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No shuttle launch before March, NASA says

Posted on: Thursday, 18 August 2005, 12:12 CDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The next launch of a space shuttle will not be until March 2006, NASA officials said on Thursday.

"It looked like the early opportunities don't work for us," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for Space Operations, told a news conference.

"From an overall standpoint we think really March 4th is the time frame we are looking at."

The U.S. space agency is still trying to determine why a large piece of foam broke off the shuttle Discovery's fuel tank during launch last month, Gerstenmaier said.

The shuttle Columbia was torn apart when it re-entered Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003, after a piece of foam insulation fell off its tank during launch and damaged its wing. All seven of Columbia's crewmembers were killed.

Gerstenmaier, newly appointed to direct NASA's return to human space flight, said March 4 was not a hard launch date but a planning target. He said it might allow a more efficient use of the shuttles Atlantis and Discovery in servicing the International Space Station.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said the space agency was taking a careful approach.

"There is a change in thinking. I have changed the game on shuttle thinking," Griffin told the news conference.

"We are not trying to get a specific number of flights out of the shuttle system."

Griffin said NASA made a big mistake in not looking at the foam issue sooner. Members of a panel examining the Columbia disaster said on Wednesday that some of the problems still existed.

"We in NASA didn't look in detail at foam shedding from the tank for 113 flights and shame on us," Griffin said.

"Absolutely everyone in and out of NASA learned a lesson, I hope, from that."

The loss of a chunk of foam during Discovery's launch was "embarrassing," Griffin said.

"On the first flight after we started really paying attention to foam, almost everything we did worked," Griffin said.

"So do I have a crisis of confidence in the team that almost made everything work right? Of course not. We are going to fix those things that we didn't get right."

Source: REUTERS

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