With Tile Glitch Fixed, Shuttle Is on Track for Launch


By MARCIA DUNN, AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (July 13) - With the countdown for Discovery in its final hours, NASA was dealt an embarrassing setback Tuesday when a window cover fell off the shuttle and damaged thermal tiles near the tail. But the space agency quickly fixed the problem and said it was still on track for launch Wednesday.

The mishap was an eerie reminder of the very thing that doomed Columbia 2 1/2 years ago - damage to the spaceship's fragile thermal shield.




The lightweight plastic cover on one of Discovery's cockpit windows came loose while the spaceship was on the launch pad, falling more than 60 feet and striking a bulge in the fuselage, said Stephanie Stilson, the NASA manager in charge of Discovery's launch preparations.

No one knows why the cover - held in place with tape and weighing less than 2 pounds - fell off, she said. The covers are used prior to launch to protect the shuttle's windows, then removed before liftoff.

Two tiles on an aluminum panel were damaged, and the entire panel was replaced with a spare in what Stilson said was a minor repair job.

The cover, which weighs less than 2 pounds, struck a part of the fuselage that houses one of the engines used by the shuttle to maneuver in orbit. Launch managers were still awaiting an engineering analysis on whether the blow caused any damage to the engine hardware, but Stilson said she was confident there would be no problems.

Word of the mishap came just two hours after NASA declared Discovery ready to return the nation to space for the first time since the Columbia disaster.

Up until the window cover fell, NASA's only concern was the weather. Because of thunderstorms in the forecast, the chances of acceptable weather at launch time were put at 60 percent.






--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Sources: AP, cnn.com, nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com



Discovery and its crew of seven were set to blast off at 3:51 p.m. EDT. The last few technical concerns had been resolved Tuesday afternoon at one final launch review by NASA's managers.

''It is utterly crucial for NASA, for the nation, for our space program to fly a safe mission,'' NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said after the meeting. ''We have done everything that we know to do.''

The families of the seven astronauts killed during Columbia's catastrophic re-entry praised the accident investigators, a NASA oversight group and the space agency itself for defining and reducing the dangers.

Like those who lost loved ones in the Apollo 1 spacecraft fire and the Challenger launch explosion, the Columbia families said they grieve deeply ''but know the exploration of space must go on.''



The New York Times
The Discovery launch comes two years after the Columbia disaster, which left its crew of seven dead. Above, a NASA employee kisses part of a memorial to the crew at the Kennedy Space Center.
· Emotions Tug Columbia Families



''We hope we have learned and will continue to learn from each of these accidents so that we will be as safe as we can be in this high-risk endeavor,'' they said in a statement. ''Godspeed, Discovery.''

Discovery will be setting off on the 114th space shuttle flight in 24 years with a redesigned external fuel tank and nearly 50 other improvements made in the wake of the Columbia tragedy.

A chunk of foam insulation the size of a carry-on suitcase fell off Columbia's fuel tank at liftoff and slammed into a reinforced carbon panel on the shuttle's wing, creating a hole that brought the spacecraft crashing down in pieces during its return to Earth on Feb. 1, 2003.

Almost every day since then, engineers have struggled to keep foam, ice and other debris from popping off the tank. They will not know whether they succeeded until Discovery flies.

During the 12-day flight, Discovery's astronauts will test various techniques for patching cracks and holes in the thermal shielding.

The crew members will also try out a new 50-foot boom designed to give them a three-dimensional laser view of the wings and nose cap and help them find any damage caused by liftoff debris. That is on top of all the pictures of the spacecraft that will be taken by more than 100 cameras positioned around the launching site and aboard two planes and the shuttle itself.

''After this flight, we will have a much, much, much better idea of whether or not our measures we have taken ... have been effective - or not effective,'' Griffin said. ''Now our best engineers have put their best efforts on that, and we devoutly hope that they have been effective.''


Multiband:
Countdown to Shuttle Launch


The board that investigated the Columbia accident put some of the blame on the space agency's safety culture, which collapsed during the doomed flight. Shuttle managers dismissed the foam strike, and engineers did not speak up about their fears.

At Tuesday's meeting, Griffin said, there was full and frank discussion of the remaining technical concerns.

''I think we got everything that everybody knows about out on the table,'' he said. ''Can there be something that we don't know about that can bite us? Yeah. This is a very tough business. It's a tough business. But everything we know about has been covered.''

A safe and successful flight of Discovery will not vindicate the space agency, Griffin said.

''There is no recovery from mistakes we've made, whether it goes back to the Apollo fire, loss of Challenger or the loss of Columbia. Going back even further to 100 years of aviation, the safety systems that we who fly have learned and know are written in other people's blood,'' said Griffin, a pilot.

