A History of the Kennedy Space Center by Lipartito Kenneth & Butler Orville R

Author:Lipartito, Kenneth & Butler, Orville R [Lipartito, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780813047935
Publisher: Ingram Distribution
Published: 2007-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

8-8. Once test flights were done, the work of installing payloads to take advantage of the shuttle’s massive payload capacity began.

Thus far the debate about turnaround time had been a paper and ink battle.128 Now it was possible to put “meat on the bones” of plans and schedules. “Columbia trained us,” remarked Bob Sieck.129 Besides proving the tile bonding process and teaching the launch team about the dangers of overpressure, Columbia gave the computer programmers a real-world opportunity to debug their software. Despite many hours spent on the code, it was only after the LPS was used for the first launch that they were able to find and fix problems, rewrite procedures, and ask for changes to ground equipment.

KSC engineers had always seemed the naysayers on the turnaround issue, basing their skepticism on actual experiences from Apollo and earlier missions. Experience with Columbia started to provide evidence for their position. No one had expected a 160-hour turnaround after the shuttle’s first flight. But earlier STAG analysts had postulated that most of the learning could be done on the first four missions. Experience now suggested that the learning process would be harder and take longer than predicted. In spite of the apparently minor repairs needed to Columbia, the orbiter spent three months in the OPF, moving to the VAB on August 10, 1981, for its second launch, scheduled for October 9. Then the unexpected intervened. On September 22, while fueling the shuttle’s forward reaction control system, technicians spilled nitrogen tetroxide. As they dried the fuel, they felt tiles coming loose.

Some 350 tiles now had to be removed and taken to the tile processing room, where they were cleaned, waterproofed, and cured in ovens. They were again bonded to felt isolation pads and then returned to the launchpad for reattachment to the shuttle. By September 30, however, a team of sixty men and women had reattached only three of the missing tiles. Now the struggles in preparing STS-1 for launch paid off. Because technicians had already learned how to affix tile at the pad, they were able to replicate the process. A new access platform permitted reattachment of about ten tiles a day.130 The fuel spill had delayed the shuttle’s launch for a little less than a month. Then, just when it seemed that experience and hard work had done the trick, came another unplanned delay. On November 4, failure of some of the shuttle’s reusable auxiliary power units pushed back launch five more days.

Joseph Engle and Richard Truly finally blasted off for the second shuttle ride on November 9.131 The water shock suppression system that KSC had installed did its job. Analysts found the shock wave on the second liftoff to be less than 25 percent that of the first.132 Fewer observers attended this second launch, and those with favored positions as official guests were moved back beyond the four-mile limit instead of watching the launch from in front of the Launch Control Center. NASA feared that, given the wrong wind conditions, shuttle exhaust might drift onto the observers.

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