ISS Irony

There was a lot of hand wringing in America after Sputnik went flying overhead. And even more so after Yuri Gugarin orbited the Earth.

He visited the UK soon afterwards in 1961 and was coolly received by officials in London but more warmly welcomed up north in Manchester.

It is incidentally the 50th anniversary of the Gugarins orbital flight this year and a statue has been put up in London (copy of the original).

The lady on the left is Gugarin's daughter Elena who has a very symmetrical face and piercing blue-grey eyes.

They had you running scared for a while.

If it had not been for President Kennedy's inspiring Man on the Moon speach it is quite likely that Russia would have bagged the moon too.

Regards, Martin Brown

You're an idiot.

Absolutely untrue. The documentaries I've seen had interviews with many of the top astronomers in the world, and NO, idiot, they did NOT know ANY such numbers before Hubble opened their eyes. They even said so.

Now you are going to argue with the professors from major universities?

You really are an idiot, and no we did NOT "already know".

After the first few thousand feet, sure.

Only some?

"$2.5B to construct" and the telescope isn't of much use without the rest.

Such lags in technology aren't at all unusual. Yes, the four years was costly but hindsight is wonderful.

Good grief. You do love hindsight.

Then you should work for NASA.

Why? They long ago figured out what you apparently can't.

orbit.

You say it can, so who is wrong?

orbit.

You, most obviously; existence theorem.

Actually you are wrong. As Uwe originally said they were spraying the shuttle tiles with Scotchguard to protect from moisture ingress which was reckoned to be the root cause of tile damage by ice formation on early flights along with the ceramic glue compromised by saliva!

See for example the report on shuttle tiles and their history of glitches in the Washington Post in 2003 after the Colombia disaster.

http://www.wash ] start quote

Early in the shuttle's history, NASA discovered that the porous tiles tended to suck up moisture like a sponge, then crack in the freezing void of space.

"NASA developed a procedure to inject waterproofing through the tile coating with a syringe," said Jachter, the former Lockheed engineer. "It was dissolving the glue. One year we had 20,000 tiles to replace. It cost me my Christmas vacation in 1985 because I was machining tiles."

NASA then "went out and bought cases of Scotchgard, the commercial stuff, right off the shelf," said Carnegie Mellon's Fischbeck. "They Scotchgarded the bottom of the orbiter."

Every shuttle had lost or damaged tiles on a flight -- sometimes both, sometimes by the hundreds, Jachter said. A 1995 NASA document recorded that each shuttle required pre- and post-mission inspections for damage and re-waterproofing of more than 20,000 tiles. The process was so complicated that replacement and maintenance averaged 17,000 man-hours or more for each flight -- about 708 man-days, a 1999 NASA report said..

] end quote

I think that is a pretty clear statement of the problem being real. You can probably find the original NASA reports with a bit of digging.

Exotic materials can have exotic modes of failure. It could stand being dropped red hot into a bucket of water quite happily but it mopped up water like a sponge and really didn't like ice forming inside it.

Regards, Martin Brown

No, read the thread again. The ScotchGuard was to keep ice from forming ON THE LAUNCH PAD. This thread is about the tiles freezing and breaking in space because of water picked up on the ground.

The ISS and the moon landing are great missions. NASA should be working on the next space station, moon base or mars mission. NASA's central mission should be the depopulation of the Earth and turning the Earth into a Nature Preserve.They could accomplish this by doubling the number of people living off Earth every 50 to 100 years. That way in 2000 to 4000 years the only people on Earth would be scientists and tourists.

You were wrong about the ink. You're AlwaysWrong.

John

The HST and the KH-11 spy satellites seems to have a lot in common. Those spy satellites were sent every 1-2 year.

Why should a space telescope go in and out of Earth's shadow ? A much more sensible orbit for a space telescope would be some highly elliptical orbit or parking into one of the Lagrange points.

Of course. a telescope in such an orbit can not be repaired by the shuttle. It appears that in order to get customers for the shuttle, some of the telescope performance had to be sacrified.

Yet another hazard for the ISS:

That's sort of cool. Every collision makes debris that will crash into other stuff and make more debris, exponentially. Some day LEO may become useless, until it all decays in a hundred or a thousand years or whatever.

John

Sure. You'd have to do it right.

Do a little googling. Some heat shields are bolted from below, and the bolt access holes plugged with more of the ablative goop.

Dare I say that this isn't rocket science?

John

"NASA won't allow the shuttle to fly with wet tiles because the moisture could freeze in space, causing the tiles crack or fall off the ship. If enough tiles were lost the shuttle could burn up on reentry into Earth's atmosphere where temperatures reach 3,000 degrees F. "

AlwaysWrong.

John

orbit.

John

It is at like mach 3 by then. So, no water.