Posted on 09/16/2003 6:12:00 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
HOUSTON (Reuters) - The next space shuttle flight, designed to test repairs that might have saved the Columbia, will not make the March target set by NASA (news - web sites) and may not fly before midsummer, a top space flight official said on Tuesday.
The space agency plans to intensify its observation of the shuttle during future flights, training twice as many cameras on the orbiter during launch and developing a number of repair techniques that could be used by spacewalking astronauts.
But many of the safety measures are technologically challenging to develop, said Bill Parsons, the shuttle program manager.
"We need to take this slow and easy," he said.
Parsons said the next flight would not launch in March or April and that it was too soon to commit to May or June.
NASA had set a target launch date for March for the first space shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts on Feb. 1.
Parsons and astronaut Jim Halsell, who heads NASA's return-to-flight activities, outlined for reporters some of the steps NASA was developing for the next mission. They include "fundamentally, about twice as many cameras" trained on the orbiter and looking for signs of debris hitting the shuttle's brittle network of heat-resistant tiles and wing panels.
Cameras will even be mounted on the external fuel tank and the twin solid-fuel booster rockets, looking for debris hits.
It was a debris hit from foam peeling away from the shuttle's external fuel tank and striking Columbia's left wing during launch that doomed the astronaut crew 16 days later when the nation's oldest shuttle broke apart during re-entry.
NEW APPROACH
The next mission, featuring astronaut Eileen Collins commanding the Atlantis, will fly to the International Space Station (news - web sites), where spacewalking astronauts can practice repairing damage, and the space station crew can make even more photographic observations.
Halsell said the new emphasis on observation meant an entirely new approach for NASA.
"In the past, we would get what we could, but it was more important to get off the ground," Halsell said.
Parsons said the Atlantis flight, which originally was supposed to deliver a new crew and supplies to the space station, would be dedicated entirely to testing the new safety measures, and at least one additional flight would be added to refine those measures.
That creates a somewhat uncertain future for the space station itself, a $95 billion project involving 17 nations.
NASA's space station manager, Bill Gerstenmaier, said the pieces of the station already in orbit should survive a long layoff in the assembly sequence. But there are about 106,000 pounds (47,700 kg) of parts still waiting to be launched that might experience ill effects from their long storage at the Kennedy Space Center (news - web sites) in Florida.
"The things we have to watch are the things that are still on the ground," he said, and they range from featherweight solar panels to multitonmodules built for the airless, weightless environment of space.
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