Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Train Guy]

Puzzling. The shuttle tires are really just aircraft tires, and those have fusible plugs to keep them from exploding if they get to hot, like say if the brakes lock up. So instead of the tire exploding, the nitrogen (they don't use air) would just be let out and you have a flat.

This statement doesn't make sense - He said that if temperatures increased markedly in the wheel well, the shuttle's wheels could fail and the tires explode.

And yet it appears he is qualified and knows about tires - On Jan. 27, the 12th day of the mission, an engineer in Houston called Daugherty to ask what effect a deflated tire might have on the shuttle's return to Earth. Daugherty had worked on tire safety issues in the past and had been involved in experiments that led to the use of radial tires on the shuttle and to alterations of the runways to make landings safer.

Why did NASA want to know about a flat tire? Here's Michelin's website with some data about the shuttle tires http://195.154.239.169/aviation/about/space.html If you click on some of the other links, they have technical data about their aircraft tires.