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Vancouver Columbian
Columbian, The (Vancouver, WA)

February 16, 2003
An Alternative to Tragedy? Ex-Nasa engineer worked on a different space shuttle design
Author: TOM VOGT, Columbian staff writer
Section: Clark County/region
Page: c1
Estimated printed pages: 4
Article Text:

Farouk Huneidi worked on the Saturn rocket that put men on the moon, and he was part of the team that designed the International Space Station.
Between those milestones of space exploration, he helped design a project that literally never got off the ground. Now the Vancouver resident wonders what would have happened if NASA had adopted his team's concept for the space shuttle.
A model of the design is in the study of his Salmon Creek home, along with other mementos of his 32-year career: patches, pictures and plaques -- and a charred chunk of heat shield that went to the moon and back as part of an Apollo capsule.
The bent-wing shuttle proposal was designed by Huneidi's team at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. It featured a metallic heat shield.
The Huntsville team lost the design competition to a team from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The Houston design used heat-resistant ceramic tiles.
"We had our suspicions about the tiles' fragility," Huneidi recalled. "We called their design 'the glass slipper.' But Houston won because it was lighter and cheaper."
Those ceramic tiles have come under scrutiny in the past two weeks as a possible cause of the destruction of the shuttle Columbia. Another highly scrutinized piece of the launch package, the foam insulation on the external fuel tank, was one of Huneidi's areas of concern.
The 69-year-old Huneidi is a retired thermal engineer, and he spent 32 years worrying about searing heat and freezing cold.
"My job was anything involving thermodynamics," said Huneidi (pronounced "hoo-NAY-dee).
He is the reason the bullet-shaped fuel tank -- the biggest component of the entire shuttle package -- is orange. NASA originally painted the tank white to protect its coat of insulating foam from rain, Huneidi said.
"The paint was not necessary to protect it. The foam had a rind that was waterproof. I wrote the request to take the paint off, and that saved 500 pounds," Huneidi said.
A chunk of the foam broke off during the Jan. 16 launch, prompting early speculation that the insulation might have fatally damaged the heat shield.
But NASA won't be rushing to a conclusion, said Huneidi, who has seen this sort of thing before. After the 1986 Challenger disaster, he was part of a team that investigated the shuttle's engines.
The Challenger launch was one of the few he missed during his career. Huneidi was working on the Hubble telescope on Jan. 28, 1986. He said he was glad he wasn't watching the Challenger launch.
"That would have been very hard," Huneidi said.
He wasn't looking for that sort of excitement when Huneidi came to this country from Kuwait in 1952 to attend college. His choice of the University of Alabama was determined by alphabetical order and dollar ranking.
"I didn't know Alabama from MIT," he said. Huneidi said he was given a list of colleges. He looked at the top three on the list; Alabama was the cheapest.
He was a business major back then, until his roommate told him that engineering was where the money was.
Even while working on his master's degree in thermo-electric engineering, the space program wasn't in his plans. He wanted to get his hands on a semiconductor and called Texas Instruments. The company forwarded him to the Marshall Space Flight Center.
"I called the lab chief, and he said he'd lend me one if I gave him a copy of my thesis. I did," Huneidi said. "After he looked at it, he asked, 'How would you like to work here?'"
Working for Wernher
Huneidi's first boss was Wernher von Braun. The German rocket expert helped develop the V-2 missiles that killed more than 2,500 people in England during World War II. He was whisked away by U.S. forces after the war and became director of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Huneidi's career followed America's triumphal path to space. Huneidi worked on the Saturn 5 rocket that put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969. His thermal engineering went into the moon-mobile used by the Apollo 15 crew to explore the lunar surface.
He got up close and personal with the launch packages as a member of the pre-launch inspection teams at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla.
"Our team, the astronauts, and the team that dressed the astronauts were the only people who got to be on the launching pad" before liftoff, he said.
That team had what was considered a high-risk job, and Huneidi recalled practicing emergency evacuations. A helicopter hovered over the pad and lowered cables to the ground. Members of the inspection team clambered into life rings at the end of the cables and were reeled up as the 'copter flew them to safety. Or at least toward a different kind of danger, as they passed over an adjacent national wildlife refuge.
"If you were the last one in, you could look down and see alligators," Huneidi recalled. "I don't know what would have been worse: to be killed on the launch pad or be eaten by an alligator."
PECK OF TROUBLE
Woodpeckers delayed a 1995 shuttle launch for a month by punching about 200 holes in the foam insulation of the external fuel tank. To see the woodpeckers in action on the Web, go to:
science.ksc.nasa.gov /shuttle/missions/sts-70 /woodpecker.html
Click onto the link: MPEG Movie of Woodpeckers.
TOM VOGT writes about science and medicine. Contact him at 360-759-8008 or at [email protected].
Caption:
Retired NASA engineer Farouk Huneidi discusses his work on a rival design (model on desk) of the space shuttle in the early days of the shuttle program. His had a metal heat shield instead of ceramic tiles, but this made it heavier, and NASA ultimately chose the lighter tile version that is in use today. * Huneidi holds a rival design to the current space shuttle that he worked on at the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Ala. His first boss at NASA was pioneer rocket designer Wernher von Braun.
Copyright (c) 2003 The Columbian Publishing Co., P.O. Box 180, Vancouver, WA 98666.
Record Number: 2003047015