For the third commentary
in the Ascent DVD Production we're sitting with five members
of the film review team and all
of these folks are effectively the final end users
of the Ascent films where they review these films
for engineering purposes to monitor the health
and safety of the vehicle.
So to introduce you we have Armando Oliu,
who is a former lead of the ice debris team
in the image analysis lab here at Kennedy Space Center.
We've got Bob Page, who manages the imagery,
planning, and integration.
Basically the interface between the folks who do the tracking
and review of the films.
Then we have Sarah Cox and Joy Huff,
who are engineers responsible
for the thermal protection system on the orbiter
and finally Scott Lockwood who at the conclusion
of the program was the NASA imagery analysis
facility manager.
So I'd like to thank all of you for being here today.
It's a great pleasure to be in the presence of all of you,
and I'm looking forward to hearing what you're going to say
as we go through the production.
One of the first things I wanted to talk
about was why are we here?
Why the image analysis team exists to begin with.
Armando, you are sort of coming from the actual analysis group
where you're in there looking at it and managing the folks
who are looking at the film and, Bob, you're more connected back
to the acquisition and deployment of it as well
as interfacing directly with the team.
Is that correct statement?
That's true.
Yeah, from analysis perspective, of course, the purposes
of the imagery is to see or to capture that the vehicle
and all the systems have worked properly
from an external perspective.
Obviously the vehicle has internal ways
of knowing itself how it worked,
but all the external interfaces whether it's T-zero disconnects,
ascent debris that may come off the vehicle
and strike the vehicle.
All of that has to be captured and reviewed
to see whether the performance of the vehicle was,
to all the requirements that are in the books.
So that's the purpose of image analysis.
And from an imagery planning standpoint you take imagery
as an instrument that can see things that are close calls
if you will, from a requirements standpoint look at anything
that was within a foot
of the vehicle that's counted as an impact.
So, you want to see the things that are happening
around the vehicle and you need multiple views in order
to do photogrammetry because it's a highly dynamic
and environment around the vehicle you always had the risk
of a camera breaking, not working, et cetera.
So you want to have multiple views to cover for that too
and so it's a huge endeavor to go out there
and understand the technology,
understand what optics are capable of,
understand what the devices are available to you
and then fulfill the needs
of the analysis community with that.
This picture we have on screen, E-19, eventually every system,
every element is seen in this picture.
Ground support equipment, orbiter, main engines,
boosters, and external tank.
Eventually when it rises you'll see the bottom
of the external tank.
So, in one shot, you're getting every bit of the program in it.
I love this because you see the engines coming one at a time.
I love it too when the sparklers start, or HBOI's,
hydrogen burn-off igniters, I always think of fireflies.
I love watching engine start up.
They are magical.
I can sit here and watch them forever.
In fact, from a film review standpoint I guess we've got a
failure on the left HBOI, right?
There is a failure of the HBOI on the opposite side
of the screen, the lower left hand corner of the screen.
It shoots out flame instead of sparkles at one point
and that's a failure of it and that would have been reported.
So that is not a hydrogen being burned off when that happens.
That's actually an anomaly.
Something to do with that little --
it's in essence a little SRB, right?
Right. Blowing out little particles.
So, it may have had a gas pocket or something.
Right. Yeah, because you look at it
and you get the number 3 engine or the number 1 --
There it goes you can see it.
See it?
Absolutely, yeah.
And now you're seeing hydrogen being burned off.
Impurities in hydrogen being burned off.
Coming up right about now, there was a piece of tile
on the engine 2, which was from this view, the back engine
on one of the tiles -- --
so the right most engine here is engine two, right?
Yes. Uh-huh.
There was a tile that goes around the engines
on what we call the dome heat shield, broke off
and it is visible and when you get
to a certain point you see a pretty good sized chunk,
you know, 4X3 corner of a tile, which we've seen before.
It's not that unusual.
Yeah. Because it's just a very harsh environment back there
and these tiles do get beat up over the years
because it is so extreme.
Once we got the on orbit imagery then we knew, we could see it
and we knew where it came from.
At this point all we saw was something kind of black fall.
We assumed it was a piece of tile.
You never can really tell in these because --
-- oh, there it is.
Because you see it falling.
Yeah, so that was a piece of tile coming off the -- --
that's what we assume.
I mean it's always hard to say 100%.
Right, but then you traced it back on on-oribt inspection
to something that was missing from up there
and made the connection circumstantially.
Yeah, on on-orbit inspection we usually don't get very good
images of the base heat shield because the lighting,
and that's not ever usually our concern, which is this area here
that you see all around the engines.
You really only need all of this thermal protection system
for ascent because it's hot from the engine.
Yeah, just because of the radiant plume.
So once you get on orbit, you know,
we don't really need it for descent.
