Space Shuttle to Receive Emegency Repairs

Tycow writes "The BBC are reporting that Discovery needs emergency repairs - dangling material has been spotted on the belly of the shuttle, and NASA are worried they could cause overheating on re-entry. 'Nasa is concerned the dangling material - called gap fillers - could cause part of the shuttle to overheat as it re-enters the atmosphere.The type of repairs being planned have never been conducted by astronauts on a spacewalk before.'"

Comments

Paranoia.

[Inominate]

It's a minor problem, which ordinarily would have gone unnoticed. It's probably happened many times before. NASA is just being paranoid because they can't afford another accident. Alternative theory, NASA wanted to find something wrong that isn't really a danger and prove they can fix it, and that there is no danger anymore in space travel.

I hope the shuttle comes home safe...

[ChiralSoftware]

I hope the shuttle comes home safe and then gets parked in a museum. The problem here is that the heat shields are exposed to stress during both launch and entry. All other spacecraft have a heat shield that is only used one way or the other way, and then is disposed of. It's a bit much for me to want to reuse something that has to be exposed to the rigors of launch and then reentry and then be reused. I'm glad that it has worked as many times as it has in the past but this does not seem like a safe design and does not seem like the right thing to use to protect astronauts. The heat shielding is the one part of the shuttle that has no redundancy; if tiles are lost in critical places, the shuttle disintegrates.

It also seems like they have spent a large fraction of their space-time on this mission simply making sure the shuttle is fit to return to Earth, rather than doing useful space work. The shuttle was sold on the promise of routine, cheap, quick flights to space, and we have something that flies so irregularly that it's hard to even say how often it flies (once a year or less?). It's such a bucket of bolts that astronauts then have to spend half their time just inspecting it for damage while they're in orbit. NASA should not be putting astronauts at risk in a ship like this. NASA should be spending its budget on programs that have a future, rather than programs which have been a dead end for a long time.

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Re:If the shuttle blows up on re-entry

[sacrilicious]

Whatever the outcome, the USA surely does not want to let China or the EU get ahead in that field...

It's already bound to happen. We're killing innovation in the US with a suffocating tidal wave of patents and litigation, and completely de-emphasizing mathematics and sciences in the educational curriculums... putting up an appearance of being ahead in space flight can only last for a few more years. The foundation is rotting away.