Safety Worries Ground Shuttles
HOUSTON — With Discovery's crew about 200 miles above Earth, NASA on Wednesday abruptly suspended all scheduled shuttle flights after determining that a piece of insulating foam -- nearly as large as the piece that doomed Columbia in 2003 -- had peeled off the craft's external fuel tank during launch.
The space agency said there was no evidence that Discovery was hit or damaged by the debris.
But the loss of insulating foam after two years of study and $1.4 billion in upgrades to the shuttle was a blow both unexpected and disappointing.
"We have to take a step back," Bill Parsons, shuttle program manager, said during a news briefing at the Johnson Space Center. "Until we're ready, we won't go fly again."
The next scheduled launch was to be Atlantis, which could have come as early as September.
NASA left open the possibility of launching Atlantis to rescue Discovery's seven-member crew at the International Space Station if the shuttle sustained serious damage and could not return to Earth. Atlantis was being readied, but NASA said any quick launch was remote.
The soonest Atlantis could be launched, if it were needed, would be 25 to 30 days, Parsons said in an interview on ABC's "Nightline."
If any damage were found on Discovery, the only other solution would be to try to repair it in flight.
The astronauts' mission calls for a spacewalk to test two repair techniques, one for the heat-resistant tiles that cover most of the orbiter, and the other for damage to the reinforced carbon panels covering the leading edges of the wings and the nose cone. Both use a goo-like solution that would be slathered over the torn surface.
A third repair technique -- which the crew had not planned on testing but had the tools and supplies to carry out -- would call for inserting a spindle with a flat metal cover into a hole on the carbon panels. The metal cover would act as an umbrella over any damaged area.
The astronauts have said they would be reluctant to entrust their lives to unproved technologies.
Charles Camarda, a mission specialist and engineer on Discovery, said weeks before the launch that even small changes made to the orbiter's surface could alter the craft's aerodynamics, throwing the orbiter out of control when it reentered Earth's atmosphere.
At that time, the crew agreed that it would prefer to wait at the space station to be rescued.
