bighugelabs.com — The Space Shuttle Enterprise was the first Space Shuttle built for NASA. It was constructed without engines or a functional heat shield, and was therefore not capable of space operations; its purpose was to perform test flights in the atmosphere.
May 17, 2009 View in Crawl 4
thesuperunknownMay 19, 2009
That still has wild halos and weird colors. HDR is supposed to look closer to real life, not Photoshop.
revjonathanMay 19, 2009
Shatner's the big white thing in the background full of tons of gas.
bj00rnMay 19, 2009
No... Just NO.The "HDR"...thing around here is not HDR, it's just appalling..
Closed AccountMay 21, 2009
Yes, the Air and Space main museum is right with all the other Smithsonian museums, and is also fantastic, but really crowded usually. But the Udvar Hazy has a shuttle. For me, that's one of the ultimate things, that thing was in space, it blows my mind. The main Air and Space museum is really easy to hit in a row of the other museums, but it takes a few days if you want to see them all. I can get stuck for hours in just one...
sharkdMay 22, 2009
The O-rings were only part of the failure.Essentially the SRB field joint was designed to use two O-rings to seal gaps between SRB segments. The lap joint O-rings, when subjected to near-freezing temperatures, did not immediately return to their original shape when deformed by pressure. The long tang, of the joint, necessitated by the two-O-ring design, allowed the internal pressure of the SRB to exert a greater force, via the tang, on the joint's clevis (the U-shaped channel in which the tang fits) than on comparable segmented rocket designs (such as the expendable Titan). This caused the SRB segments to go increasingly out-of-round with each launch.The SRB joint in question was severely out-of-round and in the course of flight, moved enough to compress the O-rings sufficiently to allow the tang to move inside the clevis, letting combustion gases flow into the joint, through the clevis channel and under the tang, which partially burned-through the sealing rings, allowing a superheated jet of gas to directly impact the external tank adjacent to the SRB. The weakened ET structure failed near the SRB lower attachment strut, allowing the SRB to rotate about the upper attachment, severely yawing the Orbiter-ET-SRB stack relative to the 2,200mph airflow.The ET's upper structure failed; the blossoming no-longer-compressed ET gasses pushed the Orbiter into a belly-first flight profile, at which point, the Orbiter structure failed. (At no point was there an "explosion".) All occurring within less than a second. The relatively-intact crew compartment continued on a ballistic trajectory, to an altitude of 65,000 feet, before impacting the ocean approximately 2min 45sec after loss of vehicle.
timpalaJun 4, 2009
You are simply wrong and that is why you are being dugg down.