''The minute we say we're good enough, we start getting bad again and we need not to do that.''


07-13-05 00:15 EDT

Here is the url to the above article.

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050702...00010000000001[/URL]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BF,

Discovery, NASA Return to Space
By John Johnson Jr. and Michael Muskal, Times Staff Writers


KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla -- The United States returned to space this morning when the space shuttle Discovery lifted off, the first manned flight since the Columbia disaster more than two years ago.

Discovery, carrying a crew of seven astronauts to the international space station, left the pad at 7:39 a.m. PDT. Galleries of notables, including First Lady Laura Bush, watched the launch that went off without a hitch.

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"Our hopes and prayers go with you," NASA control told the craft.

"Thank you very much," said flight Cmdr. Eileen Collins.

The flight was originally scheduled for July 13, but was delayed by a malfunctioning hydrogen fuel gauge.

"When the shuttle takes off, it ignites not only the rocket engines but the hope of the American people," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in an interview with CNN. "We all pray for a good launch."

NASA said that the fuel gauges or sensors functioned properly this morning, giving the flight a complete go. The weather, which had been a concern, was also on track to allow the launch.

During a pre-boarding meal, the crew wore matching Hawaiian shirts and smiled for NASA television cameras. Later in the morning, they were shown waving and giving the traditional thumbs-ups signal as they walked to the van that took them to the launch pad. The astronauts then boarded the shuttle.

The launch of Discovery marks the return of NASA's human flight program to space. The agency suspended shuttle flights after the Columbia disintegrated during its return to Earth on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven aboard.

Discovery's troubled fuel gauge had thrown the mission in question. NASA officials said that they were prepared to launch even if the part misfired again. Three of the four gauges operated correctly.

"I wake up every day and ask myself, 'Are we pushing too hard?' " N. Wayne Hale Jr., deputy shuttle program manager, said at a news briefing over the weekend at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. "We are still struggling with the ghosts of Columbia."

The fuel gauges regulate the amount of fuel that flows to the engines. By shutting off the fuel, the gauges or sensors can shut down the engines if the tank leaks or another breakdown takes place.

Only two gauges are needed to do the job, but NASA in 1988 decided that all four had to operate properly for the launch to take place. That decision came in response to heightened safety concerns after the shuttle Challenger blew apart in 1986, killing the entire crew.

Since the Discovery flight was scrubbed, dozens of teams of engineers around the country have been working to find the source of the trouble.

After testing hundreds of possibilities in the so-called fault-tree between the sensors and the orbiter's computer, investigators believe they have narrowed the cause to either a problem with the sensor or wiring in the point sensor box, a complicated piece of electronics that receives signals from the sensors at the bottom of the fuel tank.

There also is concern that changes made to the fuel tank after Columbia, including the addition of heaters on the surface to prevent the formation of ice, could be causing electromagnetic interference that is shorting out the sensor.

About 10 hours before today's launch, technicians began filling the fuel tanks with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, chilled to minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit.

The current launch window extends to July 31, though the space agency has hinted it might go a couple days into August, if necessary. The space station crew is awaiting supplies from Discovery. The next launch window won't open until September.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-072605shuttle_la...ll=la-home-headlines

Fox has shown pictures of debris falling off of the aircraft as it took off. Hope things go okay...

Deluge of data poses new risk
By John Schwartz The New York Times

THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2005


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida The successful launching of the space shuttle Discovery was a milestone for NASA, which has struggled for two and a half years to find and fix the problems that caused the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts on Feb.1, 2003.

But now that the Discovery is in orbit, an intense examination begins.

The craft lifted off into a startlingly blue sky on Tuesday morning with a stuttering roar that shook the air for miles around. With seven astronauts on board, its goal is to resupply the International Space Station and to try to put NASA's safety problems behind it.

Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, as NASA checks to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that led to the destruction of the shuttle Columbia.

There were cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a picture of a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery intensively until the end of its mission.

But all of this inspection may be a mixed blessing. Inevitably, engineers and other experts say, the more NASA looks for damage, the more it will find. And the risks of overreaction to signs of damage may be just as great as the risks of playing them down.

"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir.

The shuttle program has lived with damage from debris from the very first flight, in 1981. In 113 missions, the orbiters have been hit by debris about 15,000 times, mostly on liftoff.

Now, though, it will be far easier to spot such damage while the shuttle is still in orbit. Thanks to a $15 million laser camera system developed by a Canadian company, Neptec, for example, NASA can detect a crack of just two-hundredths of an inch, or half a millimeter - the width of two business cards pressed together. On the leading edge of the orbiter's wing, such a crack could admit dangerous amounts of superheated gas during re-entry. A similar crack elsewhere might not.

