wjr@rayssd.UUCP (02/08/84)
I have three questions which may have been answered in the papers or on the news but have apparently missed: Is there any speculation as to why the rocket motors for the two satellites exploded? Did anybody catch which insurance company(s) insured the satellites? Does this mean that the insurance company(s) are going to sue the rocket manufacturers? Bill Ramey
karn@allegra.UUCP (02/10/84)
Is there any speculation as to why the rocket motors for the two satellites exploded? Yes - the speculation is that the nozzles were plugged by material from the initiators used to start the engines. This resulted in excessive chamber pressure and eventually blew the nozzles off. In a vacuum, the reduced chamber pressure without a nozzle is insufficient to keep the fuel burning. Did anybody catch which insurance company(s) insured the satellites? Lloyd's of London. Does this mean that the insurance company(s) are going to sue the rocket manufacturers? I doubt it. It's more important that it not happen in the future. Don't feel bad about the insurance companies; they'll just raise their rates. They've been collecting enough on the successful launches in the past. Phil
jhh@ihldt.UUCP (John Haller) (02/10/84)
In an article in this morning's (2/10) Chicago Tribune, Chicago based Morton Thiokol said that Lloyd's of London said that there would probably not be any liability for Morton Thiokol. Morton Thiokol manufactures both the booster nozzles that almost burned through on the last shuttle mission. They suspect a problem with the raw materials used in making the nozzle. Morton Thiokol is the sole source for both the shuttle booster rocket nozzle, and the nozzle on the rocket used for sending satellites from the shuttle into orbit. NASA financed the factory, and it would take 5 to 7 years to build another one. Coincidentally, this has been one of Morton Thiokol's best years financially. Revenues from the space program have provided a large part of their profit. John Haller
wolit@rabbit.UUCP (Jan Wolitzky) (02/10/84)
I detect a strong odor of bureaucratese coming from NASA spokesbeings
this week, and am a little distressed that some of the cognoscenti on
this net seem to be falling for it.
This all falls into the purview of the "There's No Bad News Here"
department. The official word from NASA appears to be that
everything's just A-OK with the shuttle; the reason that there's twenty
Megabucks worth of additional spacejunk out there is that something
went wrong with one of those PAMs, which are made by some aerospace
hamburger outfit, and not with the Shuttle, which is made by NASA (!).
No, no, say the trivia freaks, McDonnell-(Remember the good ol'
DC-3?)-Douglas just puts the PAMs together; the part that
malfunctioned was the rocket ("I thought that's what we were talking
about," says the Man on the Street) which was made by Thiokol. (I
wonder who sold that bad batch of titanium to Thiokol...)
My point here is that NASA is being a little disingenuous in claiming
responsibility for everything that works right, and disavowing any
blame for everything that works wrong, and it's not our place to
encourage them in this. We're still a long way from the day that NASA
is just another overnight delivery company, and everyone here knows
it. Ronald ("Isn't he that hamburger company's clown?") Whatsisname
has decided that if Buck Rogers was good enough for JFK, it's good
enough for him, and NASA is far from displeased by this shift in the
winds of fortune; they're gonna do everything possible to keep their
newly-re-shined image from tarnishing. If that includes calling a
glaring failure an overwhelming success because they managed to
replicate Ed White's space walk of twenty years ago (at no more than
a few orders of magnitude greater cost), well, that's what it takes.
As for us, unless we work for NASA, we should call 'em as we see 'em.
Jan Wolitzky, AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJkarn@allegra.UUCP (02/11/84)
The big problem with the Westar/Palapa failures is that they were launched on the shuttle, for better or worse the only part of the space program ever seen by the public. Nobody hears much about the failures of expendable rockets - launches of those things are so commonplace that the journalists hardly show up any more. Plenty of unmanned launchers haven't even made it to orbit, much less a wrong one, and barely rate a paragraph on the back page regardless of what happens. Note also the public pronouncements made by certain competitors to the shuttle (outside of the USA) in which they claim that their brand of launcher is obviously more reliable because they've only had "two" failures when the shuttle has "three". Of course, they don't point out that their two failures were LAUNCHER failures each carrying two payloads which ended up in the ocean, while the problems with Westar, Palapa and TDRS were the fault of the payload subcontractors and not the launching agency. You can also argue, of course, whether TDRS should be called a failure. If you want to fault NASA for something here, it is that they've been forced by limited budgets to oversell the shuttle and cut off the expendable option. Soon the shuttle will have to be used for just about any and all US launches, regardless of its appropriateness or cost-effectiveness. Like all space freaks, I'm all in favor of developing new space capabilities, but I wonder if the "Solar Max" type of repair mission really justifies the cost and delay when there's the alternative of just building and launching a replacement spacecraft. I'm sure I'm not the only one struck by the irony in this mission which had as its major objective the demonstration of repair capabilities. The problem is that the much larger cost of a shuttle orbiter over an expendable launcher, combined with the need for man-rated safety procedures, makes NASA so conservative that it greatly diminishes the extra versatility provided by the system. There is a not-so-humorous rule of thumb that the weight of the paperwork required by NASA for safety certification of any "hazardous" (e.g., propellant) system on a shuttle flight is equal to or greater than the weight of the payload, and this kind of red tape works against the savings provided by reusability. The space shuttle can do many things, particularly when men are needed in space, but I fear that it was developed more as a political means of attracting public attention (i.e, funding) to the space program than as the most efficient means of providing a service. NASA is the only organization I know which can take a working, reasonably reliable automated system, replace it with a manual one, and call the result progress. On the other hand, if it DOES attract more funding to the space program (such as a space station), then it will have been worth it, even if it isn't THE best technical solution to the problem. Phil
9212osd@houxa.UUCP (Orlando Sotomayor-Diaz) (02/14/84)
Interesting newspeak coming out of NASA lately. I read
in the paper (2/12/84 Bosto Globe) how that maneuver to
recover that piece of hardware that went floating out of
the cargo bay during a spacewalk was a remarkable success.
It consisted of the pilot using the thrusters to move the
shuttle a few feet so that one of the astronauts (who was
tethered) could recover the thing. The wonders of technology!
--
Orlando Sotomayor-Diaz /AT&T Bell Laboratories, Crawfords Corner Road
Room HO-3M-325 201-949-1532 Holmdel, New Jersey, 07733
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