"Peter Stickney" wrote in message
news
In article ,
"Murray Anderson" writes:

What was this original 25 flight life based on? There doesn't seem to
have
been any experimental evidence of the susceptibility of the RCC panels
to
foam impact before the CAIB tests these past two months, so maybe the
100
flight limit was based on just as good evidence as the original 25.
Then anyone who objected would be forced to prove that it wasn't safe to
fly
the RCC on the 100th flight, using only evidence that wouldn't impeach
its
reliability on the 25th flight.

A best-guess conservative esitmate before anybody had gathered any
real experience. If yo sit down & figure it out, hamankind has about
30 +/- hours of aerodynamic flight experience in the hypersonic
region. A;; but about 30 minutes of that comes from Shuttle
re-entries. The assessment was changed as we gathered experience, to
match the behavior observed.


Do you have a reference for this, like a report or published paper used by
Nasa? For example they could have taken the leading edge panels off one of
the orbiters and done a complete set of non-destructive tests to determine
their state. Ideally they would have done destructive tests on some of the
panels too, but we know they didn't.

Murray Anderson

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster