Page 11 - Orbiter News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

-what was starting to join up was you've got video analysis that says the strike on the orbiter created a hole in the wing. and you can see that there had been some sort of penetration against the rcc panel. hot gas had entered in, the shuttle had lost aerodynamic control and crashed. but i think the challenge for a lot of folks at nasa was believing that foam had done that. they would say foam can't break reinforced carbon-carbon. there were a lot of people that said there's something else that explains this. -we decided to ask nasa about the history of foam strikes, which had never been done...

I hear from Launch Control he vehicle has exploded. Thats the orbiter itself. The Shuttle Challenger has exploded. We must assume that the crew is not alive. This is unheralded in the history of the space program. Ladies and gentlemen, i have covered Space Shuttle launches since the very first launch, since before the first launch itself, going way back, and nothing like this has ever happened. [ woman screams ] it was a sad day for all americans. This was our space program. This was our national space program. And here they lost their lives doing it for our country. When i thought about chall...

Well, they came to the conclusion that the best way to deal with that was to arrange a system of tiles to cover the shuttle. All of the black here shown is all tiles. And these tiles are made of a Silica Fiber Material which is very heatresistant. I can show you. This is a test tile. There are about 31,000 of them all together, and we hope those tiles will stay on when the orbiter comes back into the atmosphere, because otherwise the craft itself could be damaged. During the development of the Space Shuttle in the 1970s, there was quite an effort to develop a way to repair damaged tiles on orb...

Cheap, very effective. But its got this property that, as you go through supersonic flight in the atmosphere, bits of it come. The question is how bad of shape is the orbiter in . And bob said, i really wish there was some way to get more information. I knew this mission passed over places where there were some highaltitude telescopes. These are looking at stars. So if you want to look at the orbiter, you could probably get the entire Orbiter Fit in the Field Of View and have extremely good resolution. And i said, well, i dont really know much about that, bob. Well have to check. And so i got ...

So the orbiter was flying with the parachute without its door. Nasa made a request to get some imagery. However, the photos didnt help much. So, even if you can get photographs, it doesnt mean theyll necessarily show anything. I think they were a little bit embarrassed in the end about asking. And nasa never wants to look stupid. Nasa wants to be the agency with the answers. If youd have said, linda, two different people need this information. Their departments are both asking. Are you aware . That may have changed the course of events. Could i have argued with her . Maybe. But did i get the i...