NASA auditors criticize spacesuit development

Despite spending nearly $200 million on spacesuit development over the last eight years, NASA runs the risk of not having a next-generation spacesuit ready for testing on the International Space Station before the station is retired, the agency’s auditors warned.

In an April 26 report, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) also warned that NASA’s declining current inventory of spacesuits, developed in the 1970s, pose a risk to continued operations of the ISS, particularly if its life is extended to the late 2020s.

Those current spacesuits, formally known as Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs), are used for spacewalks outside the ISS. A key element of the suit is its Primary Life Support System (PLSS), the backpack-like structure that houses equipment to regulate levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide within the suit and control its temperature.

NASA built 18 PLSS units, but only 11 remain available for use today. Of those 11, four are considered flight-ready today and are on the ISS, with the other seven in various stages of disassembly or testing on the ground.

The OIG report warned that further losses of PLSS units, either from launch failures or because of irreparable damage, could jeopardize NASA’s ability to perform spacewalks outside the station, which in turn could affect station maintenance. The agency said that the current supply of spacesuits should be sufficient to support station operations, but auditors were not convinced.

“NASA will be challenged to continue to support the EVA needs of the ISS with the current fleet of EMUs through 2024 — a challenge that will escalate significantly if Station operations are extended to 2028,” the report concluded.

NASA has ruled out building additional PLSS units, citing a cost as high as $250 million per unit given their old technology. Instead, NASA has worked on new spacesuit designs, including those that could support future missions beyond Earth orbit. Those efforts, though, have suffered a series of problems, according to the OIG report.

Auditors were particularly critical of the Constellation Space Suit System program, which started with a 2009 contract to Oceaneering International to develop a spacesuit as part of the Constellation exploration program. NASA kept that contract active until January 2016 despite the cancellation of the overall Constellation program in 2010, spending a total of $135.6 million on it, including $80.8 million after NASA cancelled Constellation.

The report criticized NASA for extending the program, with a new focus on developing spacesuit technologies, in part because it duplicated work on another NASA effort, the Advanced Space Suit Project. Technologies being developed by that project were often more advanced than those being developed simultaneously by the Constellation suit program, auditors found, even though NASA spent nearly three times as much on the Constellation contract.

The Advanced Space Suit Project, though, has had issues of its own, including a lack of defined destinations for NASA exploration missions that affect spacesuit design as well as “competing funding priorities” that meant that the project was funded for only half of the 2016 fiscal year.

That project is now working on a spacesuit design known as an Exploration EMU, or xEMU, that will start with a prototype called xEMU Lite to be tested on the ISS. Current schedules call for that suit to be delivered to the station in 2023 for testing. “This schedule leaves only one year for testing before the Station’s planned 2024 retirement,” the report stated, but added that “extending ISS operations beyond 2024 would alleviate this schedule pressure.”

A third program, the Orion Crew Survival Suit, is a pressure suit designed for use in the Orion spacecraft and is based on the Advanced Crew Escape System suits used during the shuttle program. That program, too, is facing schedule pressures, with a delivery of the suits currently planned just five months before the current launch date for the first crewed Orion mission in August 2021. That date, though, may be delayed, based on a recent separate OIG review of NASA’s exploration programs.

NASA has spent nearly $200 million on those three next-generation spacesuit programs. “Despite this investment, the Agency remains years away from having a flight-ready spacesuit capable of replacing the EMU or suitable for EVA use on future exploration missions,” the report concluded.

Auditors made several recommendations to NASA, including creating a formal plan for developing a next-generation spacesuit, performing a trade study comparing maintaining the current EMU spacesuits versus developing a new one, and apply lessons learned from existing spacesuit efforts to new designs. NASA accepted all three recommendations, and plans to have a spacesuit development plan completed by the end of September.

Source: http://spacenews.com

Titanic sank due to enormous uncontrollable fire, not iceberg, experts claim

The sinking of the RMS Titanic may have been caused by an enormous fire on board, not by hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic, experts have claimed, as new evidence has been published to support the theory.

More than 1,500 passengers lost their lives when the Titanic sank on route to New York from Southampton in April 1912.

While the cause of the disaster has long been attributed to the iceberg, fresh evidence has surfaced of a fire in the ship’s hull, which researchers say burned unnoticed for almost three weeks leading up to the collision.

While experts have previously acknowledged the theory of a fire on board, new analysis of rarely seen photographs has prompted researchers to blame the fire as the primary cause of the ship’s demise.

Journalist Senan Molony, who has spent more than 30 years researching the sinking of the Titanic, studied photographs taken by the ship’s chief electrical engineers before it left Belfast shipyard.

Mr Maloney said he was able to identify 30ft-long black marks along the front right-hand side of the hull, just behind where the ship’s lining was pierced by the iceberg.

He said: “We are looking at the exact area where the iceberg stuck, and we appear to have a weakness or damage to the hull in that specific place, before she even left Belfast”.

Experts subsequently confirmed the marks were likely to have been caused by a fire started in a three-storey high fuel store behind one of the ship’s boiler rooms.

A team of 12 men attempted to put out the flames, but it was too large to control, reaching temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius.

Subsequently, when the Titanic struck ice, the steel hull was weak enough for the ship’s lining to be torn open.

Officers on board were reportedly under strict instruction from J Bruce Ismay, president of the company that built the titanic, not to mention the fire to any of the ship’s 2,500 passengers.

Presenting his research in a Channel 4 documentary, Titanic: The New Evidence, broadcast on New Year’s Day, Mr Maloney also claims the ship was reversed into its berth in Southampton to prevent passengers from seeing damage made to the side of the ship by the on-going fire.

Mr Molony said: “The official Titanic inquiry branded [the sinking] as an act of God. This isn’t a simple story of colliding with an iceberg and sinking.

“It’s a perfect storm ox extraordinary factors coming together: fire, ice and criminal negligence.

“Nobody has investigated these marks before. It totally changes the narrative. We have metallurgy experts telling us that when you get that level of temperature against steel it makes it brittle, and reduces its strength by up to 75 per cent.

“The fire was known about, but it was played down. She should never have been put to sea.”

In 2008, Ray Boston, an expert with more than 20 years of research into the Titanic’s journey, said he believed the coal fire began during speed trials as much as 10 days prior to the ship leaving Southampton.

He said the fire had potential to cause “serious explosions” below decks before it would reach New York.

An inquiry into the disaster, presented to Parliament in 1912, described the ship as travelling at “high speed” through dangerous icy waters, giving the crew little opportunity to avoid the fatal collision.

Source: www.msn.com