Did Nasa fail it's misison with Discovery?

[Madame Butterfly 0]

Shuttle Ups and Downs

Discovery succeeds, but NASA may have failed its mission.

 

 

 

 

 

By Mary Carmichael

Newsweek

Aug. 8, 2005 issue - It is NASA's old reliable, the craft the agency depends on when it needs to prove something big. Discovery was the shuttle that delivered the Hubble telescope and 77-year-old John Glenn into space, and revived NASA as the first ship to launch (in 1988) after the Challenger explosion two years earlier. The orbiter had two missions last week: to dock with the International Space Station, and to demonstrate, again, that the loss of a shuttle need not mean the loss of the entire program. As soon as the ship roared into the sky, it seemed to have met the latter goal. But jubilant spectators could not see what NASA's cameras did. In an eerie reflection of the Columbia disaster, chunks of insulating foam had broken off, despite a $1.5 billion attempt to prevent that kind of problem. Now, as Discovery sits docked in space, its brethren are grounded.

 

 

The shuttle's commander said Friday that she was "quite surprised" pieces had fallen off the ship, but not everyone was. After the Columbia flameout, an investigatory board told NASA to strengthen the shuttle. But the panel tracking the agency's progress reported publicly for the first time on June 28, a scant two weeks before Discovery's original launch date, and some in the space industry are wondering if NASA read its own findings carefully. While the report praised NASA for its new high-resolution cameras and emergency plans, it also criticized the agency on several counts—including the fact that "extensive work to develop debris models ... was, until recently, hampered by a lack of rigor in both development and testing." The fuel tank, it noted, still shed too much debris.

 

NASA's massive redesign project also neglected the PAL ramp, the area that lost foam last week. "We haven't seen a problem in the PAL-ramp area since 1983," an agency spokeswoman told NEWSWEEK. "We didn't think there was an issue there." But James McGuffin-Cawley, a materials engineer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said the agency was sufficiently "concerned about that part" to test it in a local wind tunnel. And he pointed out that insulating foam has caused NASA difficulties since 1997, when the agency stopped using environmentally unfriendly Freon in its manufacture. In what now seems like a premonition, a NASA engineer reported in 1997 that the newly formulated foam could easily pop off the tank and damage the shuttle's heat-resistant tiles, as it did on Columbia.

 

Discovery's tiles are a bit dinged up, but overall it appears to have suffered little damage. As for the rest of the fleet, NASA head Michael Griffin said Friday he still hopes for another launch this year. Meanwhile, Discovery, the oldest shuttle still in service, is set to retire in 2010, which means NASA will lose one of its chief symbols of resilience in the face of tragedy. Here's hoping it won't need another one.