Space Shuttle Fleet Grounded!

NASA sources | MB26

[MindBender26]

NASA realizes debris that fell of external fuel tank yesterday came close to causing irrepairable damage to shuttle now in orbit.

Fleet GROUNDED. More later

Chances to return to flight again, no better than 50/50.

[RightWhale]

maybe bringing up facts is a waste of my time

No, go right ahead. I have worked on the space program, but I won't throw my rocket scientist credentials away just because somebody had trouble with foam adhesion.

[TaxRelief]

...the spaceship won't fly again until the agency understands why a large section of foam peeled away...

They should have just used my daughter's nail glue.

Honestly, though. This wasn't a problem with the early shuttle flights; How hard can it be to figure out what has changed.

[IronMan04]

Is she still in Charge of the EPA or NASA?

[hattend]

Read what he said again. He said the NEXT shuttle will be where it belongs, on top of the stack.

Based on plans so far, he's right.

[samadams2000]

Doesnt sound like the decision to launch was run through a scientific probability analysis...which is verrry scary. And Im no rocket scientist.

[glock rocks]

I find it amazing that with all the technology and expertise available for NASA to use, NASA has apparently not fixed the problems with foam insulation that caused the Columbia disaster.

Hey, at least they put a nifty surveillance camera up on the tank so they could catch the perp after the fact.

[You Dirty Rats]

And the shuttle on top is going to get its liquid fuel from where exactly? If you fill the shuttle with fuel, then there is no room for cargo.

The real problem is using manned missions to send cargo up into low earth orbit. That was always a foolish idea. Use ELVs for cargo and smaller launch vehicles for humans. Instead, they tried to make a hybrid vehicle that would satisfy all needs and it stinks in every sense.

[liberty2004]

We just gave the africans $50 Billion for nothing.

Exactly. It is an absolute waste of taxpayer money to please the left the idiot PC crowd. Disgusting.

[BurbankKarl]

It's not that amazing...the people that designed the Shuttle are all gone from the program.

Perhaps they need to bid out the foam problem to India....where the engineers are.

[oh8eleven]

Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars going up in smoke.
NASA

[SierraWasp]

Try Al Gore and Carol Browner of the Clinton, Clinton & Gore, Inc... The world's greatest criminal enterprise!!!

[steveegg]

So, they're still using the environmentally friendly yet deadly main tank insulation???

'Fraid so. Can't be killing anybody besides those pesky human astronauts </sarcasm>

[TalonDJ]

How many years has it been flying? 24? How many years have we been going into space? 50? 45? (depends on how you count it) How long until we stop excepting 'but it is SOOO risky' as an excuse for poor engineering? Soyuz has had how many consecutive successful launches? Did you know that between each shuttle mission they would rewrite large portions of the flight software and have to do around 40 simulated flights just to test the software changes? If we did that in commercial aircraft world airline tickets would cost a million dollars each. Having flown it for 25 years there is no good excuse why that sort of thing should be standard practice. That much effort every mission into code that should not have been designed to NEED rewriting and still FOAM kills the whole vehicle. That level of incompetence in NASA's engineering management is truly astounding.

[cake_crumb]

Another thanks to Algore and his useless, dangerous, "environmentally friendly" foam.

[BurbankKarl]

She works at the "Albright Group" (yes, that Albright)

Carol M. Browner, Principal


Carol Browner served as head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, a $7 billion, 18,000-employee agency responsible for protecting the public’s air, water, and the health of their communities. She served as a member of the President’s Cabinet for eight years. Ms. Browner, an attorney, is widely recognized for her innovative partnerships with the business community and non-governmental organizations, forging common sense, cost-effective solutions to public health and environmental challenges. Accomplishments during her tenure included enacting the strongest-ever national air pollution standards, creating innovative and flexible alternatives to traditional regulatory programs, and leveraging more than $1 billion in public and private funds to cleanup brownfields.

[cabojoe]

RightWhale Owns.

[Normal4me]

I have lived here on the space coast all of my life. I have seen just about every type of rocket explode or fail. In the late fifties they use to just fall over and explode. Some flew off into the local river.

Our society has become a "Perfection" society. If something doesn't work perfect we blame someone. If a humvee in Iraq runs over a landmine, we blame someone because the vehicle wasn't built "right". If a hurricane destroys some homes on the coast, we blame the homeowners. If a tornado wipes out a trailer park in Oklahoma, we blame the people for living in Oklahoma.

I wish this was a perfect world but it would make life pretty dull living.

[MississippiMan]

It's WAY past time for NASA to tell the Liberal Politically Correct do-gooders to get lost, because they're the ones responsible for the grounding of the space program, and they're the ones with the Columbia deaths on their hands.

Anyone wonder why we flew shuttles for almost two decades without this foam problem? It's quite simple. Until a few years ago, they used a different foam on the tanks. A foam that worked beautifully and didn't come flying off and knocking chunks of the orbiter off. Unfortunately, that was some very very EVIL foam that was hurting the ozone layer, and had to be replaced with an inferior formulation that was "safe."

Now look. Infuriating.

MM

[IonImplantGuru]

If the situation is this serious, and there is the slightest chance that Discovery might be unable to make a safe re-entry, they might have to head for the I.S.S., hole up there until a Russian flight can bring them back, and ditch Discovery either in orbit until it can be retrieved, or set it on a course to the sun, where it will be burn up.

There's another option: send these guys up to bring the shuttle back ...

[Cboldt]

It is almost unimaginable that NASA wouldn't have adequately addressed the specific problem that destroyed the last shuttle in flight.

I think they did. The press kit for this flight describes the efforts that went into the particular failure mode that struck Columbia. I don't know for sure, but suspect that the location of the recent foam shedding is a new location.