History of the Space Shuttle, Volume 2 by T. A. Heppenheimer

Author:T. A. Heppenheimer [Heppenheimer, T. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58834-441-0
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2014-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 49. Thermal-protection tiles on the underside of the forward fuselage. (NASA, courtesy Dennis R. Jenkins) (Ill. 49)

The hangar was the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF), which adjoined the immense Vehicle Assembly Building. The second bay of the OPF became a center for tile densification. The tile work force numbered 940 in early 1980, many being in their late teens and early twenties. They worked three shifts, with about twenty large trailers parked nearby to provide support—including food service and rest rooms.

The work went badly during 1979, for as people continued to install new tiles, they found more and more that needed to be removed and replaced. In June NASA and Rockwell had estimated that they had to fit 10,500 into position. At year’s end they had applied 12,000 tiles, newly installed or remounted. A month later, only 1,200 of the June tally had not been mated—and the count of tiles to emplace was up to 13,100, as ongoing pull tests continued to disclose weak ones.

Orderly installation procedures broke down. Rockwell had received the tiles from Lockheed in arrays and had attached them in well-defined sequences. Even so, that work had gone slowly, with 550 tiles in a week being a good job. Now, however, Columbia showed a patchwork of good ones, bad ones, and open areas with no tiles. Each individual tile had been shaped to a predetermined pattern at Lockheed, using that firm’s numerically controlled milling machines. But the haphazardness of the layout made it likely that any precut tile would fail to fit into its assigned cavity, leaving too wide a gap with the adjacent ones.

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