Kim,

I passed your website's URL on to my branch chief. He also thinks it's very cool. He then passed the URL on to our Space Shuttle abort trajectory analysis team. They've been involved in producing very high fidelty aerothermodynamic models of the Space Shuttle. As you probably know, there are sections along the Shuttle's ascent trajectoy called "black zones". If a launch abort is necessary while in a black zone, all the flight crew can really do is kiss each other goodbye and start praying. However by having better understanding of the vehicle's aerothermodynamic behavior, we've been able to devise through computational fluid dynamic simulations some escape trajectories were the crew might survive. In order to do the simulations we needed the original blueprints of the Shuttle OV so we could construct the computational mesh. However we quickly discovered the Shuttle's exterior had changed significantly since it was originally designed almost 25 years ago. Therefore anything that shows us the current state of the Shuttle OV's exterior is very useful.

Gary