After the Columbia accident and 3 years the same problem has made the current mission the last for a while.
<!--StartFragment -->
July 28, 2005
<NYT_HEADLINE type=" " version="1.0"></NYT_HEADLINE>NASA Suspending Shuttle Program Over Foam Debris
<NYT_BYLINE type=" " version="1.0"></NYT_BYLINE>By JOHN SCHWARTZ
<NYT_TEXT></NYT_TEXT>HOUSTON, July 27 - NASA suspended further flights of the space shuttle fleet on Wednesday after determining that a large piece of insulating foam had broken off the external fuel tank of the Discovery shortly after liftoff Tuesday morning, the same problem that doomed the Columbia and its seven astronauts in the last mission, two and a half years ago.
The foam does not appear to have struck the Discovery, so the decision will not curtail its 12½-day mission to the International Space Station, the officials said. But further flights will be postponed indefinitely, starting with that of the Atlantis, which was to have lifted off as early as September.
"Until we fix this, we're not ready to go fly again," William W. Parsons, the manager of the shuttle program, said at a news briefing at the Johnson Space Center here on Wednesday evening.
The detection of another large breakaway piece of insulating foam is a potentially devastating setback for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a bitter counterpoint to the elation of Monday's seemingly perfect launching of the Discovery, a return to flight that was hailed as an inspiring comeback for the space program.
The effort to fix the foam problem had consumed more than two years and hundreds of millions of dollars. NASA identified the area on the tank that shed the latest piece of foam as a risk, but put off redesigning it.
"We decided it was safe to fly as is," Mr. Parsons said. "Obviously, we were wrong."
The incident occurred two minutes into the launching, at a point where the atmosphere is so thin that the piece drifted away. The Columbia accident occurred in part because the foam fell off the tank about 82 seconds after liftoff, when the air was much thicker and slowed the foam so the climbing orbiter struck it with great force.
N. Wayne Hale, the deputy manager of the shuttle program, said that if the Discovery foam had been shed earlier, "we think that it would have been really bad."
Tense and somber, Mr. Parsons said that he was "disappointed" in the news. Mr. Hale sounded resigned. "We are in the business of flying in space - it's a very difficult business," he said, adding: "It isn't disheartening. It's just the nature of the business."
Others were more dismayed. A NASA engineer who has been involved in the return-to-flight effort said: "It's an ugly story. It's a mess." The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issues involved, added, "Everyone's really, really disappointed," but continued: "It is what it is. Physics doesn't lie."
Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who now teaches at Duke and is a frequent critic of the space program, said that in some ways the problem was "worse than an unexpected anomaly arising."
"This was the major problem that they were looking to solve," Mr. Roland said. "It must be enormously demoralizing to them."
Representative Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee, said the shuttle program was "rightly grounded."
"Nothing can go forward at this juncture until there is further analysis and a remedy to the problem," Mr. Boehlert said. "It all depends on what they find. In some respects, it's back to the drawing board."
The Columbia and its crew were lost because a 1.67-pound piece of insulating foam that had fallen off the external tank during liftoff crashed through the leading edge of the shuttle's left wing. The resulting hole admitted superheated gases during the shuttle's fiery re-entry into the atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003.
That chunk fell from an area of hand-applied foam called the bipod arm ramp. The ramp's insulating foam surrounded the struts connecting the tank to the orbiter, and were originally designed to prevent ice from forming and becoming a debris hazard. But NASA had noticed that the bipod arm ramp tended to shed foam and decided to redesign it. They planned to replace it after the Columbia flight.
After the Columbia accident, the investigators who implicated the falling foam as the physical cause demanded that NASA find ways to sharply limit the amount of foam that falls off the external tank. Just as important, the investigative board determined, a "broken safety culture" tended to play down risks.
In response, NASA extensively tested foam and the way it is applied, modified the tank so that it would be less likely to shed debris, and replaced the foam-covered ramps with a heater.
In the incident described here on Wednesday, the new piece of foam - a hat-shaped chunk as much as 33 inches across at the widest part and 14 inches at the narrow part - sheared off another ramp on the external tank. It is known as the protuberance air load ramp, which NASA abbreviates as the PAL ramp, and was designed to minimize crosswise airflow and turbulence around cable trays and lines used to pressurize the external tank. The new piece is slightly smaller than the briefcase-size piece that hit the Columbia, Mr. Hale said.
Because of the other redesign efforts on the external tank, NASA engineers estimated that no piece of foam would come off the external tank that was larger than three-hundredths of a pound, and said they hoped to see no foam debris larger than one-hundredth of a pound.
On Wednesday, Mr. Parsons, who led the program requirements control board that considered all modifications, said, "We had enough data that showed we had had very few problems with the PAL ramp." The ramp, they found, performed a valuable protective function, he said; with no other obvious options, they decided the shuttle was safe to fly.
