Possible delay for Discovery Mission
NASA shuttle managers have announced there possibly will be a delay in the October 23 launching of the Discovery shuttle, due to a possibility that three of the 44 reinforced carbon panels may need to be replaced. The panels line the edges of the shuttle’s wings, and may need to be returned to the NASA hangar for their replacement, as the outer coating of the wings shows degradation.
Planning to take a new live-in compartment for the International Space Station, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center has been reviewing whether the Discovery should launch as scheduled or be delayed for repairs. They have recommended that the panels should be replaced before the launching, whereas the shuttle program does not want to delay the launching. As an alternative plan, it proposes that the panels be left alone for now and continue with the launching, based upon other NASA engineers’ data. As far as the weakening of the coating, no one seems to know how it is developing so it is pretty hard to prevent it.
Up until now, the panels have been able to withstand the 3,000 degrees when it re-entered the atmosphere of Earth. The engineers at NASA do not feel the panels are a problem as they have already flown twice with no problem, and do not feel there will be any more degradation—at least enough to delay the launch on the 23rd. Time is running out to make a decision, so hopefully NASA’s top agency officials will be making a decision with the shuttle program manager Wayne Hale to order more data to be collected.
My opinion? This decision should have been made earlier so the panels could have been replaced in time for the launching. Simple. If there was “any degree” of danger for the astronauts they should be pulled. It’s not like NASA had no idea the shuttle was taking off on the 23rd, so they had plenty of time—if they weren’t spending so much time disagreeing with the shuttle’s engineers. NASA says they have improved and expanded its shuttle wing panel testing since the Columbia disaster, but it will not bring anyone back from it. Nor this time if a wrong decision is made. My mom always said, “If in doubt—stand still.”
But soon at the ISS will be the Russian Soyuz craft with the ISS’s first female commander, along with Malaysia’s first space traveler. Astronaut Peggy Whitson of Beaconsfield, Iowa, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, and Dr. Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor of Malaysian will be the crew members. With a docking that possibly occurs 220 miles over Central Asia, hopefully both missions will be a success and everything will be a success.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, 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.
