Category: school

The foam that falls off the space shuttle isn’t all that different than the foam you might get from Lowes or Home Depot. It’s light stuff. How the heck could it break the heat shield tiles on the Space Shuttle Columbia?

This is especially surprising when you think of the fact that even if you took a hammer to those tiles, you wouldn’t produce enough force to really damage them. During take-off, the foam was regularly coming loose from the left bipod holding the shuttle to the huge external fuel tank. Because of the aerodynamic qualities of the foam, if you were to drop a foam piece about the size of a suitcase (that’s the size of the chunk that hit Columbia), from that bipod mid launch, then it’d slow down prettty dang fast. When the shuttle hit the foam, it’d hit at about 540mph. Interestingly, if a bolt happened to have come off instead of the foam, it wouldn’t have slowed down fast enough to have done as much damage as the foam. A bolt would have been less of a threat to the wing than that foam because it would have traveled with the shuttle for a little bit, instead of hitting the brakes like the foam did.

Tricky foam. you’re so counter intuitive.

Space travel occasionally seems taken for granted. This was not the case during the Apollo missions. The mission of Apollo 8 was to go around the moon; do a drive-by so to speak. There was a lot of concern about the missions back then. During one of regularly scheduled meetings with the spouses, one spouse spoke up… she nervously asked what the percentage chance was there that her husband would return to Earth safely. The NASA employee responded, “about 50/50.” She breathed a sigh of relief. 50% survival rate was far better than she had imagined.

Interestingly, Astronauts have no place giving a thumbs up or thumbs down on a mission. It’s really mission control’s call. For this reason, sometimes the spouses are a better metric in showing how nervous the astronauts are for their mission.

In my Saturday class at RPI we had a visit from Captain Dan Burbank. He’s an astronaut that has been on two space shuttle missions. He came in to talk to us a bit about the Columbia disaster. A lot of the things he said were totally and utterly fascinating. I’ve queued them up in the website’s inner workings, so for the first few days of this week we’ll have an automatic post go up around noon with some particularly interesting details of the Columbia disaster. This particular class might go down as the most entertaining and most interesting of any class yet. It was really spectacular.

Especially noteworthy about Captain Dan (outside of the fact that he’s been to space) is that he is a member of the band Max Q. It’s a band made of Astronauts. On my Saturday classes my classmate John and I get together to jam out a bit on our guitars. So after Captain Dan’s speech, I approached him, Thanked him for coming, and asked him if he’d like to come jam with us. It’s not everyday that you can rock out with an astronaut.

Sadly, his schedule didn’t allow it. He had to go help his wife with some kayaks. Anyway, here’s to you Dan Burbank. Your speech was awesome and I appreciate that you know how to wail.