CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Workers may have accidentally cut or crushed the section of foam that broke off Discovery’s fuel tank during its launch two months ago, a mishap that threatened the safety of the astronauts and grounded the shuttle fleet.
That is the leading theory for the cause behind the disturbing loss of foam insulation that cast a cloud over NASA’s return to space, Wayne Hale, the newly appointed manager of the space shuttle program, said Tuesday.
Hale said the shuttle will not fly again until the foam insulation problem is resolved – at least no sooner than spring.
He also said repair work has been set back because of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The storms dealt “a severe blow” to resuming shuttle flights and caused NASA to lose three months of work, he said.
In a memo soon after Katrina slammed two shuttle facilities on the Gulf Coast, Hale speculated that the space shuttles might be grounded until fall 2006. He has since noted that progress has been made in understanding the foam problem and getting the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, which manufactures the tanks, back into limited operation.
“We’re working a spring kind of launch date, but we haven’t established one,” he said. May is the earliest, most likely target for a launch.
To NASA’s horror, a 1-pound, 3-foot chunk of insulating foam peeled away from Discovery’s external fuel tank during liftoff in late July.
The falling foam was the same kind of problem that doomed Columbia in 2003, and occurred despite 21/2 years of improvements and assurances that this was the safest tank ever built.
What probably happened is that during modifications to the tank at Michoud, technicians using plastic knives to remove nearby foam may have made small cuts in the section that tore away, allowing air to condense in the crevices against the tank, which was filled with supercold fuel, Hale said.
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