A lot of debris.
I mean if you really observe these films -- --
yeah, a lot of frost, frost chunks.
Yeah.
As we lift, you'll see this is what I was getting at.
All of the elements are here.
You can see orbiter, engines, GSE, SRBs,
and now even the bottom of the external tank.
You saw the -- -- everything in one view.
The TSM door when it came closed there's actually some rebound
on it.
That would have been reportable because that's then an access
for those hot gases to get into the TSM.
See the ice falling off the umbilical trailing
down by the SRB.
Image analysis, unfortunately, doesn't get attention outside
of the image analysis community unless there's something
major happened.
Certainly the extreme would be a Columbia accident
or Challenger accident.
Right.
But there are a lot of things that happen in image analysis
that there are reactions to, whether there are small pieces
of debris that comes within a foot of the vehicle,
whether it's a, we notice in the image analysis
that ice was formed in a certain location, why did it form there,
did we have a gas leak of some sort or liquid leak?
So, there's a lot of little things that happen
in image analysis that really the vast majority of the folks
in the program probably don't realize is happening.
The next 4 or 5 clips here are predominately,
we'll be showing the hold down posts.
It's a little known fact that the whole vehicle, boosters,
tank, and orbiter, are all sitting on 8
of these posts right there.
The hold down post is a huge bolt
that weighs about 100 pounds.
It's torqued to a million pounds and the nut on it has two pyros
in it and when they fire the nut separates
and it's actually the tension
in the bolt is what drives it down out of the hole.
The big piece that's in the foreground of the picture
where the SRB just came up from.
They call that a shoe, and they'd like to keep it level,
but every now and again it would rock one way or the other
and so this is one tidbit I have learned in, you know,
doing film review what shoe rock was.
Yeah, I had never heard of that either.
Yeah, you can see it just rocked, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm not expert enough or know why they cared one way
or the other, but it does do that; not every time
but sometimes and people catch that and note that.
One of the neat things that people don't realize
and you don't capture too much on these views,
the whole vehicle at lift off really moves north, walks north,
has a north component to it.
It's not going straight up.
Oh, right, because of the -- --
because that the SSMEs are canted.
So that's a neat thing to see that a lot
of people don't realize is happening,
but you capture it a lot on this view on the left.
You'll see the boosters start to at one point
but by the time it clears it's moving to the left
on the left picture and it's the whole reason why those covers
are there.
The plume is impinging on top of that hold down post
and for reusability, that's what those covers are for.
The ones on the south side of the vehicle don't have it.
Those covers used to just be some heavy metal
without that other red coating on them and that red coating
on them is just an RTV, room temperature vulcanizing adhesive
with some other stuff mixed into it to act as an ablator
to help save the cover from the, you know, exhaust.
I just learned that those covers weigh 900 pounds.
I mean it's a half a ton.
You see the little push back?
Right. Okay, it's pushing back, yeah.
As soon as it clears, it'll start to close.
Of course, it's spring activated also but it weighs 700 pounds.
Wow. Every day is a school day.
You learn something every day.
Every day.
Yeah. It's hard to even imagine the environment
in that flame trench.
I mean it's just exhaust and chaos going everywhere.
On this view and I forget the mission number, it all had to do
with the time of day and the lighting but at lift off
or at engine ignition -- -- oh, yes.
The OMS Pod looked like it was oil canning.
It was right in that area
where you see the little black tiles on the OMS pod.
Oh, yeah. It was right in that area.
It literally looked like it was vibrating
and folks thought it was literally the structure was oil
canning, but of course, there's tiles on there
so it can't be physically doing what it looks like it's doing
because tiles would be popping off left and right.
Yeah, they're brittle.
But literally it looked like the thing was just bouncing back
and forth like it was about to fall off the vehicle
and it all had to do with optics.
It was right at engine ignition.
Yeah, and so it has to do with pressure waves
from engine ignition and light.
Oh, so you had air pressure density changes.
Air pressure density and then the time of day was
like at 2 o'clock so there was the sunlight angle was coming by
and I'm sure that pressure waves were hitting it right and -
it caused havoc because people were thinking we had structural
failure at OMS Pod almost, you know?
Yeah. And it was really amazing.
These views, what I think is cool
about this umbilical is it's designed to release
when it's supposed to and not release when it's not supposed
to because during engine start up and engine thrust build up,
the whole vehicle is twanging, you know, is tilting over.
Yeah, you've got two-foot surge.
So that interface is moving quite a bit and if you looked
at that image on the right during engine start up,
you'll see that whole T zero move up and then back down
and then finally release.
Nice shot of the tiles on the bottom of your vehicle here.
I'm assuming that the darkest tiles are the new ones
that have been replaced and the more later gray ones are the
ones that's been around for a while.
Yeah, actually with the RCC it's the opposite.
The darker ones are the ones that have flown more
and that light gray one you see that was a new panel.
Either brand new or a few flights old.
I like the steam plume.
The nightmare I have in planning a lot of this imagery
and the layout of the cameras is you never know from launch
to launch what the wind directions will be and so
where is all of that smoke and plume and steam going to go
and how does it obscure the vehicle, you know,
that doesn't do the analysis team any good
if you can't see the vehicle.
So, all of that enters into, you know, multiple cameras so that,
you know, if I couldn't catch it on one side
because of the wind direction I catch it on the other side.
To me one of the gee whiz things about this shot is
at SRB ignition, of course, you have this ignition
over pressurization where the shockwave hits the bottom
of the flame trench and bounces back up.
So SRB ignition the first thing you see it looks like smoke
from the flame trench is really a whole lot
of water is being pushed up from those water bags
and then eventually gets sucked back down.
That's the purpose of those water bags is to stop
that sound -- -- this is all water vapor.
That's water -- -- there's some smoke, but there's water
and vapor -- -- see all this stuff flying up --
-- there's debris, foam and you see how it gets sucked
back down?
You can see the rainbirds are just starting now.
Yeah, you just see the water -- -- the water baggies in there.
All that is those orange water bags
that are lining the flame trench are the exhaust hole,
left and right exhaust hole.
It's kind of neat.
You see it go up and then come back down.
Of course, you see pieces of debris come flying out.
The SRBs have a throat plug basically stuffed inside them.
It's like a 6-inch, it's foam.
It's got a red RTV on the outside just to plug it in.
So, at ignition that thing is getting obliterated some
of it bounces off the pad, the flame trench, and bounces back
up through those exhaust holes and that's some of those pieces
that you see sometimes.
Not in this particular mission
so you don't see it here although you see a lot
of debris, but we've had stuff ejected
out of this SRB exhaust hole of substantial mass before.
A bolt came flying away and it is being ejected
out at a pretty good click.
Coming back up.
Coming back up toward the orbiter.
So ricocheting off the ground and then?
Whether it ricocheted off the ground
or was trapped inside a gap of the MLP deck
or something to that effect.
We never really knew where it came from.
We just knew in one mission and I recall STS-105 because I was
in the middle of that investigation.
Here's this bolt and you can clearly see a bolt head
and threads flying out of the exhaust hole.
We've seen welding rods pop up out of those little cracks
in the MLP deck where guys would be out there doing work
and the welding rod would roll away from them and drop
down in the crack and during launch it gets lifted up out
and blows around and the welding rod is just a spear.
Yeah.
And that's all part of what we do in this film review,
you know, we're not just looking at whether the vehicle,
whether this hold down post covers work correctly,
whether any debris coming off the debris containment system,
that canister did not -- but you're looking to see whether
or not you have a bolt flying out of there,
which isn't supposed to be flying out of there.
So did we miss a bolt, did we miss the inspections on these,
you know, welding rods
and should we increase inspections and stuff.
The environment out there is not intuitive.
You can easily take something that lays in the crack
of the MLP and now give it reverse energy,
which is totally counter intuitive.
Absolutely.
You can't imagine how much vibration
and acoustic energy is just happening every time you light
engines and SRBs.
And if you go back before that where you have starting
at the previous launch and all of the activity that goes
on on an MLP to rebuild it and build it back up
and then the stacking of the vehicle and the work
out at the pad and how many people go out there
and how many little cracks and crevices
and hiding places there are for debris,
it's all potential problems for the next launch.
So we're constantly after FOD and doing walk downs
and doing inspections and looking in all those cracks
and crevices best we can.
There's just so many of them, you know, things get missed.
There is quite a few walk downs that are done from mission
to mission and even with that quantity of walk downs
as Armando was just saying there are areas
where items can easily disappear on you
and you don't see it during the walk downs
but during the film review, as mentioned, you'll be surprised.
Every once in a while you'll identify something
that simply came from an area that was not able
to be identified before the mission started.
A lot of the guys that do film review are system guys
that work SRBs or external tank or facilities
and then you do pre-launch walk downs to the vehicle
and pre-launch walk downs of the pad and all of that, you know,
folks can see a bolt flying out of the hole and say, well,
how did you guys miss that bolt.
Well, we didn't miss it; the team didn't miss it
because it wasn't in any obvious spot.
Yeah.
But that's why you need to learn
that all these non obvious spots need to be clean also
because it wasn't just sitting there
and somebody missed his bolt.
It was in a crevice somewhere
where nobody thought this would ever come out.
Right. And it may not have been
since the last launch that it came out.
It may have been rattled and moved around for three years.
So every little work that's done at the pad
on the mobile launch platform or anything from same point
of debris you had to be careful because eventually sooner
or later that piece of debris is going to come flying
out of wherever it's located.
And that item could have originated in the VAB
when the vehicle was being stacked or whatever.
It just happened to be transported out.
Out at the MLP maintenance area.
Exactly. Yeah.
One of the things I want to cover is the relationship
with the ice debris team and the final inspection team is really
the ice debris team, right?
They do much more than that.
Yeah, the ice debris team is just a big name
for the entire team and process.
Right.
So the ice debris team includes a vast variety
of backgrounds whether it's program integration,
whether it's facility folks, whether it's external tank,
SRB engineers, orbiter, TPS engineering and all of that
and that team includes pre-launch walk downs,
T minus 8 hour countdown to walk down, final inspection team,
the control room guys that man the ice frost console.
Right.
And the image analysis team, post-launch inspections
of the pad, landing team, landing inspections.
It's a big picture of the ice team.
And the final inspection team
because of safety reasons you have a limited number of people
that can go out when the vehicle is fueled
and you're in stable replenish.
So the final inspection team is a small piece
of the whole ice debris team.
They're the eyes and ears for all of us
when they go out to the pad.
What is it 10 members?
Six or seven.
Okay. It could be up to eight.
Yeah.
Now it's six engineers and a safety.
It's gotten down to as low as six; five engineers and a safety
and then post Columbia we decided, hey,
let's agree on seven so we can have another set
of engineering eyes on the vehicle inspecting it.
We as the orbiter TPS group we do a walk
down the night before launch
after the rotating service structure is back we do the
final debris walk down where we just do the MLP surface,
the pad surface and the flame trenches.
We're the only group that actually walked most
of the flame trench and the pad surfaces looking for debris.
It's called the debris walk down.
The ice debris team is more involved everything
from the MLP up.
Right. And they do the whole fixed service structure
and the rotating service structure.
So how many of you guys are involved
with that, a typical walk down?
Well, from NASA TPS probably just one or two of us will go
on one walk down but then they've got maybe a couple
of USA engineers, a couple of quality, a couple of techs.
Probably a dozen people that go.
We're getting into the image of the plume a lot of stuff in it.
I mean we try to pick up everything, but the pad has been
around a long time and it has gone through a lot of, you know,
harsh conditions and launches is
and it's just disintegrating in our hands.
Yeah. It goes all the way back to the Apollo days, you know.
Yeah.
So, we've been picking up a lot of pad surface debris.
As I said, we keep doing these walk downs long enough I will
have the whole pad surface in my bag.
Yeah.
From picking up, you know, concrete pieces and rust pieces
and flame trench and it's interesting going
in the flame trench especially the south side that's the side
of the slope.
It's about a 45-degree slope maybe.
It's pretty steep but it's fun to walk down in there
and more fun to try to get back out again.
Imagery analysis isn't entirely about the vehicle's performance.
It's also about the facility and any anomaly
or off-nominal events associated with that.
It kind of reminds me some of the MLP cameras, you know,
by the time the booster clears it's just a big orange wash
and not much going on, but watching it
to the end is important because you can capture things
that you may not capture if you're just waiting
until there's no more view.
Right.
Like early on a com box came flying away, you know,
sure it was several seconds after liftoff
but the box shouldn't have been flying around.
Or the objects that comes flying right straight at you and right
through the quartz lens.
The important thing about looking at it all the way
to the end, you know, the guys always wonder why are we
watching this when it's all water
and plume and nothing else.
It's so you'll know what else is there.
This is one of the shots that we have always wished we had a
tower on the other side of the vehicle also
so that we could match this
because you get a good overall view of the vehicle
after it's been down in the mud if you will
and the high-dynamic area
and things flying around it whatever.
So, here now it's passing by, it's pretty much clear of any
of that kind of stuff and so you get a good overall view
of the vehicle and what its health is.
It would be really nice to have the same view on the other side.
Yeah, it is amazing.
It's a great shot of the orbiter -- and the ET and SRBs.
But you get a good shot of the forward surfaces,
the forward areas to make sure
that nothing has fallen down and hit it.
It's just a wonderful overall last view of the vehicle
because once you get past this long-range trackers just never
can see the forward edges of things anymore.
As umbilicals come by, you can see some of the ice frost
from the umbilicals coming off
and actually moving upward a little bit obviously
with the momentum of vehicle.
Forward motion.
Yeah. Frost on the engines, bells clearly seen.
All three of you guys have been on inspection out on the pad
which has got to be, just going to the cool aspect of it
for a minute, it's gotta be pretty sweet to be part
of that team, you know.
Oh, from my perspective, yeah,
it absolutely is a cool part of the job.
I grant you when you're doing a job, you really,
I for one never ever thought of it,
I never realized how cool it was when you're doing it.
