Welcome to the latest edition of the weekly report. It's taken me a while to assimilate the vast amount of experiences I've had since last I wrote; hopefully this report will do them some justice. I've used parentheses liberally; it's the only way I could include background info along with the "action," so forgive me. By the way, all of these reports can be found on my web page - my address is at the bottom of this message. On the 19th we left the D.C. area at 3:00 AM and arrived in Cocoa Beach, Florida in the evening. The launch wasn't until the next day, so we crawled to bed. The next day bright and early we shambled off to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) for the launch of STS-78, a life sciences and microgravity mission due to launch at 10:49 AM. See the following page for details: http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/sts-78/mission-sts-78.html in fact, this page has links to information about everything that is described in this report. Check it out for great pictures and info. One thing I have to tell you before I continue - everything at NASA has an acronym, In fact, there are so many acronyms that there's a library database of acronyms (ADB), and believe it or not, an acronym standards control committee, which has an acronym - ASCC or something like that. I'll be tossing in the acronyms to give you a flavor of NASA communications. As special guests of the center (VIP-KSC) we were allowed to watch the launch from a site 3 miles away from the launch pad. Most people have to watch the launches from 5 or even 8 miles away, so I consider myself lucky. The families of the astronauts were sitting in the same area. From this vantage point the shuttle was pretty small, but easily visible. I could see most of the components of the vehicle, which consists of a shuttle, a large external tank, and two solid rocket boosters mounted on either side of the enormous tank. There's a good picture of it at http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/images/lc39a.gif . We had been told that there was only a 40% chance of the shuttle being launched on time. A launch can be delayed for many reasons, some of which are explained below: Weather (WX): The skin of the shuttle is sensitive to environmental factors and it is policy not to fly it through any kind of visible moisture, so rain causes delays. The weather forecast called for rain on this particular morning. Window (LW): The time of all space launches is bounded by a "launch window," which is the amount of delay which can occur before the launch must be scrubbed (cancelled). Launch windows (LWs) are dependent upon the position of the earth and the destination (in this case low earth orbit, or LEO), the weight of the spacecraft, and other uncontrollable factors (OUF). The launch window for this mission was only ten minutes, so a delay of more than ten minutes would automatically cancel the launch (official window was 2.5 hours but for some reason this is not the actual figure, maybe it was the rain). When a launch is cancelled, the fuel tanks are usually emptied of fuel, as the next window may not open for days and fuel in the tanks is dangerous (millions of gallons of liquid hydrogen (LH) and oxygen (LOX)). This process takes almost 12 hours (HRS); before the ship can be launched it has to be refueled, consuming another 12 hours or so. In addition, the launch windows don't occur that frequently. Thus, the loss of opportunity during the ten minute span could mean days of waiting. We had four days, so there was a good possibility we wouldn't see a launch at all! Well, after all those preliminaries, I bet you're squirming in your seats to know if we saw it go. We did! It lifted off exactly at 10:49. The shuttle's main engines (ME) ignite first, followed by the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) about 3 seconds later. This is done because if the main engines failed, the solid rockets cannot be turned off, and the shuttle would have to launch with less power than is required and would have to make an emergency landing or crash. So, they are allowed to run for a few seconds to make sure all's well (nominal). The main engines make a sound much like the sound of a lit burner in a gas stove - not too bad really, I would call it gentle (they generate 1.8 million pound of thrust). At this point the whole spacecraft assembly, called "the stack" shakes back and forth and cakes of ice from the liquid propellant tank shatter and fall to the ground. When the solid rockets are ignited the party really starts. It sounds like a bomb going off - that's what it is really, a bomb exploding in a controlled way (each SRB generates 2 million pounds of thrust). There's a scary "pop-bah-BOOM BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM" which continues indefinitely as they burn, followed by a billowing cloud of steam as 1 million gallons of water are dumped on the launch pad and vaporized - all in less than a minute, dumping and vaporizing both. The water is a sound supression system (SSS); when the first shuttle (STS-1) was launched it was damaged by the huge waves of compressed air that are the launch sounds reflecting back towards the vehicle from the concrete launch pad. Later we went to see a pad (there are two shuttle pads) and the concrete was blistered and burned despite the water. The commotion of the rockets causes thousands of panicked birds to fly screeching from the bushes and fly around in aimless terror. At this point the whole stack slowly begins to rise amidst the bedlam. At this point the sounds that had reached us were muffled by ground interaction, but as the thing climbed the noise became louder and louder until it was actually painful, even from three miles away! It isn't a constant noise, but rather a pulsating, stacatto roar. I don't know if this was an artifact of my overloaded auditory system or if it was actually happening, but the exhaust (EXHST) from the main engines does look pulsed. The flames are too bright to look at easily, and the column of exhaust is much larger than any natural cloud formation. Within one minute it reaches an altitude of about 50 miles (Mi), which is when the solid rocket boosters are jettisoned. They fall back to the sea on parachutes and are recovered (it's a complicated and interesting process which was explained to me in detail; ask me if you