Word: columbias
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...shuttle Discovery with the International Space Station last Thursday. Station commander Sergei Krikalev had prepared the little ceremony, a Russian tradition intended to bring good luck to a visitor to your home. After the shuttle's stunning lift-off two days earlier--the first since the loss of the Columbia orbiter in 2003--it didn't seem the crew would need such happy charms. But now it appears the shuttle program as a whole--if not the astronauts themselves--may need a lot of luck indeed...
...hours before the docking, NASA announced that the entire shuttle fleet was being grounded again, after evidence that four pieces of insulating foam--the largest the size of a skateboard--had spun off the ship's external fuel tank during lift-off, just the kind of debris that damaged Columbia's wing and doomed the ship. Only one small piece may have struck the shuttle this time, glancing off a wing with so little force it didn't register on impact sensors. But a camera mounted on the shuttle's 50-ft. arm as well as photos taken from...
...thought Alyssa was cute,” he says of two of the other contestants. Alyssa is the only other Scholar who will attend Harvard next year, while Max will matriculate to Columbia...
...which the foam, at that acceleration, could begin to present the danger of serious damage. So what surprised NASA isn't that they lost a few bits of foam, but that one of the pieces that fell off was very big: Almost as big as the piece that killed Columbia, which weighed 1.67 pounds...
...this may well be a problem that they can't fix, although the fact that NASA has stopped future flights also signals the much tighter safety standards that are now in place. Shuttles have been shedding tiles and foam for years, but luck and careful maintenance prevented tragedies. Then Columbia happened. Since then, NASA has narrowed the aperture of danger it is willing to tolerate. The current shuttle, by comparison to some of the previous missions, is remarkably clean despite the foam that fell off. In that respect, it shows that the work of the past two years has produced...