But if a crack is detected, said Iain Christie, director of research and development for Neptec, "how is NASA supposed to explain that this is not a problem?"

Nor is it clear how it could be fixed. NASA's efforts to create a repair kit for tile and leading-edge panels - a recommendation of the independent board that investigated the Columbia accident - have not been successful.

Another option, the "safe haven" plan, would involve abandoning the shuttle and having the astronauts wait in the space station for a rescue mission. For that plan to work, another shuttle would have to be launched within a few weeks.

That is theoretically possible, but fraught with risks of its own: the nightmarish possibility, for example, that the orbiting astronauts would run out of food, water or oxygen before the mission could be mounted.

"There is risk in anything you do," said Kyle Herring, a NASA spokesman.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida The successful launching of the space shuttle Discovery was a milestone for NASA, which has struggled for two and a half years to find and fix the problems that caused the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts on Feb.1, 2003.

But now that the Discovery is in orbit, an intense examination begins.

The craft lifted off into a startlingly blue sky on Tuesday morning with a stuttering roar that shook the air for miles around. With seven astronauts on board, its goal is to resupply the International Space Station and to try to put NASA's safety problems behind it.

Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, as NASA checks to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that led to the destruction of the shuttle Columbia.

There were cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a picture of a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery intensively until the end of its mission.

But all of this inspection may be a mixed blessing. Inevitably, engineers and other experts say, the more NASA looks for damage, the more it will find. And the risks of overreaction to signs of damage may be just as great as the risks of playing them down.

"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir.

The shuttle program has lived with damage from debris from the very first flight, in 1981. In 113 missions, the orbiters have been hit by debris about 15,000 times, mostly on liftoff.

Now, though, it will be far easier to spot such damage while the shuttle is still in orbit. Thanks to a $15 million laser camera system developed by a Canadian company, Neptec, for example, NASA can detect a crack of just two-hundredths of an inch, or half a millimeter - the width of two business cards pressed together. On the leading edge of the orbiter's wing, such a crack could admit dangerous amounts of superheated gas during re-entry. A similar crack elsewhere might not.

But if a crack is detected, said Iain Christie, director of research and development for Neptec, "how is NASA supposed to explain that this is not a problem?"

Nor is it clear how it could be fixed. NASA's efforts to create a repair kit for tile and leading-edge panels - a recommendation of the independent board that investigated the Columbia accident - have not been successful.

Another option, the "safe haven" plan, would involve abandoning the shuttle and having the astronauts wait in the space station for a rescue mission. For that plan to work, another shuttle would have to be launched within a few weeks.

That is theoretically possible, but fraught with risks of its own: the nightmarish possibility, for example, that the orbiting astronauts would run out of food, water or oxygen before the mission could be mounted.

"There is risk in anything you do," said Kyle Herring, a NASA spokesman.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida The successful launching of the space shuttle Discovery was a milestone for NASA, which has struggled for two and a half years to find and fix the problems that caused the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts on Feb.1, 2003.

But now that the Discovery is in orbit, an intense examination begins.

The craft lifted off into a startlingly blue sky on Tuesday morning with a stuttering roar that shook the air for miles around. With seven astronauts on board, its goal is to resupply the International Space Station and to try to put NASA's safety problems behind it.

Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, as NASA checks to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that led to the destruction of the shuttle Columbia.

There were cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a picture of a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery intensively until the end of its mission.

But all of this inspection may be a mixed blessing. Inevitably, engineers and other experts say, the more NASA looks for damage, the more it will find. And the risks of overreaction to signs of damage may be just as great as the risks of playing them down.

"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir.

The shuttle program has lived with damage from debris from the very first flight, in 1981. In 113 missions, the orbiters have been hit by debris about 15,000 times, mostly on liftoff.

Now, though, it will be far easier to spot such damage while the shuttle is still in orbit. Thanks to a $15 million laser camera system developed by a Canadian company, Neptec, for example, NASA can detect a crack of just two-hundredths of an inch, or half a millimeter - the width of two business cards pressed together. On the leading edge of the orbiter's wing, such a crack could admit dangerous amounts of superheated gas during re-entry. A similar crack elsewhere might not.

But if a crack is detected, said Iain Christie, director of research and development for Neptec, "how is NASA supposed to explain that this is not a problem?"

Nor is it clear how it could be fixed. NASA's efforts to create a repair kit for tile and leading-edge panels - a recommendation of the independent board that investigated the Columbia accident - have not been successful.

Another option, the "safe haven" plan, would involve abandoning the shuttle and having the astronauts wait in the space station for a rescue mission. For that plan to work, another shuttle would have to be launched within a few weeks.

That is theoretically possible, but fraught with risks of its own: the nightmarish possibility, for example, that the orbiting astronauts would run out of food, water or oxygen before the mission could be mounted.

"There is risk in anything you do," said Kyle Herring, a NASA spokesman.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida The successful launching of the space shuttle Discovery was a milestone for NASA, which has struggled for two and a half years to find and fix the problems that caused the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts on Feb.1, 2003.

But now that the Discovery is in orbit, an intense examination begins.

The craft lifted off into a startlingly blue sky on Tuesday morning with a stuttering roar that shook the air for miles around. With seven astronauts on board, its goal is to resupply the International Space Station and to try to put NASA's safety problems behind it.

Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, as NASA checks to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that led to the destruction of the shuttle Columbia.

There were cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a picture of a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery intensively until the end of its mission.

But all of this inspection may be a mixed blessing. Inevitably, engineers and other experts say, the more NASA looks for damage, the more it will find. And the risks of overreaction to signs of damage may be just as great as the risks of playing them down.

"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir.

The rest of the article can be read at:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/27/news/shuttle.php

Last Leg of Discovery's Journey Delayed

By The Associated Press
The Associated Press
Saturday, August 20, 2005; 9:40 AM

-- Space shuttle Discovery will have to wait a day to complete the last leg of its trip home.

Discovery had been expected to arrive at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday after riding piggyback atop a jumbo jet across the country, but NASA delayed the trip for a day because of weather concerns, said Bruce Buckingham, a spokesman with the space agency.



This image released by NASA shows the space shuttle Discovery riding piggyback atop a Boeing 747 jet, as it makes its way to the Kennedy Space Center, Fl., Friday., Aug. 19, 2005. (AP)
The jet took off Friday from California and arrived at Louisana's Barksdale Air Force, one of several refueling stops. Shuttle managers were to meet Sunday morning to reasses the flight plan, Buckingham said.

An Air Force KC-135 has flown ahead of the shuttle and the modified Boeing 747 to monitor weather along the route. The expected cost of the trip: at least $1 million.

Discovery and its seven-member crew touched down Aug. 9 in California's Edwards Air Force Base after low clouds and lightning prevented the shuttle from returning to Florida during four earlier opportunities.

After landing, Discovery underwent maintenance inside a steel structure on the base two hours north of Los Angeles. Crews purged the shuttle of hazardous substances, removed fuel from the on-board tanks and attached a 10,000-pound aluminum tail cone to eliminate drag during flight.

Discovery's homecoming has been tempered by uncertainties about the shuttle program's future. The same foam problems that doomed the shuttle Columbia 2 1/2 years ago showed up during Discovery's liftoff, prompting NASA to ground all shuttle flights until 2006 so engineers could find a solution.

A chunk of foam insulation broke off Discovery's redesigned external fuel tank during liftoff on July 26, but unlike in Columbia's case, the foam missed hitting Discovery. Columbia disintegrated over Texas, killing all seven astronauts on board.

NASA ground crews who inspected Discovery after its return from orbit found little damage to its exterior.

___

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...AR2005082000394.html

Posted 9/27/2005 11:03 PM Updated 9/27/2005 11:31 PM


NASA administrator says space shuttle was a mistake
By Traci Watson, USA TODAY
The space shuttle and International Space Station "” nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades "” were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

NASA chief Michael Griffin on the space shuttle: "It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path."
By H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY

In a meeting with USA TODAY's editorial board, Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth.

"It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," Griffin said. "We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can."

The shuttle has cost the lives of 14 astronauts since the first flight in 1982. Roger Pielke Jr., a space policy expert at the University of Colorado, estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on the program since its inception in 1971. The total cost of the space station by the time it's finished "” in 2010 or later "” may exceed $100 billion, though other nations will bear some of that.


Only now is the nation's space program getting back on track, Griffin said. He announced last week that NASA aims to send astronauts back to the moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo capsule.

The goal of returning Americans to the moon was laid out by President Bush in 2004, before Griffin took the top job at NASA. Bush also said the shuttle would be retired in 2010.

Griffin has made clear in previous statements that he regards the shuttle and space station as misguided. He told the Senate earlier this year that the shuttle was "deeply flawed" and that the space station was not worth "the expense, the risk and the difficulty" of flying humans to space.

But since he became NASA administrator, Griffin hasn't been so blunt about the two programs.

Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, "My opinion is that it was. ... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible." Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in."

Joe Rothenberg, head of NASA's manned space programs from 1995 to 2001, defended the programs for providing lessons about how to operate in space. But he conceded that "in hindsight, there may have been other ways."

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-09-27-n...ffin-interview_x.htm