Hurricane Damage May Delay Launch of Shuttle

With two space shuttle facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina and hundreds of workers left homeless, NASA is reassessing its plans for launching another mission next year.

Before the hurricane struck the Gulf Coast last week, NASA had hoped to launch Discovery in March. The storm put those plans in disarray, although officials weren’t ready Thursday to officially give up on a spring flight.

“Right now, we’re still addressing what the implications are on the shuttle launch schedule, and if I say I don’t know what those are, that’s an understatement,” NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin told employees in a televised address.

Griffin downplayed an internal memo written Sept. 1 by acting shuttle program manager N. Wayne Hale Jr., who indicated that a launch before fall 2006 might not be possible given the hurricane damage and the ongoing effort to prevent foam insulation from falling off shuttle fuel tanks.

A chunk of foam flew off Discovery’s external fuel tank during liftoff in July; a large piece of foam broke away and struck Colombia in 2003, dooming the flight.

The space agency has grounded the shuttle fleet pending further investigation.

Griffin said Hale wrote the memo “at a particularly dark moment last week.” The NASA chief said he thought the launch would take place earlier than October 2006.

At a news conference later Thursday, Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA’s space station operations, refused to speculate on when the shuttle might fly again, saying, “It’s really too difficult to predict.”

The space agency estimates Hurricane Katrina caused at least $1 billion in damage at its facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi.