Did lack of Freon for properly producing insulation for the Space Shuttle booster, jeopardize the missions?

Question

If a sub-standard production method was employed, for indefensible reasons, then someone would be answerable, for negligence, or worse.

Answer 1

Foams can be made from any volatile liquid introduced to a flowable or plastic material; water or soapy water mixed into materials such as plastic and concrete; materials mechanically frothed with air; blown by gasses self generated by polymerization reactions; and even formed by carbonizing nonwoven organics. Freon 12 was discontinued long ago ( I think it was the original blowing agent for Styrofoam) and replaced with environmentally friendly Freons, propane and such.
I'm not certain what the specific mechanism used to make the shuttle tile is (I've seen it- it weighs about 1-2 pounds per cubic foot), but my point is that there is no shortage of environmentally friendly and availabe foaming agents to produce a tile that is identical to one that may have been made with Freon 12 20 years age (if. indeed, that was what was used.
Oops, I just saw that you referred to the booster. The booster is not insulated so I assume you mean the external fuel container-that big yellow thing. That is basically insulated with a mixture of urethane foam and cork. The same answer applies. Urethane is blown either by a a reaction generated gas or sheared in volatile liquid, usually the former. Again, no availability or environmental problem

Answer 2

Which mission?

In a nut shell, the first space shuttle disaster was a bunch of engineers got conned into saying ok to launch.

Here's the deal - they knew there were problems with O ring failure and only had test data from let's say 60 degrees F and 80 degrees F.

Then they had the launch data on how badly damaged the O-rings were during launches. The worst damage was from a 70 degree launch. The trend was that the coldest launches had the most damage, but someone at Thiokol pointed at the worst damage at 70 degrees and said they "didn't have enough data to make that claim." Which is true, but the conclusion drawn (ok to launch) is obviously flawed. Engineering is BASED on science, and when you have no science, the safest thing to do is do nothing, i.e. not launch. If they wanted to launch at that temp, a responsible engineer would have requested a 30 degree F (below freezing) test of the rocket by itself. Once that passed (and it probably would have blown up instead), then they could say launching in freezing weather, when the only previous launches were 54 degrees or above, would be safe.

The second disaster was essentially more of the same, except someone at NASA instructed the astronauts NOT to look at the hole, so they don't even know how big the hole that killed the space shuttle is. Now, we've got a known problem and no data points, so is it safe to launch? No. Had they gotten the size of the hole that killed the shuttle, they would at least have something to measure once the next shuttle got into space, and they would have more information about how big a hole could cause probems, given that the hole on the destroyed shuttle was "X" millimeters in size, say, they would know if they found a hole after launch that was larger than that it is cause for serious concern.

Answer 3

Lack of freon would only impact the scheduling of the launches. If they ran out of freon to make the foam, then it would only delay the launch of the next (or subsequent to the next) launch. They would not use any unauthorized subsitutes to make the foam. The production methods are carefully controlled and monitored.

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Answer 4

I think 20 year old technology jeopardized the shuttle missions,