wish to know). The remainder of the stack continues to go like a bat out of hell; I could see it as a fiery point until it had reached 90 miles of altitude, less than two minutes after launch. At this point it was travelling at about 25 times the speed of sound. Fifteen minutes later it was over the Indian ocean, the external fuel tank long ago jettisoned (the external fuel tank reaches orbit with the shuttle but is destabilized so that it falls back and burns up in the atmosphere). I have known intellectually that launches were dangerous, but I don't think it was possible for me to appreciate just how bad it really can be until I saw it for myself. Seven people get into a box strapped to millions of gallons of hydrogen, oxygen, and thermite explosive. Somebody lights it on fire and the explosion lifts them into a deadly environment at speeds so high that, while in the atmosphere, 560 pounds per square inch of pressure are exerted on the spacecraft body, which heats up from the stress and friction (don't forget, it's packed with explosives). It's almost shaking apart the whole time, and for the first several minutes of flight there's nowhere to go if they crash - only later in the flight, after the first several minutes, can they make an emergency landing. The scariest point was throttle-up, a point about one minute into flight when the main engines are driven to full performance. This is the point at which the challenger exploded; I was worried that the Columbia would explode at this point. It seems too much to believe that this complicated thing, full of fire, can actually work. I don't think a person on the center breathed for at least 20 seconds. After that part of the sequence was over people started laughing and clapping, but prior to that there was silence. At this point there wasn't much to be seen from the ground - everything was too far away. We were ushered back to the main complex, where more wonders awaited our perusal. If there's one overriding impression that the space center made on me, it was SIZE. The scale of things there is incredible. Everything is huge! First was the center itself; its 140000 acres are mostly undeveloped. It looks exactly like the everglades wilderness for the most part, and much of it is covered in orange groves, which were there when the government seized the property in th late fifties. The families who owned the farms are allowed to cultivate the oranges to this day, and much of the Indian river crop comes from Kennedy Center. Most of the buildings on the center were made to handle space hardware, which is often large; but the vehicle assembly building (VAB) is the mother of them all. This building was used to assemble the Apollo rockets (A-S LV, for Apollo-saturn launch vehicles), and is used to assemble the shuttle stacks. It is 54 stories high and is ONE ROOM. One room, 54 stories high, and about four square football fields around. This huge volume is air conditioned, with the result that when any of the huge doors are opened the difference in humidity causes - you guessed it - rain, INSIDE the building. It has its own weather system. Unfortunately, this was one of two places in which no pictures were allowed, but I did see a stack being built. Everything was so big it was hard to believe that it could actually be manipulated by people. Imagine picking up a 15-story rocket and lifting it up over the 2-story mobile launch pad assembly to attach it to the 20-story fuel tank (which you took from the storage locker, a 30-story high structure which holds several of these tanks). Then lift up an entire shuttle the size of an airliner and toss it several stories onto the back of the stack. Did I mention that two stacks can be assembled at once? Now, open the 54-story high door (the stack is only about three quarters this height) and drive the pad out to the launch complex about three or four miles away. The pad had tractor treads on the bottom of it and is the largest vehicle of its type ever built. It has a top speed of two miles per hour, was built in 1964 and has a thousand miles on the odometer. Another extremely large structure was the ONC (whatever that stands for) which is the facility where shuttle payloads are prepared. In the ONC I saw one of NASA's two spacelabs, which are tubes full of experiments which can be mounted in the cargo bay of a shuttle. One had launched that morning, and is still orbiting as I write this. The spacelabs are interesting because they are large and pressurized, so that crew can live and work inside of them. All of the pictures I've seen on TV this week from space were taken in this module. Also in the ONC are two cavernous vacuum chambers which were used to test the Apollo equipment such as lunar landers. I'll guess that each of these chambers could hold enough water to fill an olympic-sized swimming pool. A point of interest in this facility was a large white "fishing reel," which turned out to be the cable reel for the ill-fated tethered satellite experiment which you may have heard of. Almost everything in this building has flown aboard a shuttle; you can't turn around without practically bumping into a satellite, orbiter component, or other piece of space hardware. Somewhat diminutive by comparison, but more interesting, was the orbiter processing facility (OPF). The second location where photography was forbidden, these buildings (there are three) are shuttle "Garages" where the shuttles are taken after landing. In these buildings they are lightly overhauled and prepared for the next flight. There are four shuttles in the fleet (Columbia, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour in order of age); one is always at NASA's major overhaul facility in California, where jobs like engine replacement are undertaken. In the OPF I was allowed to walk under, around, and over the top of the Endeavour, affectionately known to NASA as orbiter vehicle #105 (OV-105). It is a surprisingly clumsy and unaerodynamic-looking vehicle. In fact, it's called the "flying brick." The ceramic tiles which protect it during re-entry are visibly scarred by the experience, but for the most part are actually OK and used over and over again. Each of the 17000 tiles is individually manufactured and indexed. Every one is inspected prior to flight and replaced if necessary (a robot is being developed to do this automatically). Maybe some of