Yeah.
Because you only have two hours max, two and a half hours
at the pad and doing a full walk down of the vehicle in two
and a half hours may seem like a lot of time
but it sure as heck isn't.
Well, and you've got people in your ear asking questions
and you're checking boxes and --
-- yeah. It is not a whole lot of time to sit there and go,
wow, this is a pretty cool view.
Yeah, yeah.
You just don't have that luxury.
You have the luxury afterwards of saying it's pretty neat
that I was out there, but when you're
out there you just don't have that luxury.
At least I don't remember ever having it.
The other side of it is the risk factor in being out there,
you know, you go through the training of escape from the pad
and what would you do and all of those kind of things,
but when you really think
about it you're standing arms length away from half a million
of gallons of liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen.
If something goes wrong, I mean there's not much chance
that you're really going to go anywhere.
Yeah, there's extraordinary hazard associated
with it, right?
I mean you've got a fully filled tank ready to go and -- --
the hypergols that are on board the vehicle.
Yeah. Tanks are pressurized.
It's ready to go.
I mean other than systems that are electrically safed,
like the pyrotechnics and the range safety system,
the vehicle is ready to fly.
Pressurized tanks on the orbiter, hypergolics,
obviously systems purge with nitrogen which is inert gas,
liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen.
I mean it is an alive vehicle or a live vehicle and ready to go.
While you're out there you have the potential for bad weather
to roll in, which was one of the cases on walk
down where we were forced to take shelter
around the fixed service structure and wait it out for
at least an hour or so.
Yeah, lightning warning.
Yeah, we had lightning warnings.
That's not where you want to be.
No. No.
About 20 feet from a fully fueled external tank
when you have a lightning alert going on.
And understand it's not just the external tank but all
of the piping and everything that carries all
of that hydrogen to, you know, through the orbiter
into the tank and, you know, we've had leaks of those.
We've had ruptures of those lines and, you know,
and that's a huge potentially explosive -- --
yeah, the fuel farms are massive out there, yeah.
just a quarter mile away.
Yeah.
But I mean right on side of the MLP we had one
of the hydrogen vent line rupture one time,
a joint in it broke and if these guys had been out there
at the pad, you know -- --
there could have been hydrogen flowing all
over the place with us out there.
Wow.
You know with all that said, again from my perspective,
I never really sat and looked at the gee whiz of it
and I never really was out there, I had never been
out there thinking of the danger of it.
I mean, I was aware that there was obviously a risk being
out there and a hazard, but I wasn't worried
about it and scared about it.
You have a job to do.
Right.
You have a job to do and you have limited time to do it
and everyone is depending on you to get the job done
and do it right and be able
to report the good things and the bad things.
The crew is expecting that from you,
the crew's families are expecting all of that from you,
to make sure that you can say that that vehicle is safe.
So you have a job to do and Armando is right you don't think
about those dangers and you don't think
about the gee whiz factor of it and you don't think
about those things until afterwards.
That's America's last wooden pole on the right there.
Yeah.
With my last walk down being the final mission
of Endeavour I went into knowing this is the last walk
down that I'll ever perform out there
and that's the last mission of Endeavour.
So I went into it with the cool factor in the back of my mind
but as these guys said you're under a constrained amount
of time and I was so focused on getting the particular shots
that I wanted to get with the telescope that we had set up
and being that originally it was to be a daylight mission
that had gone into nighttime, it added that more stress upon me
that I didn't realize until afterwards
that I never actually took a moment to reflect upon
that this is Endeavour's last launch while I was out there.
I was just so pushed in trying to get the best shots
that I could for everybody that was to be looking
at those photos during and after we got back from the pad area.
That brings up a point that I hadn't thought about.
It's a completely different animal doing final inspection
in darkness as opposed to light, right?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean even though you've got all those xenon lights aimed
at the vehicle it's still different at night
than it is in the daylight.
Oh, no doubt about it.
If you're taking pictures, you have to realize
that you'll be taking shots of at one point super bright area
and you might be taking a shot of an area that's in shadow
and darkness and you've gotta be careful with that.
When you're looking at it, you've gotta do the same thing.
Right. It's a whole different beast out there.
Now this next clip coming up in just a few moments it's going
to be one for the review team.
There was a fair amount of black debris coming
out of both the front and the back end of the flame trench
and SRB ignition and I certainly wasn't able to identify it
when I first looked at the clip so, Scott,
I know you were very familiar with STS-124.
Why don't you give us a few words
and explain what we're going to see here.
STS-124 had its unique issues associated
with it during launch.
Basically the flame trench area
on pad A liberated quite a few bricks as well as fondue fire
and there's some examples there coming
out on the south end you saw some but more
so to the north end you see a lot of bricks.
