NASA Readies for Launch -- and Holds Its Breath

As NASA prepares for the return of human spaceflight, there is little talk of giant leaps for mankind.

If there’s one phrase to describe the sober mood at America’s space agency, it’s: No more mistakes.

After two space shuttle disasters and 14 astronaut deaths, NASA managers know that the agency’s tattered reputation, as well as the future of its human spaceflight program, is on the line with the launch of Discovery, the first since the Columbia accident in early 2003.

NASA officials acknowledge that another accident would probably kill the shuttle program, hobble President Bush’s plans to send astronauts to the moon and Mars, and endanger plans to finish the International Space Station.

“There’s a heck of a lot at stake,” said Paul Hill, the lead flight director for the Discovery launch. “We have to prove that the current generation ... can be trusted to do the great things” their elders accomplished in the Apollo program and others from NASA’s glory years.

Twenty thousand workers have labored for two years at a cost of $1.4 billion to reach these goals with the launch of Discovery, now scheduled for July 13.

On Thursday, NASA officially cleared Discovery for launch despite a report earlier in the week from an independent panel that said the space agency had failed to fully resolve some key shuttle safety problems.

NASA officials said they had analyzed the shuttle from top to bottom to make sure the malfunction that brought down Columbia on Feb. 1, 2003 -- a loose piece of insulating foam that struck the craft’s wing -- would never happen again.

Newly appointed NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin recently told Congress that the agency had “made more than 100 major maintenance modifications and upgrades” to the shuttle and its supporting systems.

Those changes include a new surveillance system with about 100 cameras to monitor the craft. If anything were to hit Discovery during its eight-minute ascent, it wouldn’t go unnoticed.

NASA has redesigned the giant external fuel tank that attaches to the orbiter to make sure no big chunks of insulating foam fall off.

In case the craft is damaged, Discovery for the first time is to carry repair kits to patch the heat-absorbing tiles and the carbon composite panels on the nose and wings.

Scott Hubbard, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center near Mountain View, Calif., and one of the 13 members of the panel that investigated the Columbia accident, said he saw a new “philosophy of safety at the top.” He said he believed the Columbia disaster would not be repeated.

But for all the changes, there is a lingering concern about NASA and its aging shuttle fleet.

The shuttle is an amalgam of 2.5 million parts and 230 miles of wiring. Once considered the cutting edge of technology, it is now a creaky beast approaching the end of its service life.

Some fear the shuttle is so flawed that solving the problems that destroyed Challenger and Columbia will not guarantee against other potential defects.

“NASA is good at fixing the last accident,” said Stanford University physicist Douglas Osheroff, a member of the Columbia investigation panel.

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These are the twilight years of America’s once-proud space shuttle program. After 24 years of service, the shuttle is as outmoded as a crank telephone.

Before the craft is retired in 2010, NASA is planning 28 more flights -- just enough to complete construction of the space station.

The goal of the shuttle program is to make a graceful exit -- a far cry from several decades ago, when it was conceived as the next step into the solar system. Planners envisioned 50 flights a year.

President Nixon praised the craft, saying it would “revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it.”

To a large degree, it did just that.

Although the shuttle never made more than nine flights in a year, the launches seemed so routine that NASA began to worry that it was losing the attention of the American public. To bolster interest, the agency began offering rides to people from various nations and walks of life. The launch of Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986, would carry the first teacher into space, bright-eyed Christa McAuliffe.

Unbeknownst to the Challenger crew, engineers from Morton Thiokol Inc., the maker of the shuttle’s two rocket boosters, expressed fears the night before the launch that the cold weather predicted for the next morning could cause a failure of the thin, rubbery O-rings sealing a joint.

“My God, Thiokol,” a NASA manager exclaimed. “When do you want me to launch, next April?”

The launch went ahead and all seven astronauts onboard died.

An investigation placed much of the blame on a NASA bureaucracy mesmerized by its successes.

NASA promised to reform itself. And for the next 17 years, shuttle flights became almost as routine as before.

And then came Columbia.

Fifty-seven seconds into the flight of Columbia on Jan. 16, 2003, ground cameras saw one large piece of foam and two smaller ones break away from the fitting that attached the external fuel tank to the orbiter. (Foam is sprayed on the external fuel tank, which contains frigid liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel, to keep ice from forming on the outside.)

A later analysis showed that the biggest chunk of foam, estimated to have been 27 inches long and 18 inches wide, hit the underside of the orbiter’s left wing at 416 mph to 573 mph.