you have seen the demonstration of these tiles on tv? Well, the insulating properties are so good that one of these tiles can be hand-held while a welding torch heats it white-hot. If you hold it on the edges you won't even get burned. Some random first-person observations: The entire vehicle is spotlessly clean except around the nose where most of the heat of re-entry occurs; you can see streaks of white "ash" flowing down the belly of the thing. The landing gear looks more or less like a jet airliner's. The wings are kind of stubby looking but the tail is an enormous sail of a thing which stands several stories high. Something I had never realized was that the inside of the cargo bay is not solid; it's an aluminum framework covered by cloth. For this reason, any experiment mounted in an orbiter must first be mounted in a launch pallet, which is a semicircular metal platform. The crew compartment is a lot smaller than it looks on TV, because all of the cameras have wide-angle lenses. It's two levels high but only about the length of a full-sized van; and because it's thinner on top the flight deck is only about half that length. I was also lucky enough to get a close-up look at the launch pad and SRB recovery facilities. In the interests of brevity I won't say a whole lot about either of these except that the launch pad facility is a lot bigger than it looks, and it looks big in the pictures. The parachute facility houses the largest washer and dryer in the world so that it can clean the parachutes from the SRBs after they've splashed down in the atlantic. I watched workers packing the little drougue chute that the orbiters deploy upon landing; many types of advanced materials, such as kevlar, are used in it's construction and the details of deployment and multiple redundancy are interesting. In addition to all of this fantastic hardware I also spoke with several interesting people, such as the director of the public affairs office at KSC and Gene Thomas, communications director for the Apollo missions as well as launch director for the first 25 shuttle missions. Challenger was the 25th; this was the man personally responsible for allowing the launch to go ahead that day. After all these years he still seems shattered by the event. I don't think I could overstress the effect of the Challenger disaster (that's how they refer to it) on the people of NASA. Not only has it been responsible for major changes in proceedure, but all of the employees, particularly at KSC, seem scarred by it. Everywhere I went people still spoke of it. Something often mentioned is the fact that no space program has ever had a success rate greater than 99%; 1 failure out of 78 missions is a success rate of 98.8%. This not only means that the challenger accident was "normal," but there is a statistical likelihood of another accident in the future. As you may know, lockheed is taking over all shuttle operations, and although NASA managers oversee all activities, some are worried that cost and corner-cutting will result in another accident. There are only four shuttles, and their operational lifetime is likely to be very long because NASA doesn't have the money to build the next generation of vehicles. The first shuttle, Columbia, was launched in 1981; it is flying now and it is 15 years old. That's a long time for a complicated machine like a shuttle. In addition, cost cuts have necessitated a reduction in shuttle inspections. So there is much grumbling in the ranks, although I don't know how seriously to take it. An alternate viewpoint is that the shuttles were designed for 100 launches; no shuttle has more than 21 launches to its name at present. Therefore, they are well within spec and not likely to fail. Improvements in technology have made the existing shuttles much safer and more reliable, and proceedural revisions have increased safety in a number of areas. KSC could launch a shuttle every six weeks if required; they are working much more slowly because of safety precautions. Ok, time for me to get up on my soapbox. It's not NASA brainwashing, but rather a synthesis of the information collected during this internship so far: at present it seems politically expedient (from outside of NASA) to question the usefulness of NASA. I have always been a space buff and understood that research is important; but seeing these projects really made an impression on me. Think back upon the incredible things being done by the space program - the engineering necessary to accomplish such feats: a 54-story building that can withstand hurricanes; an air-conditioning system that can handle that volume (when it was built it was the first one); insulating materials like the shuttle's tiles and metals; managerial systems for planning every aspect of a six-million part count spacecraft successfully (in terms of parts count, the shuttles are the most complex machines ever made except for aircraft carriers, and certainly one of the most advanced); a machine capable of keeping a 400 million pound load level on uneven grades while moving, and countless other feats of technology, not to mention the theory advanced by so much research in aerodynamics, propulsion, navigation, and other fields. Extensions of space technologies have effected every part of our lives, and it would be ridiculous to say that the end of the cold war means that NASA isn't as important to the health and security of the US. If we don't figure out how to use space, someone else will - some other country that will then be able to master the satellite and space technology market. Everyone's working on it, and in almost every country it's a national as well as private effort. In the U.S. private corporations are taking off, but they are followers in the wake of NASA, which is a unique organization because of its non-profit, research-oriented missions. If NASA is not available to push ahead into areas not immediately profitable, space enterprises as a whole will not be as healthy, and science will suffer. Who will do earth science so that we can understand the greenhouse effect etc.? What I've presented here is only the surface of what I've learned about the manned space program; if I've missed anything you want to know about, please ask and I'll do my best to answer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dan Greenspan greenspan@rowan.edu http://www.rowan.edu/~greenspa