Are in-flights repairs even feasible. If you detected a fault in the heat shields while in orbit. Would you trust and back yourself to fix it; in EVA, mix up a special ointment, apply it successfully in null-grav; get back in safely and ride that rollercoaster home? That's the question.
Mission commander Eileen Collins, who was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with her six crewmates for training, said NASA had not yet decided on which repair techniques to test.
"Normally you'd have to make the decision a lot sooner," she said. "We've been training for over three years -- and we have a lot of flexibility in the sense that we're trained to maybe pick up some tasks late," Collins said, seemingly good-natured about the problem.
"But it is late, we're three months from launch." Columbia was destroyed after a chunk of insulation fell off the shuttle's fuel tank during launch and smashed a hole in the orbiter's left wing. The damage was undetected until after the shuttle attempted to re-enter Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003, and was torn apart by searing temperatures and high pressure.
NASA's first priority was to redesign the fuel tank and Discovery will fly with a new one.
MIXING MATERIAL IN SPACE
The heat shield repair technique that spacewalkers Soichi Noguchi of Japan and Steve Robinson have practiced the most involves a complex caulk gun and a heat-resistant material known as STA-54. Ground tests, however, indicate there may be problems mixing and applying the material in the weightless environment of space."I don't know if we're ready to do it in space or not," Robinson said. "We are not going to fly it if it's not ready," he added. NASA managers and engineers were meeting on Thursday to review options for the heat shield repair techniques and Collins said she was hopeful there would be a decision by the end of this month.
There are no options, however, to fix a hole as large as the one that downed Columbia. If that were to happen again, NASA is developing a plan to temporarily house the shuttle crew aboard the International Space Station.
Among the hundreds of items the Discovery crew is delivering to the station are supplies to sustain the seven astronauts aboard the outpost if they ended up having to abandon ship and take refuge there. A second shuttle would presumably be
launched to retrieve the crew within a month or so."This is not a certified thing that we're doing," Collins said, meaning that it was an option that might be used if needed rather than meeting the stringent requirements for flight operations. "We don't plan on doing it. But we do have the capability to stay if we had to."
The use of the space station as a refuge was called into question last week by Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who will be the next station commander. He said the emergency plan raised safety issues and he had pressed managers on the issue.
What? You think I'm that brave? What does Princess Leia say when she first lays eyes on the Millennium Falcon? - "Wow, you guys came in that thing? You are brave!"
- Art Neuro
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