NASA Debates Second Discovery Repair

An anonymous reader writes "NASA is debating today whether or not they should attempt a second repair attempt of the Space Shuttle Discovery to repair a possible problem with the thermal blanket. On Wednesday, an astronaut removed two protruding cloth fillers from between the ceramic tiles on the space shuttle's heat shield. "I think in the old days we would not have worried about this so much," said shuttle programme deputy manager Wayne Hale The astronaut extended his gloved hand and quickly removed the first fiber strip, which was sticking up from Discovery's smooth, tiled underside. "It's coming out very easily," the astronaut said. Arm operator Jim Kelly then maneuvered the arm about three meters to the second protruding strip, known as a gap filler, and Robinson gently pulled that piece out as well. The concern now is whether or not a damaged thermal blanket under one of the cockpit windows would tear apart during re-entry and strike the orbiter."

Comments

Re:well, that's it for the US space program

[ScentCone]

just to finance silly foreign adventures that don't help their economy ...

By which you presumably mean dealing with the Taliban, and with Saddam. I'd say that 9/11 had a pretty huge impact on our economy, wouldn't you? And the Taliban regimein Afghanistan was playing delighted host to the people who planned and carried out that bit of nastiness. Turning places like towards democracy and away from corrupt theocracy is so, so in our economic interests that to say otherwise suggests a total head-in-the-sand lack of world view.

As for the Europeans and Japanese... well, aren't they lucky at how little they've had to spend on defense in the last 30, 40 years. The US has done pretty much all of the heavy lifting, allowing them to fiddle around with whatever floats their collective boats (um, "collective" being the key word in most of Europe, certainly). The Chinese are jumping ahead quickly by using other people's intellectual work, and by keeping their government in a position to manipulate their labor and import/export/currency in ways that can't be sustained, but which for now, play well for them in the news. Clock's ticking on that front.