Boeing helps fix space shuttle fault

BY A CORRESPONDENT
January 28, 2006
With the assistance of Boeing engineers, United Space Alliance (USA) and NASA have found a way to prevent gap fillers, thin spaces between the shuttle's heat resistant tiles, from protruding from the belly of the orbiter.

During the last space shuttle mission, it was found that two gap fillers were protruding an inch between the tiles and they had to be removed during a spacewalk. Analysis had showed that it could cause increased heating on the Thermal Protection System (TPS) when the orbiter re-enters the Earth's atmosphere from space.

After a long intensive study by Boeing, USA and NASA engineers found out the reason. "The first thing we looked at was the installation process," said Dan Bell, Boeing TPS subsystem manager. Since there were multiple possible causes for the protruding tiles, the cause was narrowed down to the installation process and they developed a new method.

Engineers are on their way to remove the gap fillers. NASA expects to remove them and replace on Atlantis and Discovery in the priority one region before the next flight.

"We ended up saving about 15 percent of those gap fillers that were installed with the old process, while all others in our first priority region were replaced," said Bell.

The priority one region will have almost 3000 gap fillers. Bell also said that they would check and replace gap fillers if needed.