Newsday July 18, 2006
Discovery makes its safe return
By Bryn Nelson
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - With twin staccato booms heralding its return, the Discovery space shuttle capped a successful mission with a safe landing yesterday morning, giving NASA a much-needed boost as it resumes the difficult task of assembling the International Space Station.
"I sort of feel like a quarterback that was on a team that won the Super Bowl," said entry flight director Steve Stich at a postlanding news conference.
"This is as good a mission as we've ever flown," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, though he hastened to add that his space agency was not about to get overconfident as it prepares to launch the Atlantis in late next month or in early September.
"We don't have any slack; we have just enough shuttle flights left to do the job, so we can't afford to mess up," he said.
Analysts pointed out that NASA has the unenviable task of pushing ahead with its challenging construction project while keeping a careful eye on its soon-to-retire shuttle fleet.
"The only way they can stay safe is to keep pretty much to the level of the inspections and refurbishment that they've been doing," said Donna Shirley, a former manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "They have to keep up the vigilance and the question is: Are they going to get sloppy again?"
Shirley and other agency watchers have given Griffin high marks for running a tight ship, but say the scheduling pressure of completing at least 15 shuttle missions ahead of the fleet's mandatory retirement in 2010 is undeniable.
"Going into the flight, it was a toss-up" as to whether the crew would be able to accomplish every task laid before them, shuttle commander Steve Lindsey conceded after landing. Ultimately, they did, but Lindsey said the timeline was the tightest of the four missions he's flown.
With NASA now embarking on what officials term the most complicated assembly activities ever attempted in space, the highly choreographed missions of Atlantis and all subsequent flights are likely to require similarly strenuous timelines.
"I have great faith in the people who go to work for NASA, being smart and hard workers. If anybody can pull it off, they can," Shirley said. "But it's a very complex, risky system and complex, risky systems can always fail. Look at the Big Dig."
Even so, the relatively good performance of the troublesome external fuel tank during Discovery's launch, the absence of significant damage to the orbiter's heat shield and Lindsey's "perfect" landing gave NASA reason to smile.
"What it does is provides some credibility to the agency," said W. Henry Lambright, a professor of political science and public administration at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. NASA's fate, he said, depends on performance. Its successes or failures are often very dramatic - and very public.
Once flight controllers gave the go-ahead for yesterday's landing, the shuttle fired its engines to slow itself on the nearly 70-minute journey home. Lindsey recalled seeing the Earth through one window and the orange glow of super-heated plasma through the other at one point during Discovery's re-entry through Earth's fiery atmosphere, while pilot Mark Kelly spied the moon through the same orange-ish glow.
"It was just wild. I've never seen an entry like that before," Lindsey said.
For nearly two weeks, NASA engineers were kept busy studying an unprecedented number of shuttle images - during its ascent, at the beginning and end of its orbit and during its landing sequence. But unlike in 2003, when falling foam struck the Columbia's left wing and ultimately sealed its fate, no sizable pieces of foam fell from the shuttle's external tank at critical moments and no worrisome damage was spotted on Discovery's sensitive heat shield - even after a preliminary check on the ground.
"This is the cleanest orbiter anyone remembers seeing," Griffin said, an assessment repeated throughout the day.
The Discovery transferred tons of much-needed supplies and equipment to the space station while delivering German astronaut Thomas Reiter for his six-month stay, bringing to three the crew members living aboard the orbiting outpost.
Space-walking astronauts Piers Sellers and Michael Fossum fixed a key station transporter that will be called upon to move big components during the station's continued construction, and the duo tested new techniques for inspecting and repairing the shuttle's thermal panels while in flight.
John Pike, a veteran space policy analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, said the mission was a noticeable improvement over last year's flawed return to flight, which was plagued by falling foam debris and protruding gap fillers.
"That just didn't look good," Pike said. "I think a year ago was a false start, and this one seemed to go just fine."
The question now, he said, is whether NASA can repeat that success every few months, rather than every few years.
"They were thrown from the horse and now they're back in the saddle," Pike said. "Whether they can stay in the saddle remains to be seen."
© Copyright 2006, Newsday Inc.
