Final Decision—No Repairs Needed for Endeavour
After about five hours of discussion, the Endeavour’s mission managers have decided against the extra spacewalk that would have been needed to repair the tear in the Endeavour spacecraft. This final decision was made after the final thermal test on the Endeavour tear was completed, with the astronauts waiting before this to anxiously to see what Friday would have entailed. Now, sighs of relief will be aboard the ISS tonight. The whole day had already been spent with the astronauts “practicing” the repair methods to fix the tear in the Endeavour, although they had never done anything like it before.
According to the CNN report, the plan would have been to send the astronauts out for the spacewalk on Saturday, tentatively. As repair tools for the job, they would have had to use black paint and goo that was similar to caulk. The plan was then to maneuver beneath the shuttle on the end of the 100-foot robotic arm and extension boom for their “painting job.” Unfortunately, there were few camera views available for the work. Risky, NASA mission managers did not want to jeopardize the astronauts any more than they had to unless it was highly necessary for the safety of the Endeavour.
The tests that have been given to the Endeavour show that there will not be any serious structural damage when the astronauts return to Earth next week. According to reports coming out of NASA, there never has been any fear about the Endeavour being destroyed like the Columbia had been. Where the concern was is when the Endeavour re-entered Earth’s orbit, the heat if the re-entry would weaken the spacecraft’s aluminum frame where the tear was located which would result in added repairs.
John Shannon is the chairman of the Endeavor mission management team, and is quoted as saying, “I am 100 percent comfortable that the work that has been done has accurately characterized it (the damage) and that we will have a very successful re-entry.” But the Johnson Space Center’s engineering group had wanted to go ahead with the shuttle repairs, although safety officials and everyone else decided to skip them.
A Nobel Prize-winning physicist individual by the name of Douglas Osheroff, questioned why NASA was hesitant to do the repairs, feeling they would increase the quality of the re-entry flight down. Comparing it to the Columbia doomed mission, Douglas Osheroff had been on the investigation board for the Columbia accident, and was recognizing some similarity between the two situations.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