Foam had been coming off fuel tanks since the earliest days of the shuttle program. At first, it was considered a critical issue, but as shuttles continued to return home safely, many in NASA came to believe that foam would not harm the orbiter.

Still, a NASA team charged with looking at the foam strike on Columbia was worried. The team made three requests to use military satellites to photograph Columbia’s left wing. Each was denied by NASA managers higher up the chain of command.

As Columbia reentered Earth’s atmosphere after 15 days in orbit, the hole in the wing panel allowed air to pour in at temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees. As the orbiter broke apart, debris was scattered from west Texas to southern Louisiana.

Seven months after the tragedy, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued a scathing report that blamed the accident on the foam and a badly flawed culture at NASA.

“We became overconfident,” said Stephen Robinson, a mission specialist on Discovery. “We were convinced we were the most safety-conscious organization in the world. We talked about safety every day. While we were doing that, we were making mistakes.”

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The flight of Discovery is to be the most closely scrutinized in spacefaring history.

When it launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, its every motion is to be watched by 107 cameras: some on the ground; a few aboard planes waiting for the shuttle at 60,000 feet.

With Discovery reaching orbit, the crew plans to use a 50-foot robotic arm to scan virtually every bit of the hull for debris damage.

This time, military satellites are to photograph the craft as it orbits in space.

Most of NASA’s efforts have been dedicated to reducing the chances of stray debris harming the craft.

After redesigning the external fuel tank to eliminate areas that might shed foam, engineers said they believed no orbiter would ever be hit by a blow like the one that downed Columbia.

“We had a 2-pound piece of foam” come off before, said N. Wayne Hale Jr., deputy manager of the shuttle program. “Now the most we’ll have is 0.026 pounds.”

Some experts, however, contend that even bits of foam known as popcorn could cause trouble in certain circumstances. As it turns out, foam is part of a broader problem with the now-acknowledged delicacy of the craft’s skin.

There are no easy solutions, given the myriad objects that could damage the craft.

The latest example was in early May, when shuttle managers were planning for a May 22 launch date. The shuttle was standing at Launch Pad 39B, when the most recent debris analysis came in.

NASA engineers had already looked at 175 ways that foam and ice could come off the fuel tank. Tests had shown that ice could form along the bellows, or expansion joints, on the feedlines during fueling, an area that couldn’t be covered with insulating foam because it would crack and fall off. Engineers had installed a “drip lip” around the joints to channel moisture to a safe location.

Even though ice had never damaged an orbiter, the test results prompted agency officials to delay the launch by two months to install a heater to prevent ice, and to make other improvements.

NASA has tried to deal with many of the debris problems. It has redesigned the mechanism that catches the 70-pound bolts that fall away after the boosters separate from the shuttle. It has strengthened portions of the orbiter to better withstand hits from stray debris, including the estimated 9,000 pieces of space junk circling Earth. Hardened windows have been installed on the flight deck.

But there is no way for the agency to completely guard against debris. “We have substantially reduced the hazard,” Hale said. “But we haven’t driven it to zero.”

The real question is: What level of risk is acceptable?

Practical considerations limit how far engineers can go to enforce safety.

One recommendation from the Columbia investigation board was for the shuttle to operate with the same degree of safety as the space station. The danger of a catastrophic hit from debris to the station has been calculated at 0.5% per year.

Making the orbiter meet that standard would require a fivefold increase in its ability to withstand damage. Doing that with current technology would make the craft so heavy it couldn’t reach space, NASA officials say.

The alternative has been to design a method for the astronauts to repair their spacecraft in case of a strike from foam, ice or space junk.

One spacewalk planned for the Discovery astronauts would test two techniques. The first repair system is called an emittance wash, a sticky, caulk-like mixture of fine-grit siliconcarbide granules that is used to seal tears in the insulating tiles that cover most of the orbiter. The second resembles a Flash Gordon ray gun, which applies a substance called NOAX, or “the goo,” to seal cracks in the panels.

Despite all the work and money that has gone into producing these repair kits, the crew of Discovery has been less than enthusiastic about entrusting their lives to them.

Mission specialist Charles Camarda said it might be as dangerous to repair damage as to leave it alone. At Mach 25, tiny variations in aerodynamics can throw an orbiter out of control.

“If the damage is on a critical leading edge, I wouldn’t want my crew or any crew to fly back,” Camarda said.