While the two other shuttles, Atlantis and Endeavour, are grounded, work will begin on solving the PAL ramp problem. "We'll put our best people on it," Mr. Parsons said, "and we'll figure out something to do."
"I don't know if that's a month, I don't know if that's three months," he went on. "We've got a lot of work in front of us."
But before that, the officials said, there is still a mission to complete and seven astronauts in space. Using the official numerical designation for the flight, Mr. Hale said, "Right now this team is focused on STS-114, and getting this crew home safely."
That means continuing with the work that had always been intended for the current mission: a thorough examination of the shuttle's thermal protection system for any damage, using an array of new cameras and laser systems.
Mr. Parsons and Mr. Hale said there were other surprising examples of lost foam - including divots several inches long that popped out of "acreage foam," which is applied robotically and had been considered to be free of shedding problems.
They also showed photos of the loss of a 1.5-inch piece of an insulating tile over a landing-gear door on the nose cone, which they suggested might have sheared because of an earlier repair. Mr. Hale said the tile would receive further examination, but was not considered a critical problem now.
"Are we concerned about this? We're treating this very seriously," he said. "Are we losing sleep over it? Not yet."
Mission managers said they briefly discussed the news of the foam chunk with the astronauts in the afternoon, and transmitted pictures to Discovery in the early evening after the astronauts' bed time.
The shuttle astronauts - the commander, Col. Eileen M. Collins; the pilot, Col. James M. Kelly; the flight engineer, Stephen K. Robinson; and the mission specialists, Soichi Noguchi, Andrew S. W. Thomas, Capt. Wendy B. Lawrence and Charles J. Camarda - spent most of their workday using the shuttle's robot arm and a 50-foot sensor-tipped boom to inspect the craft's nose and the wings' leading edges, and preparing to dock with the International Space Station.
During slow, close-up scans of the reinforced carbon structures with a high-definition television camera and laser scanners, no obvious damage was spotted. Though the preliminary results look promising, Mr. Hale said, there are problems with viewing some areas that will have to be repeated, and so "today we cannot tell you without a shadow of a doubt that we've got a clean bill of health" for those panels.
The astronauts had awakened to their first full day in space to the song "I Got You, Babe," as excerpted from the movie "Groundhog Day." The movie, about living the same day over and over, was a joking reference to the seemingly endless days in prelaunching quarantine as the crew awaited their chance to fly.
<NYT_AUTHOR_ID></NYT_AUTHOR_ID>Kenneth Chang contributed reporting from New York for this article.
<!--StartFragment -->
July 28, 2005
<NYT_HEADLINE type=" " version="1.0"></NYT_HEADLINE>NASA Suspending Shuttle Program Over Foam Debris
<NYT_BYLINE type=" " version="1.0"></NYT_BYLINE>By JOHN SCHWARTZ
<NYT_TEXT></NYT_TEXT>HOUSTON, July 27 - NASA suspended further flights of the space shuttle fleet on Wednesday after determining that a large piece of insulating foam had broken off the external fuel tank of the Discovery shortly after liftoff Tuesday morning, the same problem that doomed the Columbia and its seven astronauts in the last mission, two and a half years ago.
The foam does not appear to have struck the Discovery, so the decision will not curtail its 12½-day mission to the International Space Station, the officials said. But further flights will be postponed indefinitely, starting with that of the Atlantis, which was to have lifted off as early as September.
"Until we fix this, we're not ready to go fly again," William W. Parsons, the manager of the shuttle program, said at a news briefing at the Johnson Space Center here on Wednesday evening.
The detection of another large breakaway piece of insulating foam is a potentially devastating setback for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a bitter counterpoint to the elation of Monday's seemingly perfect launching of the Discovery, a return to flight that was hailed as an inspiring comeback for the space program.
The effort to fix the foam problem had consumed more than two years and hundreds of millions of dollars. NASA identified the area on the tank that shed the latest piece of foam as a risk, but put off redesigning it.
"We decided it was safe to fly as is," Mr. Parsons said. "Obviously, we were wrong."
The incident occurred two minutes into the launching, at a point where the atmosphere is so thin that the piece drifted away. The Columbia accident occurred in part because the foam fell off the tank about 82 seconds after liftoff, when the air was much thicker and slowed the foam so the climbing orbiter struck it with great force.
N. Wayne Hale, the deputy manager of the shuttle program, said that if the Discovery foam had been shed earlier, "we think that it would have been really bad."
Tense and somber, Mr. Parsons said that he was "disappointed" in the news. Mr. Hale sounded resigned. "We are in the business of flying in space - it's a very difficult business," he said, adding: "It isn't disheartening. It's just the nature of the business."
Others were more dismayed. A NASA engineer who has been involved in the return-to-flight effort said: "It's an ugly story. It's a mess." The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issues involved, added, "Everyone's really, really disappointed," but continued: "It is what it is. Physics doesn't lie."
Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who now teaches at Duke and is a frequent critic of the space program, said that in some ways the problem was "worse than an unexpected anomaly arising."
"This was the major problem that they were looking to solve," Mr. Roland said. "It must be enormously demoralizing to them."
Representative Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee, said the shuttle program was "rightly grounded."
"Nothing can go forward at this juncture until there is further analysis and a remedy to the problem," Mr. Boehlert said. "It all depends on what they find. In some respects, it's back to the drawing board."
The Columbia and its crew were lost because a 1.67-pound piece of insulating foam that had fallen off the external tank during liftoff crashed through the leading edge of the shuttle's left wing. The resulting hole admitted superheated gases during the shuttle's fiery re-entry into the atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003.
That chunk fell from an area of hand-applied foam called the bipod arm ramp. The ramp's insulating foam surrounded the struts connecting the tank to the orbiter, and were originally designed to prevent ice from forming and becoming a debris hazard. But NASA had noticed that the bipod arm ramp tended to shed foam and decided to redesign it. They planned to replace it after the Columbia flight.
After the Columbia accident, the investigators who implicated the falling foam as the physical cause demanded that NASA find ways to sharply limit the amount of foam that falls off the external tank. Just as important, the investigative board determined, a "broken safety culture" tended to play down risks.
In response, NASA extensively tested foam and the way it is applied, modified the tank so that it would be less likely to shed debris, and replaced the foam-covered ramps with a heater.
In the incident described here on Wednesday, the new piece of foam - a hat-shaped chunk as much as 33 inches across at the widest part and 14 inches at the narrow part - sheared off another ramp on the external tank. It is known as the protuberance air load ramp, which NASA abbreviates as the PAL ramp, and was designed to minimize crosswise airflow and turbulence around cable trays and lines used to pressurize the external tank. The new piece is slightly smaller than the briefcase-size piece that hit the Columbia, Mr. Hale said.
Because of the other redesign efforts on the external tank, NASA engineers estimated that no piece of foam would come off the external tank that was larger than three-hundredths of a pound, and said they hoped to see no foam debris larger than one-hundredth of a pound.
On Wednesday, Mr. Parsons, who led the program requirements control board that considered all modifications, said, "We had enough data that showed we had had very few problems with the PAL ramp." The ramp, they found, performed a valuable protective function, he said; with no other obvious options, they decided the shuttle was safe to fly.
While the two other shuttles, Atlantis and Endeavour, are grounded, work will begin on solving the PAL ramp problem. "We'll put our best people on it," Mr. Parsons said, "and we'll figure out something to do."
"I don't know if that's a month, I don't know if that's three months," he went on. "We've got a lot of work in front of us."
But before that, the officials said, there is still a mission to complete and seven astronauts in space. Using the official numerical designation for the flight, Mr. Hale said, "Right now this team is focused on STS-114, and getting this crew home safely."
That means continuing with the work that had always been intended for the current mission: a thorough examination of the shuttle's thermal protection system for any damage, using an array of new cameras and laser systems.
Mr. Parsons and Mr. Hale said there were other surprising examples of lost foam - including divots several inches long that popped out of "acreage foam," which is applied robotically and had been considered to be free of shedding problems.
They also showed photos of the loss of a 1.5-inch piece of an insulating tile over a landing-gear door on the nose cone, which they suggested might have sheared because of an earlier repair. Mr. Hale said the tile would receive further examination, but was not considered a critical problem now.
"Are we concerned about this? We're treating this very seriously," he said. "Are we losing sleep over it? Not yet."
Mission managers said they briefly discussed the news of the foam chunk with the astronauts in the afternoon, and transmitted pictures to Discovery in the early evening after the astronauts' bed time.
The shuttle astronauts - the commander, Col. Eileen M. Collins; the pilot, Col. James M. Kelly; the flight engineer, Stephen K. Robinson; and the mission specialists, Soichi Noguchi, Andrew S. W. Thomas, Capt. Wendy B. Lawrence and Charles J. Camarda - spent most of their workday using the shuttle's robot arm and a 50-foot sensor-tipped boom to inspect the craft's nose and the wings' leading edges, and preparing to dock with the International Space Station.
During slow, close-up scans of the reinforced carbon structures with a high-definition television camera and laser scanners, no obvious damage was spotted. Though the preliminary results look promising, Mr. Hale said, there are problems with viewing some areas that will have to be repeated, and so "today we cannot tell you without a shadow of a doubt that we've got a clean bill of health" for those panels.
The astronauts had awakened to their first full day in space to the song "I Got You, Babe," as excerpted from the movie "Groundhog Day." The movie, about living the same day over and over, was a joking reference to the seemingly endless days in prelaunching quarantine as the crew awaited their chance to fly.
<NYT_AUTHOR_ID></NYT_AUTHOR_ID>Kenneth Chang contributed reporting from New York for this article.
