Shuttle Launch: A QL story

alsplacebartender

Al's Place Bartender
Staff member
Hi all - my friend Dave who worked at NASA sent me this. He allowed me to share his personal thoughts with you and I think it's a great story. Hope you enjoy.

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Hello, Brian.

Yes, my family and I have been invited to attend the final Space Shuttle launch this coming Friday. Needless to say, we're as excited as one can be.
Over the past two weeks, I've thought long and hard about everything that's happened in the past 40 years. The attached screen capture comes from the family movies that my late mother had transferred to VHS, and I've transferred them to DVD.

I had forgotten that almost exactly 40 years ago she and I had taken a vacation to Ormond Beach and had visited the Cape. That is the 15-year-old version of me, having no notion that I would be returning 40 years later after having contributed so much to the safety of our brave astronauts.

Life sometimes has its own plans for us...or perhaps a higher power makes those plans for us.

I was just watching a program about the shuttle on CNN and became overwhelmed by how many people my work, my passion, has affected.
I thought of Al, saying "I've got Mother Teresa here!" Yeah, Al, I know that it's changed the lives of people, but it's how many that staggers me! So far, everyone who's gone into space since Columbia came home safely (although we came within days of losing STS-133 on the pad!), they completed construction of the ISS, they refurbished the Hubble...and we made it possible for Barbara Morgan to complete Christa McAuliffe's and Challenger's legacy by teaching from space.

I can't begin to imagine how many people's lives have been affected for the better...

Ever since a chance encounter at the final CAIB hearing, I've been exchanging ideas with Dr. Douglas Osheroff. It was overwhelming at first, but Doug is quite the regular guy.

Last fall, during a tanking test of STS-133, a fuel leak at the GUCP connector occurred. Some insulating foam at the intertank section cracked and when they inspected it they found that the stringers that hold the two tanks apart had cracked. Now, if you found termites in one floor joist, you'd have them all inspected and treated, right? It's just common sense. NASA was six months behind schedule, and planned to repair the leak and the visible stringers, reinsulate, and launch on December 17th.

I had been monitoring the issue and conversing with Doug about it, but one night everything came into focus...

My wife and I had been watching "The Mothman Prophecies". At the movie's end, they state that a cause for the bridge collapse was never found. My wife wondered if a cause had been found, so I Googled it and found that a corrosion-induced stress crack in a bridge link was the culprit. But my head began spinning...cracks in the bridge...cracks in the stringers...there was a disaster staring us in the eyes!

"Launch fever" was a major cause in the loss of Challenger. NASA was blinded by it once again. The conversation became frenetic until some NASA spokesperson used language to describe NASA's "comfort" with the stringers that was eerily similar to that used to describe the foam shedding that doomed Columbia.
I forwarded it to Doug...he asked me for every NASA e-mail address I had. I only gave him one.

If you truly believe that everything happens for a reason and that there are no random acts, then it was God's hands that made it so that the Chief Engineer of the ET/SRB group was our tour guide in December 2004. I gave Doug his address, and Doug wrote a missive reminding Peter that normalization of deviance was a major contributing factor in the loss of Columbia.

Two days later, they cancelled the launch and began a root cause investigation into the cause of the stringer cracks. My wife said that Doug's missive took the decision out of anyone's hands, and that the next morning Peter put the missive on the board at the morning meeting and said "I don't know how he got my address, but now the CAIB is watching this and we absolutely cannot launch like this!"
The root cause was improperly heat-treated stringers, and they found that the tanks for Discovery and Atlantis had been constructed with defective stringers. Failure of any four adjacent stringers would result in the two tanks collapsing into one another shortly after launch, resulting in a deadly fireball. Discovery wouldn't have cleared the tower before joining Challenger and Columbia.

They ended up reinforcing 94 out of 108 stringers on Discovery's tank. They did a complete test on Endeavour's tank even though its stringers came from a different batch. They reinforced stringers on Atlantis' tank, and the retest discovered a leaky fuel valve that would have cancelled the scheduled launch. Today, there are no issues being worked and even the weather is cooperating.

Had we done nothing, a lot of people would have had a really rotten Christmas. You have to wonder...did we get it right the first time, or did "Sam and Stowpah" have to work together to make right that which once went wrong?

Two other miracles were Sean O'Keefe and his son Kevin surviving that horrific plane crash in Alaska last year, and Gabby Giffords' surviving the attempt on her life. Those are the ones I know about...there are truly angels which surround everyone involved here.

I once felt that the end of the shuttle program was the end of my "mission", but now I feel as if perhaps another mission will be placed before me, one of telling my story as one of inspiration.

"Sam, if you'd been a priest..."
"I HAVE been a priest!"
"So you have. If the priesthood had been your chosen profession...you could take a sabbatical before embarking on a new, more dangerous mission."

I've already had a taste of it...the Space Coast is about to become as economically devastated as the Rust Belt was 30 years ago, and we had a lot of suicides as jobless men lost their reason to exist. While we never truly recovered, we did survive and find a reason to go on, and if my example can somehow be an inspiration to someone who has lost their reason to live, then I will devote my life to this as I did to keeping astronauts safe.

Launch time is 11:26 AM ET Friday...and I'll be there. Amazing, simply amazing.

All the best.
Dave