ET Foam Honed
Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey
Space Development Conference, where members of the National Space
Society and fellow travelers meet. Of course I had to visit the
Alabama Space and Rocket Center, home of Space Camp, a Saturn V, and
other wonders.
The weirdest thing I saw was their Shuttle. They have created a
complete launch assembly by mounting a test (non-flying) Shuttle
Orbiter, the *Pathfinder*, on a big orange External Tank, and
strapping Solid Rocket Boosters to it. (Trivia buffs tell me these
are "filament-wound" SRBs, atype which also never flew.)
The whole thing is mounted on tall concrete pylons slanting into the
sky, so you can walk underneath the belly of it and gawk. It's
orbiter-on-top, by the way, the way you think it *ought* to look,
rather than orbiter-on-bottom the way it actually flies into space.
As Josh Hopkins (jbh5...@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu) and I strolled around it,
I looked closely at the external tank and noticed something strange.
The tank is covered with a few inches of orange insulating foam. The
foam had a lot of little dark marks on it, about a centimeter long.
At first I thought the damage must come from birds pecking at the tank
or something. But how would birds attack the underside of a big
cylinder with nowhere to perch?
Gradually I realized that the scars were pennies! People fling
pennies into the foam, like ninjas hurling shuriken, and if they're
moving fast enough they stick. In a few places I could see ballpoint
pens and screwdrivers sticking out of the ET. I was looking at
hundreds of pennies embedded in the foam of the tank. Kind of a
high-tech wishing well.
As I told Josh, I guess this monument symbolizes NASA's recipe for a
space program:
Take one Shuttle, then keep throwing money at it.
--
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