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The Chilling Truth About NASA And The Space Shuttle
Interview With Richard C. Cook, Former NASA Analyst, 26 June 2008
Part II of II
Audio Interview
Ken: Do you think that "O" rings were the cause of any other shuttle disasters or near disasters? Richard C. Cook: Yeah. Well let me take that back. You say near disasters. There were incidents before Challenger where you had distress that could have affected the vehicle, but didn't. Again the January 1985 launch had four "O" rings that were eroded by flames, that quite possible could have caused a disaster if it had been worse, but it did not. There was also an incident where the lining on the nozzle of a solid rocket booster was almost burned all the way through, because of impurities in the nozzle lining. That was judged to be seconds away from disaster by the NASA officials who examined it. The NASA and the contract officials who examined it afterwards. The "O" rings have shown signs of potentially catastrophic problems up until the Challenger disaster, but they did not cause the disaster. The other catastrophic event was the 2003 destruction of Columbia. It was not due to an "O" ring problem, or a solid rocket booster problem. That was due to a burn through of the fuselage that occurred after the heat resistant tiles were damaged. Is it strange that the external fuel tanks survived the Challenger destruction, while the shuttle didn't? Richard C. Cook: You mean the solid rocket boosters? Ken: Yeah. Richard C. Cook: The external tank was the part that initially broke up. The boosters, when they broke loose of the configuration, they were attached by struts to the external tank. They swung around and the tank came apart and that was the huge fireball that you saw in the photographs. The shuttle itself, the vehicle, broke up into pieces, but the crew cabin came out of it intact. The crew cabin containing the members of the crew fell all the way to the surface of the ocean and shattered at that point. The solid rocked boosters themselves did continue in flight until they were blown up by the person that was in charge of range safety. Ken: Well we have been talking about ejection seats on the shuttle and basically, I was wondering why couldn't they have designed a detachable crew cabin that would have come down with large parachutes? Richard C. Cook: Some people say they could have and should have. That is a controversial point, but there were people that were saying that was what they should have designed into it and afterwards it had a summary design done to it, after the Challenger disaster, they put in place a mechanism where the astronauts would slide down a pole and parachute out individually. It was always controversial as to whether something the size of the shuttle orbiter, whether you could have the enormous crew cabin, which they do have, eject intact, even though with the Challenger disaster itself, it did come out in a unit? It is a very controversial point. The Challenger and the space shuttle initially was the only space vehicle ever designed that did not have a primary ejection capability from the launch pad, in the early stages of the launch. Ken: The Challenger disaster was in 1986. Is the space shuttle any safer today than it was then? Richard C. Cook: The space shuttle is and always has been extremely complex and very hazardous and it still has features that are very, very dangerous. The main one is the tile system underneath the vehicle. that is to protect the orbiter when it come back in from space. Even to this day, NASA does not feel that they have a completely safe vehicle to work with and I believe that this is one of the reasons that the space shuttle is being phased out. The space shuttle is not scheduled to fly after the year 2010. Please correct me if I am wrong, but most of the fuel the shuttle uses, is used up getting into orbit. Wouldn't it have been safer and allowed the shuttle to be much lighter if it were launched high up in the atmosphere, as on the back of a high flying plane, or dropped from under one like some of the early X-Planes? Richard C. Cook: It would have been safer perhaps, but they would not have been able to come anywhere near the size of the vehicle, if they had tried to do that. They could not have built in enough fuel to get it into orbit because the big fuel requirement is to get the vehicle circling the earth where it balances the gravity pull of earth, but by the forward trajectory and in order to do that you need a tremendous amount of thrust at some point and the smaller the vehicle the easier it is to get that thrust. A big vehicle like Challenger, you need to package somewhere an enormous amount of fuel. So again it goes back to the size and the performance requirements. Building that huge vehicle, I mean that thing is enormous. and it is extremely heavy and once you have decided to build something that big and again the reason that they did so was to launch military satellites, you pretty much locked yourself into a situation where you have got tremendous safety problems in a manned space environment. People don't really understand that when you go from an un manned rocket to an manned system, what a tremendous burden you have created for yourself. Not just in terms of safety, but in terms of the size and the weight of the safety systems.
Russian Shuttle Buran
Do you think that we have something better than the space shuttle, but it is being used by the military and is secret? Richard C. Cook: Well there are rumors that is so. There were plans going back into the Reagan administration days, maybe even earlier, to build a military space plane. I have heard and other people and I am sure that you have, that such a space plane exists with a high performance propulsion system and that it has even been used. I can not verify that, I do not have personal knowledge of that. That is what the rumors are. Ken: If you had to decide whether the space shuttle was a practical craft for sending people and objects into orbit, what would your decision be? Richard C. Cook: I think that my decision, which of course is that of a layman, not a technical engineer, but the technical engineers who designed a smaller, safer shuttle back in the 1970s and who were extremely disappointed when the choice was made to go with the high performance military style vehicle, I think that they were the ones who were right. That should have been the decision at that time.
Russian Shuttle Riding Piggyback
Is it true that a shuttle launch has a one in two hundred chance of ending up in a disaster? Richard C. Cook: That pretty much has been the statistics, maybe even a little bit more than that. Ken: Do you think that it is possible that the Challenger disaster was caused by some outside force. There are stories circulating on the Internet that it might have been hit by a laser or sabotage was performed on it? Richard C. Cook: Yeah, I have seen all those reports and there is absolutely no data to support that. None what so ever. It is just speculation and anyone that puts forth a theory like that has got to come up with data. That is the one part of the commissions investigation that we can have confidence in. If you read the technical reports you can see that. In fact they pulled up off of the ocean bottom, that section of the solid rocket booster that had been burned through. I characterize it in my book as big enough for a man to crawl through. It is just an enormous. hole in the side of the solid rocket booster and if you combine that with the photographs and the telemetry, that is what happened to Challenger. There was no external sabotage. Does the shuttle have any advantages over a rocket? Richard C. Cook: Well, yes it does. The initial concept of a reusable vehicle that has multiple uses at low earth orbit. For example the launching that they did of the Hubble Space Telescope and the subsequent repairs that were done on the Space Telescope. I think it had a lot of potential, a lot of value that has been contributed and potentially could have been contributed. Again, the shuttle as designed was so big, so sensitive, so complex that much more care should have been taken with it, than NASA was able to do. Ken: If I wanted to use the shuttle to send cargo into space, how much more expensive would it be, by the pound, than a conventional rocket? Richard C. Cook: Well I don't know what the actual ratio is, but I expect that has been calculated. If you just remember that when you are sending a manned space vehicle into space you have got to have all of the systems to protect human life. You have to have the breathing system, the water system, the sewage system. You have got to have additional redundancy, you can not accept any kind of a catastrophic accident if you are doing it properly, so you are going to have several times the cost added to a vehicle, just because it is manned. Ken: Did NASA really believe it, when they said that they were developing a reusable shuttle, because it would allow us to put stuff and people into space more cheaply? Richard C. Cook: The numbers that were generated were highly inflated. I fault the Nixon administration for that. They had some studies done that I think were disingenuous studies. They were based upon made up numbers and when James Beggs came into office around 1981, to begin to actually fly the shuttle, he hired a former air force man named Robert Bowman, to do a study of what actually could be expected of the shuttle. I think Bowman's figures were that the shuttle could be launched maybe 25% of what was projected originally, for a cost that was actually many times what the original projected cost was. I do believe that numbers were invented, or to be charitable, that best case scenarios were selected, in order to sell the shuttle to congress.
Shuttle Columbia
Is the shuttle capable of being fitted with any weapons and used offensively or defensively? Richard C. Cook: The shuttle is not really a military weapons system as much as it is, what I call, a test platform. There was never any intention to use the shuttle as a military attack weapon. What I wrote about and what I found to be the flaw in the system was that the shuttle was going to fly a lot of military missions where lasers, particle generators and other types of weaponry were going to be tested. It was going to be a test system, or a test platform for the Strategic Defense Initiative, the so called Star Wars Program. As experts pointed out, even at the time, the shuttle itself is so vulnerable that it has no defensive protection what so ever. It has no capability of being loaded with any kind of serious weaponry. It never would have been practical that the shuttle itself would have been a military weapon. Ken: A few years ago, NASA talked about a recent discovery called aerogel. It is a substance that is extremely light, yet it supposedly makes a great heat shield. Have you heard about this? Richard C. Cook: No, actually I haven't. Ken: Richard C. Cook: Yes, I have heard about that and if you think about the technology on the shuttle, it is extremely primitive. None of the systems today are even up to date. If you even think further about the whole idea of putting beings on the end of an enormous. explosion, the way current technology is used, you see that it is extremely dangerous, extremely primitive and that we should get away from that as soon as we can. You have various experiments that are going on with antigravity for example and you have suggestions coming out that we could be seeing on some future date, maybe even a foreseeable date, rocketry that does not use explosive technology. Certainly that is the way to go in the future. Ken: Richard C. Cook: I think that a lot of it probably has to do with cost. You have the shuttle orbiters that have been in use for many years. You would have to redesign the vehicle and in order to do that you would have to invest an enormous amount of money and NASA has decided that rather than improve the shuttle type system, to abandon it and go back to the one shot capsules, which they are now developing in order to go back to the moon. It is a choice of priorities, how much money do you have, what can you do? Think about the budget of NASA. The budget of NASA is approximately sixteen billion dollars per year. We are talking about expenditures on the Iraq war, right now, approaching a trillion dollars. That is where the United States is putting it's priorities, not into the space program.
Columbia's First Launch
Ken: Well as long as you brought the budget up, is it true that most of NASA's budget doesn't go for space exploration, but for the shuttle and the International Space Station? Richard C. Cook: Well it has always been the case and that has been one of the major controversies at NASA, but I am going way back into the 1970s. When the shuttle itself was proposed, in the 1970s, the whole space science community was very strongly opposed to it. They did not want a space shuttle, because they thought that the way the manned space program was being designed, that it was going to take money that was needed away from all the other unmanned, exploratory ventures. Of course that is what has happened. Today, with the new Lunar, Mars manned program that has been announced, the same thing is happening. Money is being taken away from all other NASA programs, to the point, where I am told, that there are actual scientists in NASA that don't have work to do anymore, because their projects have been taken away in order to fund the next phase of the manned space program. This controversy between the enormous cost of manned space exploration versus the relative low cost of unmanned space exploration, that is a controversy that has been going on in NASA for decades. The decision has always been on the side of the manned space program, which of course is the much more spectacular and visible program. Ken: Was the shuttle rushed through the design stage just so we could get into space with a reusable vehicle? Richard C. Cook: It was done as expeditiously as they could, even though it was the most expensive space vehicle ever designed. It took the longest to develop of any space vehicle ever designed. There were numerous delays and numerous cost overruns, before they finally launched it in 1981. You can't really say it was rushed through, even though given the complexity of the technology there were short cuts taken, certainly. They took more time doing it than they ever had before, because it was so complex and so expensive. Even by doing it, they cut corners. Ken: Richard C. Cook: Oh yes, way, way more. It is extremely expensive and the main reusability features are the orbiter itself. That thing has to be refurbished ever time there is a new launch and that costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time.The solid rocket boosters themselves never achieved the level of reusability that they intended to, because they were always losing slight segments for various reasons. The reusability feature itself, it is a money saver in the long run and that is the reason that they designed it. Ken: Tell us about the Personal Egress Air Packs or PEAPs that were aboard the shuttle and why three of them were found to have been used on the Challenger? Richard C. Cook: The initial reports that came after the Challenger disaster, from the NASA public relations officials, were that the astronauts had all died in the explosion. Later it was disclosed that this was not true. In fact there was not really an explosion per se, when Challenger broke up, it was an ignition of the external tank's fuel, the hydrogen and liquid oxygen that made a fireball. The vehicle itself did not explode from the inside and so the crew cabin escaped intact. and fell to the ocean's surface. During this fall there has been a lot of speculation, although nothing definitive was ever released by NASA, as to whether the astronauts were still alive during the fall to the ocean's surface, or whether they were even conscious. The fact was discovered later that three of the air packs, the emergency air packs were activated, would indicate that they were alive, some of them alive and conscious during the fall to the surface of the ocean. Death very likely occurred with the impact with the surface of the ocean, or even as some people have suggested, from drowning in the ocean. The astronauts themselves were alive during the fall to the ocean floor.
