Brown’s office door swung open and crashed against the doorstop. Steve Metzer, Brown’s senior photo analyst, hurried into the room. “Sorry,” he said, seeing Brown was on the phone.
Brown held up an index finger to Metzer.
Metzer didn’t wait. “Ken, your films…”
Brown nodded. “Jeff, gotta go, my films are here. Call you later.” Brown hung up.
“That was Sims,” Brown said, using his arms to push himself up. There was an unusual lightness in his voice as his nervous system climbed the apex of another medication up phase. “He says there was a debris strike, a late hit.”
“Ice?” Metzer asked to Brown’s back.
“Don’t think so,” Brown said, turning to open the door of the video viewing room. “Sims thinks it’s more of that goddamn bi-pod ramp foam.”
As he entered the viewing room, Brown barked, “Get the hi-res up. Run 208 first. Cue it to T-plus-75. Remember, we’re looking for anything out of the ordinary—ice shards, foam insulation showers, blurred images, anything abnormal.”
All eyes looked up from their consoles. Brown’s rants weren’t new to anyone on staff, even to Paul Rusnick, who’d joined Brown just two weeks earlier.
When Brown got riled, they gave him anything he asked for. When he had a hunch, the team helped him until it proved to be right or wrong—he was rarely wrong. Brown had a talent for pinpointing the smallest detail. He worked with precision, like a radiologist scanning the CT films of a multiple-trauma victim.
Back in 1986, it was Brown—at the time merely an engineer on the team—just one of the “Photo Guys”—who saw the first ghost of smoke for Challenger. He’d watched the disaster over and over for hours, trying to find the cause, any clues to what went so terribly wrong. He vividly remembered how, in a final exhausted effort, he’d rewound the film from camera E60 back to T-minus-seven seconds and watched the playback at an agonizingly slow frame rate. At Launch-plus-0.678 seconds, the faint puff of gray smoke finally showed itself, blooming at the field joint between sections three and four of the starboard solid rocket booster (SRB). Brown had stared at the film as the puff grew into a torch that consumed the black rubber seal, the O-ring, between the SRB sections. The torch then thickened, burning through the metal side of the SRB like a separate rocket. The result was a catastrophic explosive fury.
Brown had taken the loss of crew and craft personally, as if he’d lost members of his own family.
But that was twenty-three years ago. There had been eighty-eight shuttle launches since then, two solid rocket boosters used per launch, without any failures. The problem was considered by all at NASA to be fixed.
These days, Brown and his team of engineers worried mostly about the rain of debris from the shuttle’s external fuel tank during launch. For some time, it had been the focus of their reports. Small pockets of trapped air inside the insulating foam would expand with the increase in altitude and aerothermal heating of launch. Small chunks of insulating foam debris were falling with an almost predictable frequency. Orbiters returned from space with pockmarked underbellies, as if they’d been subjected to some botched dermabrasion treatment. With their protective skins scarred, Columbia, Endeavor, Atlantis, and Discovery were all dispatched for tile repair as part of their post-flight turnaround maintenance.
“I just got off the phone with Sims from Marshall,” Brown told his team as he approached the video console. “They think they saw something contact Columbia’s wing at T-plus-81.9 seconds. Sims thinks it’s bi-pod foam.”
Brown had everyone’s attention.
“81.9 seconds,” Metzer exclaimed. “Man that is late.”
“Exactly,” Brown said. “We’re gonna have to study this one closely. Velocity was 2,300 feet per second at the point of impact.
That’s over 1,500 miles per hour, folks.”
“What’s all this about the bi-pod foam?” Rusnick asked.
Brown shot a look at Rusnick. He hated new guys. But he figured that if he couldn’t make every imaging assessment for NASA between now and when the Star Trek era arrived, he could at least serve as mentor for the incoming group of engineers.
So as Metzer readied the film, Brown took a moment to explain the bi-pod foam problem to Rusnick.
“I insult everyone,” Brown said to Rusnick. “So don’t take it personally. I don’t know how well you understand various shuttle systems. I’ll assume you know nothing.”
Rusnick nodded, tried to smile off Brown’s not-so-subtle insult, but Brown had reached him. He always did.
“Alright. So the huge rust-colored ET actually contains two separate tanks, one for liquid hydrogen at minus-423 degrees and one for liquid oxygen at minus-297 degrees. Fuel for the shuttle’s main engines during launch.”
Rusnick kept eye contact with Brown, nodded as he listened.
Brown looked over at Metzer to gauge how much time he had before the hi-res film would be ready.
“Ready in a second,” Metzer said as he looped the film through the projector.
“The ET is covered with foam insulation to prevent condensation and ice from forming on the outside surface of the tank,” Brown said. “The foam also helps to limit the aerodynamic heating of the tank during ascent. The assembly of the ET and the application of foam insulation is done at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.”
Bored with his own voice, Brown glanced back at Metzer. Still working. There was more to the foam story.
“The majority of foam insulation over the 154-foot tank is applied with robotic precision to a thickness of one inch. In certain places on the ET, where specialized hardware such as Orbiter attachment struts or the liquid-oxygen feed line interrupts the otherwise-smooth surface of the tank, insulation is applied by hand. The bi-pod strut, the point where the forward aspect of the Orbiter is physically connected to the ET for launch, is covered in hand-applied foam.
“I’ve been to the facility. I’ve seen the technicians mold and sculpt aerodynamic ramps of foam around blunt projections—they do an amazing job. Problem is that the hand-applied foam
