thinking on eggshells, hoping and praying that it won't be a repeat of the Columbia disaster in 2003, but not daring to say that out loud.
I lost interest in the space program a long time ago, when it appeared to me that the only participants were middle-aged men. They've changed that, but I moved on to other things in the meanwhile. So I follow events only at a distance until disaster strikes. I would follow the successes, but they are modest and incremental, the kind of thing that requires more attention than I have spent on this subject.
The disasters, of course, grab everyone's attention. It was four years ago that the Columbia broke up on re-entry. Everyone had gotten accustomed to that hard frozen foam breaking off, sometimes hitting the shuttle. Not a problem, until it was.
Space flight is still exploratory and dangerous. The crews, I hope, are fully aware of that.
But serious engineers know that the best solutions to safety problems are engineered solutions. The kind of solutions that eliminate, oh, say, the possibility of frozen foam breaking off and gouging holes in the heat shield. That's much better than figuring out how to fix the damage in space.
It's hard to believe that NASA's engineers don't know this. I've been wondering, every time I read once again about that deadly foam, why it isn't gone from the assembly. Some of it breaks off every launch. I've never read a good explanation of why they haven't eliminated it.
The gouge is on a different part of the structure this time. We can only hope that the simulations are correct. Hoping and praying sem to be as good as anything NASA has been doing to eliminate the foam-damage problem.