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Home Front: Tech
Shuttle grounded until pigs have wings 2006
2005-08-19
Parts which duplicate article posted by Shipman deleted.
NASA said Thursday it is pushing the next shuttle flight into 2006 to give engineers time to understand dangerous fuel-tank foam loss and to avoid the string of unrealistic launch dates that preceded Discovery's just-completed mission.

NASA's three remaining space shuttles are grounded as the agency investigates why a large, potentially catastrophic chunk of foam insulation broke off Discovery's fuel tank during liftoff last month — the same problem that doomed Columbia in 2003. Discovery's tank lost sizable pieces of foam from five areas, in fact.
Even My '77 Nova did better than that.
The space agency wants to understand and stop this kind of foam loss before the shuttle flies again. Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's new space operations chief, said the next mission will not take place before March and will be carried out by Discovery. Atlantis was supposed to fly next, in September, but managers decided to switch spaceships so Atlantis can be ready for scrapping a heavy-lift space station assembly mission once Discovery returns.

All three external fuel tanks at Kennedy Space Center, meanwhile, will likely be returned to the manufacturing plant in New Orleans for repairs.

Both Griffin and Gerstenmaier said they will avoid setting multiple launch dates for the next mission. By the time Discovery blasted off July 26 on the first shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster, it had gone through 15 launch dates. Some safety improvements that could have been made were not because of the push to meet a launch date that was always just a few months away.

"That's why we're going out as far as March and giving ourselves what we hope is plenty of time to for people to forget the Shuttle even exists evaluate where we are," Griffin told reporters.
This is just depressing. My childhood heroes have feet of clay. Maybe the Chinese will colonize space. Americans won't.
Posted by:Jackal

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