Some crew members have said they would rather abandon Discovery and wait for rescue in the space station. The longest a crew could stay would be about 43 days. Even then, they would have to use emergency oxygen.

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Beyond fixing the mechanical problems is the deeper question of whether NASA is ready to fly.

The Columbia investigation board was biting in its criticism: “We are convinced that the management practices overseeing the Space Shuttle Program were as much a cause of the accident as the foam.”

NASA, at one time among the most innovative organizations in the world, had become a place that emphasized “chain of command, following the rules and going by the book,” the investigation board wrote.

Hill, the Discovery flight director, said the question was not whether NASA was capable of flying the shuttle, but whether it had regained the discipline and fortitude to press beyond Earth’s orbit to return to the moon and then go on to Mars.

The loss of one more orbiter would reduce the fleet to two craft, barely enough to keep operating since one shuttle must be held in reserve as a rescue ship.

The political repercussions of a third disaster would be more serious than in the two previous accidents. Some NASA experts have said it would, at a minimum, kill the shuttle program.

That in turn would endanger the completion of the space station, because the shuttle, with its bus-sized cargo bay capable of carrying 56,000 pounds of equipment, is the only vehicle able to carry large pieces of construction material.

Though design work is underway on a new generation spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, it may not be ready until 2014.

There is no guarantee the new vehicle will be able to perform shuttle-type missions, or that the international consortium backing the space station program will be willing to wait.

Many space enthusiasts were delighted by Bush’s announcement last year that Americans would return to the moon and then go on to Mars. It was the first shot in the arm the space program had received from political leaders in years.

A third shuttle failure would probably not kill the dreams of visiting other planets, since those dreams have been woven into the human imagination at least since Jules Verne imagined shooting a spaceship to the moon from a cannon. But it would set back the effort, which in the case of a Mars trip is several decades away.

It is hard to gauge how much NASA has changed. Like any bureaucracy, some pieces can change, others cannot.

NASA moved quickly after the Columbia accident to reshape parts of the organization to prevent the kind of insular decision making that led to the disaster. An independent engineering task force, insulated from the influence of other departments, was formed to set engineering standards for the entire space agency. A separate independent group was established to provide technical advice on safety issues.

The agency has gone so far as to spend $857,000 to redecorate the room where mission managers meet each day. Now, the table where managers sit is round so no one can be in a dominant position.

A crucial change has been made at the top.

Griffin became NASA administrator in April. His predecessor, Sean O’Keefe, was a fiscal disciplinarian who took over the space agency at a tumultuous time of shrinking budgets and chaotic overspending. O’Keefe had been deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, where he oversaw management and preparation of the federal budget.

Griffin came from the heart of NASA’s engineering tradition. In many ways, he is considered the quintessential rocket scientist.

Early in his career he was chief engineer at the space agency. He is the author of the textbook, “Space Vehicle Design.” Before returning to NASA, he headed the space department at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

Griffin made it clear within days of becoming administrator that engineering thoroughness and discipline would be the key to NASA’s future.

He promised to leave “absolutely no stone unturned” in ensuring the safety of Discovery’s launch.

His first crisis came quickly.

Weeks before the first scheduled launch of Discovery, in May, internal engineering documents were leaked to the New York Times.

Employees who leaked the documents said NASA managers were fudging numbers to make the results of debris testing look better than they were. The employees said they didn’t allow their names to be used because they feared reprisals.

NASA managers denied tinkering with equations. Showing that he too was part of the new warts-and-all NASA, Hale let his emotions flare as he answered allegations that he was cutting corners to get the shuttle flying once more.

“It is to my everlasting shame that my name appears in Chapter 6 of the [Columbia accident] report,” he said. “I never want to go to another astronaut’s memorial service. There will be no corners cut on my watch.”

Hale said he was most distressed that the employees decided they had no recourse but to go public with their concerns. The new NASA is a place that values its critics, he said.

A review of the problems resulted in delaying Discovery’s launch until July to make further improvements.

It was not an easy decision to make. Once the shuttle is on the launch pad, the momentum to continue is enormous.

But Griffin said: “We are going to return to flight, not rush to flight.”

Hale later wrote in a memo to shuttle workers that the decision was an appropriate test of whether they were ready and worthy to assume the responsibility of spaceflight.

“The character that we will need to explore the universe in this and the succeeding generations is being formed today,” he wrote. “Make sure that it is a good character. Make sure that character’s lessons are written firmly in our hearts.”