Monday, February 5, 2018

PRESIDENT Adam Schiff

There must be many people thinking about who will be the next president.

My choice would  be Adam Schiff, a man of impeccable qualifications, smart, experienced, thoughtful, well educated, the right age, thoroughly likable. He would trounce "little" Donald in the 2020 election.

MISSILE FAILURES

Excerpt from book, “A Pig In The Rumble Seat,” by Edward Hujsak. Edited
A serious aspect of missile engineering, failure analysis, that can weigh heavily  on the practicing engineer, is how well they understand the system and how various parts function, and a good measure of thoughtfulness, intuition, patience, and just plain horse sense. There is little training for this, and often there is no op- portunity for forensic analysis, as the pieces lie at the bottom of the ocean. If you are lucky, telemetry sent back from the flight will carry useful evidence. Even then, it may be a matter of interpretation.
I was Assistant Chief Engineer for mechanical design for a time on the Atlas Weapon’s System Program. It was a very bad time for the program, as the missile experienced numerous failures at the instance of booster engine staging. The pres
sure to get it fixed was considerable, even to the extent that the Aerospace Division, Ramo.Wooldrige and AF Space Division began laying plans for a replacement vehicle, Titan II.
Our chief engineer, Gene Armstrong, was frantic. He had convinced the AF Major
who was stationed at General Dynamics that the situation called for drastic measures. Together they cooked up a plan to “harden” the missile propulsion system
by replacing all aluminum propellant lines with stainless steel ones. They calledit “The Shotgun Program” and placed me in charge of a crew assembled to do the design and manufacturing work. In due time, and at considerable expense, an “F’
missile was refitted and readied for launch. To Armstrong’s intense disappoint- ment, a failure at staging not unlike the previous ones occurred again.The Shotgun Program was an embarrassing shot in the dark, riding on prayers that one of the changes would hit the mark.
A flight failure immediately gets front burner attention. While awaiting some sense of order to develop for the next line of action, I decided to have an independent go at analysis, on the idea that there may be something in the flight telemetry traces that had eluded our flight dynamics engineers. One night, with assistance from an engineer in Telemetry, I gathered up the vibration telemetry traces and pored over them, placing them side by side for comparison. There should be nothing of interest in the successful flights. Hello. Comparing successful flights recordings with failed ones showed an anomaly in the form of a short. sharp “buzz,” in the failed flights at the instance of booster cutoff and thrust section separation. Gradually, the picture began to unfold. Early the next morning I spoke with Gene Armstrong, who fortu- nately was a good listener. The conversation ran something like this, as I laid out the traces, side by side, before him.
“These are explosions” I said.

“Explosiosns? How so? Bosster engine shuts down, then the thrust section separates and slides down the rails. What’s to explode? Besides, witout containment, damage from an altitude explosion is pretty unlikely.”
“There is containment,” I said, then proceeded to explain further. “Multiple events occur in the first millisecond or so during separation, mainly the separation of electrical and fluid connections to the upper stage. I believe that we lucked out with the “D” series. Changes were made in subsequent models that causes a near predictable failure..”
“Go on,”
“Flow in the propellant feed lines to the pumps is cut off at booster separation by valves that close automaticaly. But a situation exists where a large amount of propellant remains in the pumps and engine feed lines. This propellant is still at sea level vapor pressure and spurts out in all directions at the instant of separation. The vapors mix. There is plenty of time for ignition by generators and turbines in a contained space. A key factor is that changes were made in locating the propellant line 
and they doubled in number on the E and F models. Gene, I believe we can fix the problem.”
“Not another shotgun approach, I hope. I need a solution the change board will approve.”
“Simple valves installed in the booster suction lines that close as the thrust section drops away should do the job.”
To sum it up, we got change board approval the following day. Jerry Nuding, a fine engineer, was assigned to do the design. In a matter of a few weeks we had an F missile refitted with shutoff valves. The flight was successful, with no sign of a  suspected explosion. The entire E and F ICBM fleet was then modified and no further staging failures occurred.