As Bob mentioned earlier, there was a lot of --
with the aid of imagery analysis our IR assets we were able
to see quite a bit of the bricks shooting off to the north.
There you see it coming up two dark ones.
Yeah.
Coming over to the left side coming out SSME.
A whole bunch -- -- oh, yeah, there's a whole bunch in there.
You start seeing multiple ones off to the right going north.
Easily, three or four that I can tell right away.
All that stuff circulating
around in the back is water bag material, right?
There seems to be a -- -- there's some of that too,
but some of it is throat plugged,
some of it is fire brick.
The throat plug probably gets up higher because it's lighter.
I don't think there was much evidence that said that any
of the fire brick got much above the deck level of the MLP.
Right. It all stayed low.
It may have been, you know, enough trajectory to get
over the fence and into the pond out there but it wasn't,
you know, it wasn't straight up in the air
because the MLP blocked anything
from being able to go straight up.
No doubt 124 and I don't know if it was the next one or what.
We had a significant number of bricks coming out.
We've had single bricks in the past come out
and go right through the fence.
I mean post launch you can see a hole in the fence or a dent
in the fence literally the chain-link fence would be have a
big dimple in it.
It is from pretty substantial impact.
Yeah.
After this particular mission and because
of the brick liberation, what Armando
and Bob were saying earlier, is an area we decided to go
with a couple of camera views
where we actually lowered the camera view
so we could see some activity taking place
under the MLP deck surface.
On the 195 foot level where the crew access arm is, you know,
final inspection team stops there
and this vent line that's routing hydrogen gas
from the external tank out to the flare stack.
That line is covered in frost on some launch days
when the final inspection team is out there on a hot day
on the 195 foot level you can get access to this vent line
and some of the guys if not all
of the guys are scraping some frost off the line
and putting it in the back of their suits just to try
to cool off a little bit.
It's just a perfect spot to do it.
Yeah, because it's so hot
up there you're looking for relief, right?
Absolutely.
That's a fantastic story.
Again, the final inspection team gets sent
out at T minus 3 hours once we're in stable replenish.
At the same time the close out crew is sent
out to begin the work to get ready for the astronaut crew.
So the close out crew, the guys in the white suits that are
in the -- oh, the guys with the signs.
The guys that did the sign.
They get sent out there also.
So when we're out there, when the teams are out there,
these guys are up on 195 foot level on the orbiter access arm
and in the ship getting the vehicle ready.
When the final inspection team at least I did it
and I'm sure Tom did it too,
when the final inspection team got to the 195 foot level,
we walk out on the arm and I would always go
into the white room and say my hellos to the team
and to the lead of the close out crew and just to let them know
that we're there or about to head down below you guys
so you don't need to worry about us getting in the basket.
So it's kind of one of the unofficial, you know,
sign offs between one team and the other.
A second handshake, yeah.
A handshake and then the beauty
of that is they always had cold water in there.
I don't know if you guys ever knew that.
So if you just had a good rapport with them, hey,
could I have a cup of cold water?
I'd stop in there and have a drink of cold water.
No, Armando never seemed to pass that bit of information
on during the last five,
six years of the final inspection team.
[laughter]
It's one of the benefits of being the lead.
[laughter] We'll have to check in with Tom
as to whether Armando passed that from one lead to the next.
I hope I didn't forget that.
[laughter] I think it might have stayed with the leads.
[laughter]
That is a good story.
So this is the first of one
of our remote tracking cameras in ascent.
As you can see, we're going to fly
through this exhaust burn-off plume if you will.
This is coming from one of the fuel farms, right?
It's coming from the flare stack that's burning the residual
hydrogen that's being vented off the external tank while it was
still on the ground.
That residual hydrogen
that flare stack burning you could actually feel the heat
from that on the final inspection team on the MLP deck
if the winds are just right.
That's how intense hydrogen is burning.
That's about halfway to the camera sites.
It's about an eighth of a mile.
Eighth of a mile.
Yeah, right.
It's no short distance.
So, yeah, it was pretty incredible
when the winds are right and you can feel the heat.
Guys, I'd like to touch a little bit
on the history of film review.
Bob and Armando, you two became involved with final inspection
and film analysis around the time of Challenger,
and I'd like to have you guys give me an idea of what it was
like back in those days technically to go
through the process of film review and how it's evolved
over the last couple of decades into what it is now.
For me from hiring on right
after Challenger there was a big change in film review
and analysis and acquisition post Challenger
because they did a lot of changes from post Challenger.
I used to do the review in a conference room on a pull
down screen that was in terrible shape and, you know,
it wasn't a good atmosphere for 20 guys to sit in.
So, they basically put a lot of money into, okay,
let's revamp the whole analysis system,
some new cameras were bought, better -- -- projection.
