Friday, February 14, 2003

NASA Engineer Warned of Dire Effects of Shuttle Liftoff Damage
Two days before the Columbia broke apart, a NASA safety engineer warned of the possibility of "catastrophic" consequences if damage from the foam insulation that struck the shuttle in liftoff allowed the heat of re-entry to penetrate the wheel well and burst the shuttle's tires.


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/13/national/nationalspecial/13SHUT.html?pagewanted=all&position=topBut because other NASA officials had concluded by then that the foam could not have caused extensive damage, no one acted on the engineer's concerns.

The engineer, Robert H. Daugherty, who works at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., was responding to a request to assess the potential impact of damage to the sensitive heat-shielding tiles around the shuttle's wheel well. In an e-mail message to engineers at the Johnson Space Center at Houston, Mr. Daugherty laid out what he called the "absolute worst-case scenarios."

He said that if temperatures increased markedly in the wheel well, the shuttle's wheels could fail and the tires explode.

"It seems to me that with that much carnage in the wheel well, something could get screwed up enough to prevent deployment and then you are in a world of hurt," Mr. Daugherty wrote.

Mr. Daugherty said the pressure in the wheel well "would almost certainly blow the door off the hinges or at least send it out into the slip stream — catastrophic."
NASA released copies of the engineer's warnings on its Web site this morning.

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