That funny orange thing hanging off the bottom of the shuttle during launches turns out to be a key element in how quickly we could restart the program if certain United States legislators had their way.
It’s called the external tank, and it will be the block to any efforts to extend the space shuttle program — including this morning’s bipartisan effort headlined by Bill Posey (R-Fla) and Suzanne Kosmos (D-Fla), who are concerned about the number of contractor jobs that will be lost in their districts when the shuttle program ends.
Think of the external tank as the equivalent of where you get the gas in your car. Inside, tens of thousands of pounds of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen combine to give the shuttle energy to push into space during the first two minutes of a launch. After the fuel is exhausted, the tank blows off the shuttle and hits the atmosphere, where most of the tank disintegrates, with the remaining bits falling into the ocean.
It’s an essential part of the shuttle’s launch system. And the thing is, the final external tank is already in production. It’s not so easy to restart the lines. As reported in Space Politics this morning, NASA estimates it would take two to three years to get the line moving again.
“That’s just the way it is, folks, that’s the way it is because it takes us that long to build an external tank,” said David Radzanowski, deputy associate administrator for program intergration in the Space Operations Mission Directorate, which oversees the direction of NASA’s human spaceflight programs.
A 2002 NASA Q&A webcast went into a little more detail about what the production entails:
It takes months, literally, to make each of the sections and that have to be welded together. Each time there is a weld there’s are a whole lot of inspections. Then we stack up the weldings, and eventually we have it all added up to a bare aluminum External Tank. Then we have to add foam to the outside, and that is another process that takes a long time. It takes months and months; we can’t just call up and order one for next week.
Read more about the external tank here, at manufacturer Lockheed Martin’s web site.
