NY Daily News July 4, 2006
Shuttle is 'ready to go fly,' says NASA
By Richard Sisk
WASHINGTON - NASA decided last night it will proceed with a Fourth of July shuttle liftoff despite potentially dangerous cracking and flaking in fuel line insulation.
"We are ready to go fly," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, said last night. "We determined that the foam would do the job it was supposed to do."
Liftoff is planned for 2:38 p.m., NASA said.
After two weather-related launch scrubs over the weekend, safety crews yesterday morning detected a 5-inch-long, quarter-inch-wide crack in protective foam on a strut connecting the shuttle to the 535,000-gallon external fuel tank.
At the base of the launch pad, the crews later found a triangular, 3-inch piece of foam that had flaked off from the crack area, but "we have more insulation in this area than we absolutely need," said John Chapman, the external tank manager.
John Shannon, the shuttle's deputy manager, said the flaked-off foam "looked like this small piece of bread crust."
Officials believe the crack was caused by condensation trailing down the shuttle's fuel line and solidifying into ice during the second launch attempt on Sunday. When the fuel tank was emptied after the delay, the ice melted and the foam cracked as the line expanded in the warm air.
A lengthy launch delay, or a flight malfunction that endangered the crew, would scrap NASA's tight timetable for putting up 16 shuttle flights by the year 2010 to complete the International Space Station.
"If they lose another crew, that's it" for the U.S. human spaceflight program, which would shut down while a new crew vehicle was developed, said John Pike, a space analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.
Flyaway foam during liftoff has been a major concern since a 1.67-pound chunk of insulation punched a hole in the wing of the Columbia shuttle in 2003, dooming the crew of seven on reentry.
Shannon said the foam that came off Discovery weighed .0057 pounds, well below the .013 pounds that would be considered dangerous if it hit the shuttle.
© Copyright 2006, Daily News, L.P.
