Boeing Employee Information Hotline at 1-800-899-6431

skip to: page content | footer(site information)

This site will look much better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

BA stock price 51.97 [- 0.66] at 4:13 PM ET on Nov 24
The Boeing Company logo
Corporate Governance | Employment | Employee/Retiree | Ethics | Suppliers | Secure Logon
Select Country/LanguageGlobe image to select country/languageGlobe, Boeing Worldlwide
Return to Flight

Vehicle Upgrades: Windows Impact Testing

In Orbiter Processing Facility bay 1, United Space Alliance technicians help STS-121 Mission Commander Steven W. Lindsey (right) and Pilot Mark E. Kelly with an inspection of the windows in Atlantis' cockpit.
In Orbiter Processing Facility bay 1, United Space Alliance technicians help STS-121 Mission Commander Steven W. Lindsey (right) and Pilot Mark E. Kelly with an inspection of the windows in Atlantis' cockpit. The STS-121 crew is at KSC to participate in the Crew Equipment Interface Test (CEIT). Boeing engineers redesign the two side windows. The shuttle has always suffered some damage on the two side windows (numbers 1 and 6). To give those windows more robustness, the thickness of the windows has been increased by three tenths of an inch (56/100th of an inch). This change also caused a change in the thickness of the tiles around the windows to accommodate the thicker glass panes. All of the design and aerodynamic work was done at HB. New mounting brackets had to be also created to accommodate the thicker glass.

The front of the orbiter has six windows that are composed of fused silica which shrink or expand from heating on reentry. Boeing engineers in Houston, Kennedy Space Center and Huntington Beach, Calif., developed solutions to prevent the windows from getting dinged with six types of likely debris: butcher paper, aluminum oxide, copper, ice, foam, and ablator materials. The Boeing window team worked closely with the NASA Glenn Research Center to conduct a series of tests in a vacuum chamber that fired foam, commercial aluminum oxide, ice, copper and paper at the shuttle' s windows to determine if the required safety margins could be compromised.

Boeing designed and provided installation engineering for replacement of the two orbiter side windows (No. 1 and 6) which had the lowest structural margins of the orbiter windows, to increase the thickness of the glass, providing additional margin against impact damage.