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Shuttle Team's Pressing Task: Get U.S. Flying Again

Posted on: Monday, 17 January 2005, 06:00 CST

For two years, space shuttle engineer Steven Holmes has seen little of his 6-year-old son and missed nearly all of his teenage daughter's soccer games. Mostly he's been 500 miles away, helping to revamp a New Orleans factory that makes the shuttle's fuel tank.

''The suitcase doesn't get put away at my house anymore,'' says Holmes, who normally works at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. ''When the clothes are clean, they just go back in the suitcase again.''

Holmes, like the astronaut corps and thousands of others, has devoted his life to getting the space shuttle flying again.

America's shuttle fleet has been grounded since the shuttle Columbia fell apart on Feb. 1, 2003. Now the shuttle's return to orbit depends on Holmes and other unsung workers.

The upcoming flight of shuttle Discovery, tentatively scheduled for May or June, bears a heavy burden. It will test a host of new inventions to keep the spacecraft and its crew safe. It will mark a recovery from tragedy. And it will show the world whether NASA has solved the problems that doomed Columbia and can still muster the right stuff.

The flight is symbolic, says Andrew Thomas, an astronaut on the flight. ''It's the return of the U.S. space program. It's getting back in the space business.''

An investigation pinned the Columbia accident on a piece of foam insulation about the size of most VCRs. NASA cameras saw it fall off the shuttle's fuel tank during launch and hit the wing. But shuttle managers declined to have satellites examine Columbia. Nor did they ask the crew to do an emergency spacewalk to look for damage.

As a result, no one knew the foam had smashed a hole the size of a medium pizza in the wing's heat shield. There was no way to fix the damage anyway. As Columbia returned to Earth, hot gases poured into the hole and melted the shuttle's insides. The crew of seven, which realized at the last minute that things had gone wrong, died.

People in the shuttle workforce have spent countless hours since then figuring out how to keep foam on the tank, how to detect damage to the shuttle, and how to fix any damage in orbit. Outsiders such as the independent panel overseeing NASA's efforts say the agency has made good progress.

NASA's actions ''will result in reduced risk to the continued flights of the shuttle and its crew,'' says Richard Covey, the panel's co-chair.

But there have been setbacks on the road to recovery. Shuttle manager William Parsons said last month that devising shuttle-repair techniques has proved unexpectedly difficult, so Discovery won't carry a repair kit guaranteed to fix even minor problems. Nor will it carry all the sensors that would be useful to spot damage.

And despite his positive assessment, Covey adds that NASA ''will ultimately have to determine if the remaining risk is sufficiently low to justify returning to flight.''

Discovery's flight alone won't prove the shuttle is safer, says Jerry Grey of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He says that shuttle accidents are rare to begin with, so it will take many flights before it's clear that safety has improved. ''If the thing flies safely the first time, that would be expected,'' he says. ''The test will be the 40th or 50th flight.''

Whatever the outcome, the four people profiled here have dedicated their lives to getting the shuttle flying again. Two are members of the seven-person crew on the first flight; two are engineers who will cheer Discovery from the ground. They all have different reasons for being part of the program. But they all have the same passion -- they want to put America back in space.

Source: USA TODAY

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