Crew Of Columbia Salutes President Reagan
Isn't it true that NASA had considered devices for crew escape during development, but felt that it was unnecessary due to the expected high reliability? Richard C. Cook: Well that was the reason that they gave. I don't really believe that. They claimed that the shuttle would be so reliable as to preclude the need for any kind of crew escape. NASA itself was running surveys that showed a relatively high possibility of a catastrophic accident, even to the point of one study that predicted a one in thirty five failure rate of the solid rocket boosters themselves. I think it was more of a public relations, or even a propaganda tool, because the real reason that they didn't put the escape systems in was cost and technical difficulty. Ken: Didn't they again consider escape devices after the Challenger disaster and still didn't install any? Richard C. Cook: They did consider them and what they ended up doing was putting in place this pole system, where the astronauts would slide down a pole that was stuck out of the crew cabin and then parachute down. Now this could not be done during the early launch phase. This would be only during the phase where the astronauts would be in flight over the Atlantic Ocean, during that one particular segment. NASA rejected any options at that time for an actual crew escape capsule. or for the crew cabin to become detached. Ken: Richard C. Cook: NASA went into a complete public relations lock down. They confiscated physically, the film and video that had been shot of the launch. They took that away from the news people that were there at the site. NASA knew, they were in the control area of the Kennedy Space Center that afternoon, looking at videos of the launch and they were seeing the signs of the solid rocket boosters with those flame leaks coming out of it that day. The word went out immediately that nobody at NASA was to be talking about anything, anything that they had seen, anything that was going on. They were putting out these press stories that as far as they knew there was no evident reason at the launch and that they were going to launch a long term investigation that maybe weeks and months later would begin to produce some kind of information. There was a cover up being put into place. At NASA headquarters we were told not to talk to the press about anything. Ken: How is it that private companies are developing space vehicles that only cost a few million dollars, when NASA had to spend billions to accomplish this? Richard C. Cook: The private space companies are not really doing much more than space tourism. They are not even orbital flights, where you are shot up into space into a trajectory the way Alan Shepard did when he was the first U.S. man in space. What the private companies are doing is pretty much replicating systems and technology that is thirty and forty years old. It is not that hard to do anymore. Ariane , for example, the European Space Agency system, has a tremendous positive launch rate by using very basic, very simple technology. Just arcing someone just above the atmosphere into what is called space in this day and age, is not that hard to do. Ken: If you were the head of NASA, what changes would you make in the way that funds are spent? Richard C. Cook: Well that is a really good question. My own inclination is to focus much more on space science and on economic development of space. For example, the whole idea of using giant solar collectors in order to generate electricity in space. The idea of mining the asteroid belt, or Moon. To me these are much more promising. I think the whole idea of space colonization, sending a manned trip to Mars, that sort of thing, I think that this is pretty much public relations by NASA. I think a lot of it is to demonstrate a sort of military superiority that I don't think is necessary. I think that we should be working with other nations, with international cooperation, with Russia, with China, with the European Space Agency, to develop space science and space economic development a lot more than we are doing right now. Ken: Do you believe that the huge sums of money that were supposedly spent on the X-33, a vehicle that was intended to replace the space shuttle but failed, were really spent on that project, or could it have been a front for something else? (1.33 billion) Richard C. Cook: Well you know, it is always possible. They speak of a black budget where the funding for various agencies are diverted into secret projects. I do expect that this is going on, but I don't really have any first hand information about that. Ken: There has been a persistent rumor that NASA has a space station that is hidden from view? This has been cited in some books like Dark Mission by Hogeland and Barra. Do you think that this is true? Richard C. Cook: I have seen no solid information that this is true. This type of speculation is interesting. I think that probably there are projects going on that are not known, for instance we mentioned before the military space plane. Until you see some solid data on these types of things or until you get an eye witness who is a whistle blower and comes and tells you exactly what is going on, the speculation doesn't do a whole lot of good. Now we do have some eyewitness commentary that has come out on the military space plane, that I think is very interesting. Until you have this kind of testimony or scientific evidence, it is very difficult to just speculate about it. Ken: By the end of 2010, our government will have spent over 174 Billion dollars on our space shuttles. Does this sound like we have lost our minds. Do you think that this is where all that money really went? Richard C. Cook: I think that, again I don't know exactly where all of the money went, those kinds of things are certainly grounds for speculation, particularly since you can't ever get a straight answer out of congress, because they're the ones that are supposed to have oversight. Of course they are all sworn to secrecy as well, about things like this. I do believe in the space program. I am a very strong proponent of the U.S. space program, of man in space. I think that it has changed our consciousness of the world we live in, of the solar system, of the universe. I think that it has been a tremendous technical and human achievement. I think that it has been a great stimulus to industry, to science and technology. In general I support the space program, but I support a space program that is in line with NASA's original objective, which was a space program that is done in peace, which is done for the benefit of all mankind, it is done for scientific and exploration purposes. I am not in favor of any attempt by the United States, or any other country to achieve space dominance, or military dominance in space. I think that discoveries that are made in the space program, a lot of it should be shared with people, with industry, with other nations and used for the advancement of all people. Ken: Is there anything that you would like to add, before we end this interview? Richard C. Cook: I greatly appreciate being able to talk to you, I think that these are really important issues. They don't get a lot of play. I do have a new article coming out, it is in EurasiaCritic Magazine, where I was asked if there was a new space race to the moon and I said yes there certainly is. Ken: Yes there certainly is. Richard C. Cook: People might want to take a look at that when it comes out? I believe it is the July issue. I think the the space program now, when you have other players coming on to the scene like China, like India, you have a resurgent Russian space program. I think that things could become very interesting, but I certainly hope that it goes into peaceful directions and not just a military race for space dominance. Ken: Don't we all. At this point I would like to thank you very much for such an interesting interview and I wish you well in your future endeavors and I believe that the American public owes you a debt of gratitude. |
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