Guided tour of the Atlantis Space Shuttle orbiter at Kennedy Space Center, 3 March 2020
Channel: Angela Brett
Date: 2020-03-18

For maximum effect, watch this immediately after the preshow that those people coming through the door in the beginning just saw. It’s really well done: https://youtu.be/B7ZCkgjcXis

Safety advisory: Take your right hand, and put it under your chin (actual safety advisory: don’t touch your face; your hands are filthy and your face is full of holes), because what you see today, your chin will fall to the ground and cause an injury. Recovering sixth-grader William [I couldn’t hear his last name) shows us OV-104, a.k.a. the Orbiter Vehicle (that’s what the OV stands for) Atlantis (the term ‘Space Shuttle’ technically refers to the entire assembly of orbiter, external fuel tank, and solid rocket boosters.) All of the orbiters were named after sailing ships, and Atlantis was named after a research vessel. The 1 at the beginning of the second part of the designation means it was designed for spaceflight rather than a test article that would be tested but not flown. OV-101 is that world-famous orbiter The Constitution (later renamed Enterprise.) OV-099, Challenger, was originally designed to be a test article, but it was decided that it was easier to turn Challenger into a flightworthy orbiter than Enterprise, so Challenger ended up going to space and Enterprise didn’t. OV-102 was the first orbiter to launch, in April 1981, Columbia. OV-103 was Discovery, and OV-104 (this one, Atlantis, remember?) was built and launched in the mid-1980s.

Atlantis has a 60-foot by 15-foot payload bay. It’s designed as a sort of space truck, to basically launch just about any kind of vehicle — the Hubble, components of the International Space Station, etc. This very vehicle launched Magellan, to radar map the surface of Venus. 

In 1986, the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded 73 seconds into launch, due to the effect of the cold on the O-rings, killing seven astronauts. They were so dependent on the Space Shuttle programme that they had to build another orbiter out of spare parts: OV-105 Endeavour. 

The nose and wings are reinforced carbon-carbon. Stiff, and able to take very high temperatures, they’re a little on the heavy side. Most of the orbiter is covered with silica foam tiles, which can also take really super high temperatures, but are over 90% empty space, so they’re very easy to break. That’s one of the reasons the launch pad is flooded with over 300 000 gallons of water in 20–40 seconds: to protect the tiles from the sound vibrations. There’s more about this in my video of the Sound Suppression System: https://youtu.be/38AgIq7T2NQ — it’s a short clip, but since I also recorded audio of the whole tour, I transcribed much more of what that tour guide said into the video description.

The top of the orbiter looks like it’s covered with blankets. They actually call those quilts ‘thermal protection blankets’. Earlier models of the orbiter actually had tiles in that area, but they decided that the temperatures (hundreds rather than thousands of degrees, presumedly Fahrenheit) were such that the blankets would work just fine. As a result, Atlantis and Endeavour were 3.5 tons lighter than Challenger or Columbia, and took half the time to build. This is William’s second-favourite weight-loss hero, after the Saturn V rocket, because it’s 20000 pounds lighter than any of the other flying orbiters. (I’m not sure how that equates to 3.5 tons… does this one lack some other heavy component as well?)

Six and a half seconds before launching an orbiter, they fired the RS-25 engines on the orbiter, because they were liquid-fuelled, fuelled by the orange external fuel tank, which meant they could be steered or turned off. But the Solid Rocket Boosters, fired at T=0, like firecrackers, can’t be shut off once lit. Once those fire, the orbiter is going somewhere… whether to its intended orbit in space, or to Zaragoza, Spain. 2 minutes, 7 seconds later, the Solid Rocket Boosters would run out of fuel, and parachute into the Atlantic Ocean, where they’d be picked up by the ships Liberty Star and Freedom Star, refurbished, and reused. Eight and a half minutes into the flight, the RS-25 engines shut off and the orange external fuel tank (which was painted white for the first two launches) is jettisoned, never to be used again. OMS (Orbiter Manoeuvring System) engines are used after that.

Part of the problem with Columbia in 2003 had to do with the orange, which is the insulation on the outside of that tank. Part of the insulation came off and punched a hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon of panel 8 of the wing. Sixteen minutes before the orbiter was supposed to land, the superheated air from reentry went through that hole and destroyed the spacecraft. At that point they started to think maybe they should go in a different direction with crewed spaceflight. It’s why the Orion has a crew escape system, like they had in Apollo.

This is where I run out of characters and wish I'd transcribed the video faithfully enough for closed captions instead.