Jun 3 1980
From The Space Library
The Washington Post quoted a White House source as saying that "We're running out of patience on the Space Shuttle... There's a feeling here that we can't tolerate any more delays in the Shuttle program." Noting the six postponements that had done "serious harm to the space agency's credibility," the Washington Post said that "in fairness... the delays caused by engine and tile troubles are not all its fault." When Pratt & Whitney lost the engine contract to Rocketdyne, it sued NASA, delaying engine tests for a year; lack of money also caused delay.
JSC Director Christopher C. Kraft pointed out that money cutbacks in 1978 meant that "we delayed building the tiles, and that naturally delayed our test procedures, which naturally delayed us from getting at the answers we now have." The custom-built tiles, each shaped to fit a specific place on the fuselage, took 25 hours apiece to install. After many were attached, NASA found that half had lost their strength in the bonding process; technicians had to remove and coat the tiles before replacing them.
When NASA shipped the Shuttle orbiter piggyback on its Boeing carrier from Palmdale, Calif., to Cape Canaveral in 1979, only 10 % of its 30,922 tiles were in place, and some of those fell off during the trip. NASA enlisted a force of 1,200 workers to install the tiles, working two 10-hour shifts six days a week at the Cape. When the coating problem developed, the crews were attaching 750 tiles a week but removing 100. About 5,000 cavities on the frame remained to be filled, and NASA forecast August as the finishing date for the task.
The other technological challenge was the Shuttle's engine cluster, three liquid-hydrogen engines, each 10 times as powerful as the largest jet engine and burning 1,000 degrees hotter than any engine before it. These were the first liquid-fuel rockets designed for reuse; said Shuttle program manager Robert Thompson: "We had to expect that in heating it and stressing it with repeated use we were going to run into problems." During tests, engines had caught, fire and even blown up; 6 of the last 12 tests of the three engines firing together had to be stopped because of overheating. By summer's end the tests would have cost $1 billion more than the $500 million NASA estimated.
NASA's costs by the time the first Shuttle flew would be $264 million for solid-fuel rocket engines; $381 million for tiles; $442 million for the external fuel tank; $1.5 billion for development of the main liquid-rocket engine, amounting to an overrun of almost $1.6 billion.
Money was a lesser concern, however, than the slips in schedule. The Shuttle was the first civilian vehicle designed to carry surveillance satellites for the DOD; those due to fly in 1983 were the biggest and most sophisticated ever built, weighing up to 25 tons each, too big to be carried by any other rocket including DOD's Titan. Former astronaut Sen. Harrison Schmitt (RN.M.), ranking Republican on the Senate subcommittee on space, said that DOD would have to alter its craft to fit on the Titan if they could not fly on the Shuttle in 1983. (W Post, June 3/80, A-2)
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