Projection capabilities for analysis.
These are film based now.
There's no digital at this point.
No, no. There's nothing digital in these days.
The only thing was analog videos.
Yeah. They back up the film, not really, you know,
29.97 frames per second wasn't interlaced, wasn't anything
like a backup to film.
Yeah.
But the film analysis part of it had a brand new lab
in the VAB here at Kennedy and it was as state of the art
as it got in the late 80s, you know, 1988 timeframe, '87,
'88 is when it was completed.
Still clunky compared to today.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
If you look back at some of the equipment,
you just shake your head as to oh, my God, you were doing this,
you know, this piece
of equipment the 35 millimeter projector, for instance,
that we had was a projector built by a gentleman
in California that worked in the movie studios and we asked him
for an analysis projector so it included stop frame capability
with bigger fan, he basically built it in his garage
in his own shop as a custom-built,
35 millimeter analysis projector.
That unit is still up there, right?
In the review room.
We moved it to another area but we still have it
but over the years it was starting time give us problems
after 15, 17 years.
That projector was very sensitive.
The control panel, if you didn't pause
between touching the keys the thing would just freeze
up on you and you had to power it down and wait a few minutes
and power back up and cross your fingers.
I mean it was that sensitive after years of operation
and then we'd have guys go out there
and periodically clean the unit of and, you know,
they were so careful because they knew very well
that this is a one off and to get it replaced was going
to be a significant amount of money.
Once you saw something and you identified it then you had
to mark the frames and if you wanted
to get motion things then you had to go scan, by hand,
on a flat panel scanner multiple frames to put together
into a video and, you know, it was very clunky
and very cumbersome and it took days to get through all
of the work you needed to do to do analysis.
Right, right.
Which for instance on the Columbia
when we saw the debris come off and strike the orbiter,
we pulled that film off the projector
and started scanning it, those 17 or 18 frames
that this event was covering and it took us,
I grant you that's all we did as part of the team while the rest
of the team did more the imagery
in the back rooms these guys were scanning these images
and putting it together into a clip so we can send it out
and that took several hours,
which nowadays scanning 17 frames
on a 35 millimeter film won't take you more
than a minute probably.
Right, yeah, it's going through the -- -- so it was tedious,
which is part of what we learned we needed
to have something better,
but prior to Columbia we're really more of scan it
so we can send it out to show folks what it is
that we're seeing.
Right.
We weren't doing that sophisticated of an analysis.
Certainly when Columbia happened everybody realized we have
to have this capability so that's
when post Columbia we had an influx of money.
They're overlooking one aspect that we had
to endure bringing back the older days
and that is we were lucky we could even hear each other think
much less talk because you had 16 millimeter projectors
that are running like Gatling guns [making sounds].
And there's so many of them we would split them up
and we'd have two running at the same time.
Really, so you had -- -- two screens.
We'd have 2, 16-millimeter projectors running
at the same time.
So here we are six or seven of us watching one film.
Of course if you were in the middle you kind of did both,
but you'd have comments going
for this film while people were making comments of this film,
two different films, going at the same time.
Projectors ratcheting away.
That was the normal way of operating.
Absolutely.
It seemed natural.
I don't know if normal was the right word
but that was the way the operation took place.
It was normal.
You were spoiled.
Luckily when I came along we advanced.
[laughter] Oh.
[laughter]
To where through the digital world we were able to do things
in a much more efficient way I believe Mr. Page just said
and definitely in a quicker and more efficient manner.
We'll leave it at that.
[laughter]
Here is yet another great tracking film.
Imagine tracking this thing in realtime and making it look
like it's absolutely still in the viewfinder.
This really highlights the skill of these guys, you know,
there's extraordinary pressure on them not
to have this thing fall out of frame.
We've been in film review before where we're sitting there
and they'll lose it and it's like, oh, you know,
you hear just the whole room goes oh, come on, get it back,
and it's amazing if they lose it some of them can get it back.
Yeah.
That's even more amazing, you know, it's amazing enough
to keep it, but then if something happens
and they do lose it, if they can get it back after not seeing it
and trying to, you know,
get it on the monitor I think that's even more incredible.
Yeah.
Now this is a case on 124 is if you look
at the forward area reaction control system is a piece
of Tyvek actually did tear and the piece is still left there
on one of the big oval thrusters.
You can see that bright white
that is Tyvek the cover tore and left that piece.
So that would have been considered a failure,
or an off nominal item, and it does eventually come off
but it's well past the time it was supposed to.
So something coming off that late could have, you know,
caused some small damage somewhere.
See it's flicking there a little bit.
Yeah, it's becoming more loose and it'll eventually,
yep, and there it went.
We don't see if it did anything, but you know, those are the kind
of things that then could come back to the OMS Pod leading it
to the OMS Pod because now it's going much faster
than they originally were supposed to come off
and it could have caused some very small,
minor damage on the OMS Pod.
Interesting thing during film review we have many discussions
about having checklists.
So we have a checklist during film analysis and it always came
down to no because the checklist focused you to look
for certain things which distracted you
from missing something that might be new
or might be different than was ever before.
So it takes a while to get used to being able to look
at the whole picture and being able to see the whole scene
and then what's wrong in the whole scene as opposed
to focusing in on certain areas.
Now there are times when there's so many things going
on that we've actually said, okay,
this group over here you look at this quadrant,
this group over here you look at that quadrant and try
to divide it up but most
of the time you just want an overall view of it
and see the things that are wrong.
This would have been the first flight of the Tyvek covers
and you'll see a couple of them don't come off
for well past their allotted time of 13 seconds;
one on the right side here, on the big oval one stays too long,
and then rotate and you'll see there's one
on the other side still there and I believe it ended
up coming off about 21 seconds and at that point we're really,
you know, going pretty fast and it could cause damage,
but it was something we learned, you know.
Once again we did a new design that did pretty good, you know,
they got most of it but they still had a few flaws
with it the two Tyveks didn't come off at the correct time.
And then the other thing we talked
about earlier was running the imagery backwards and the fact
that running it backwards gets you to see things
that you may not see when running it forward
because the eye is confused with the backward motion
of the vehicle which is not the normal thing that you would see
and so things that are moving opposite
that then just jump out at you.
You're right.
Your attention gets drawn to things
that you don't normally see.
Don't normally see and, you know, the part about focusing
in on certain parts of the imagery or not it's almost
by default that some folks would focus in on certain things
because the team is made up of system guys.
So there were external tank engineers, SRB engineers,
orbiter, TPS folks and so when you first started looking
at the imagery the first time you see a film
or particular film number the external tank guys are probably
focusing in on the external tank.
Right.
And the SRB guys are focusing in SRBs
and so you're getting a little bit of that already.
So as you go through the film like Bob said you go
through the film forward first and then you go through reverse
and somebody says, oh, I see something coming off this area,
the ET, SRB, okay, well, then you start seeing it
in reverse then other people focus in on it and try to figure
out what it is you're looking at and so it's kind of a,
it is part of a team effort of going back and forth and looking
at all these different, having all these different people look
at the whole image you get a pretty good 100% coverage
of the field of view you're looking at without having
to tell people go look at this particular image.
I mean it is just amazing the level of detail
that the film review can do.
Well, with that it has been a great pleasure and honor to sit
and talk with you and not only the film review process but some
of the final inspection processes that go on all
in preparation for shuttle launch and I'd like to thank you
for taking the time to sit and share your experiences
and your stories with the audiences
of the Ascent DVD Production.
Well, thank you.
It was my pleasure because I love to talk about it to anybody
from the minor little details to the big picture.
So I enjoyed this very much.
Thank you for inviting us over.
Yeah. I think that's true for all of us.
We love to talk about shuttle and space program.
It's what we love to do.
The imagery has and always will help any launch vehicle
in the future.
Imagery is important and we need to continue
to improve the imagery
and improve the analysis capabilities of the folks,
but more importantly we need to continue to understand
that we need to have assets to acquire images
of the vehicles as it's ascending.
It's a must; we have to have it whether it's film or video,
you know, certainly video is increasing in capability
so we could one day do without film but we have to have imagery
of ascent, of any vehicle.
We're visually oriented people and with exploration we need
to be able to document that and capture that to be able
to show it to everybody.
Unfortunately at this time period, it's only a handful
of men and women that get to take such a journey
and if it wasn't for that imagery capturing capability
and being able to let the rest of us see
that through their eyes, it would be a deficiency
and a shame for the rest of us if that didn't exist.
So. I'm all about imagery and I'm a sole supporter of that.
The skills that it takes to do this type of imagery,
the capabilities that require the infrastructure,
the equipment, all of that stuff can never be replaced.
You can't buy the quality of equipment today
that took these images, the trackers and the optics
and the people that operate them and the skills they have
that can't be replaced.
It's something that we need to keep alive knowing that not long
down the road we're going to be back in this spot whether it's
for commercial vehicles and verifying their performance
or it's our own heavy lift vehicle or what we're doing
in the future and all of this applies to the next destination.
If we're going to the moon, then we're lifting off of the moon
and we're, you know, we're going to need imagery and how
to handle imagery there or if Mars or asteroid
or wherever it is we're going to need imagery there.
We need to plan all of that ahead of time and it's the way
that we show the country, that we involve the country,
that we involve the young people and inspire them to reach out
and pursue beyond what their imagination is.
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