Environmental dogma led to the sacrifice of 14 shuttle astronauts?
Blunt headline, but let's examine it. We know now what caused the Columbia disaster: insulating foam that flaked off from the main booster tank -- foam created with a new "environmentally friendly" formula, but that was responsible for a huge increase in damage to the shuttles' tiles on liftoff.
Aerospace engineer and former NASA filght controller Hannes Hacker weighs in.
NASA notes that it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether it was the old or the new foam that caused the recent disaster, and environmentalists will no doubt say this means that we can't pin the disaster on them. But any unnecessary increase in risk in an enterprise so unforgiving of error, is unacceptable. The bottom line is that NASA took a much greater risk in order to comply with EPA demands. Environmentalist junk science trumped sound engineering.These claims need to be taken seriously by the people in charge, but unfortunately, those who make the decisions are as likely to understand the science as they are to do anything that would expose them to political criticism from the Luddite environmental lobby.This is not the first time that has happened. The cause of the 1986 Challenger explosion is officially established as hot gases burning through an O-ring joint in one of the solid-rocket boosters. NASA was roundly criticized for its decision to launch in cold weather over the objection of some engineers, but there was a deeper cause that was not as widely reported.
In 1985 NASA had switched to a new putty to seal the O-ring joints. The new putty became brittle at cold temperatures, thus allowing Dr. Richard Feynman to teach NASA a famous lesson. At the congressional hearing investigating the accident, he simply placed some of the O-ring putty in a glass of ice water and crumbled it in his fingers.
NASA had changed the sealant because its original supplier for O-ring putty stopped producing it for fear of anti-asbestos lawsuits.
Posted by Matt at July 10, 2003 6:02 PM
