On Mon, 3 Feb 2003 07:26:10 +0100, Hans Ulrich Ammann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Im trying to get a feeling of how damaging a chunk of isolation could >be. But eventually one has to consider that most of the mass of a torn >of piece of insulation could consist of frozen moisture. In the moment >a piece of insulation gets loose it has the same velocity as the whole >vehicle, how important would be the relative velocity at the moment it >would impact on the orbiter? I heard it broke loose about a minute into the launch. At that point, they're still in the stratosphere, but supersonic. A piece of ice-coated insulation would be very draggy, and would pull several hundred g. It would have been essentially stopped by the time the wing hit it at Mach 1+. Ouch. I never took the insulation strike hypothesis very seriously before, but ice at Mach 1+ would do enough damage to make that scenario credible. Ouch again, and damn. -R _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
