Vinny Gambini once said:
It’s a procedure. Like rebuilding a carburetor has a procedure. You know, when you rebuild a carburetor, the first thing you do is you take the carburetor off the manifold? Supposing you skip the first step, and while you’re replacing one of the jets, you accidentally drop the jet, it goes down the carburetor, rolls along the manifold, and goes into the head. You’re fucked. You just learned the hard way that you gotta remove the carburetor first, right? So that’s all that happened to me today. I learned the hard way. Actually, it was a good learning experience for me.
Last Friday someone accidentally dropped a nut while crews were mating the space shuttle Discovery to it’s main tank. The nut went down the carburetor, rolled along the manifold, and went into the head. They were fucked.
Actually, the nut, belonging to one of the separation bolts, ended up dropping into the aft compartment of the orbiter. Just like the jet in Vinny’s story, you can’t just reach in and grab the errant nut.
First a team of engineers and technicians needs to make sure the nut didn’t damage anything it may have hit. Then they have to decide how to get into the compartment where the nut is resting. The orbiter is vertical as it is mated to the external tank and the aft compartment wasn’t meant to be accessible in this orientation. Will they need to put the orbiter horizontal again? How will this impact the schedule for launch?
Ideas are discussed. Eventually they decide a scaffold can be constructed so that someone can access the aft compartment. The plan is evaluated. After a briefing, management gives it’s approval. The procedure begins. Under the watchful eye of the engineering team, a technician manages to retrieve the nut.
24 hours after the nut was dropped everything is nominal once again. The orbiter can continue to be mated to the external tank.
There are more than 2.5 million parts in the Space Transportation System. If someone drops one of them, say a nut, it can take 24 hours to get back on track if things go well. This is one of the reasons the STS never became the “space truck” I was promised when in high school.
The STS is a design from the 60’s that was fleshed out in the 70’s and first launched in 1981. When excitedly watching that first launch I would never have imagined the same system would still be flying in 2011. By now we were supposed to have moved on to new technologies and systems.
The Augustine Commission made some great suggestions about how to move science and human spaceflight into the future They basically said that NASA was good at doing things that had never been done before, developing new technologies to do those things. Things like visiting an asteroid or one of the moons of Mars. They wanted to leave development and operations of the next space truck to private enterprise.
This was a good plan and I was pleasantly surprised when Obama endorsed it pretty much as suggested. Congress, however, is fighting against it. They want to keep NASA, and the long-established lucrative contracts, chugging along without any changes. They want to keep fying 1970’s technology to low earth orbit and maybe go back to the moon using an updated, larger version of the 1960’s Saturn/Apollo system. And science? They are cutting most of the science missions out so they can pay for keeping us stuck in the past.
Developing a plan for NASA is a procedure. Like rebuilding a carburetor has a procedure. Congress has the future of NASA in their hands and they forgot to take the graft carburetor off the funding manifold first.
We’re fucked.
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