Word: endeavour
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Pilots have always had a pretty generous standard for judging what constitutes a safe return home: any landing you can walk away from, they say, is a good one. All the current handwringing about the gouge on the belly of the space shuttle Endeavour notwithstanding, the odds are extremely high that the seven astronauts aboard the ship will indeed walk away when their mission ends 10 days from now. That doesn't mean that there won't be plenty of knotted stomachs in Mission Control and the homes of the crewmembers until then - and with good reason...
...shuttle Columbia in February 2003, when superheated gases generated during reentry entered the ship through a breach in the insulation. Ever since then, astronauts have given their spacecraft a close visual inspection upon reaching orbit to look for any troublesome chips. On Sunday, a 3D laser imager attached to Endeavour's robotic arm revealed what could be a nasty...
...vessel's interior. What's more, the greater the number of tiles damaged by debris, the greater the jagged area exposed to the force of rentry - something which can, in theory, lead to a catastrophic peeling away of whole stretches of tiles. The comparative severity of the injury to Endeavour is leading NASA to conclude that it was probably denser ice, not comparatively light foam, that is responsible for the damage...
...Endeavour has plenty of things going for it. While the temperature in the vicinity of the wheel well grows blistering during reentry - on the order of 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit - that's a fair bit cooler than the 3,000 degrees reached at the spacecraft's nose and wingtips. Even damaged tiles can usually survive the heating at the aft end of the ship. NASA reports that it caught one bit of good luck in that the breach occurred right over a stretch of the aluminum framework of the ship itself - a bit like damaging a sheet-rock wall directly...
Yesterday's launch included plenty of respectful grace notes. Sixty of the 114 candidates for the Teacher in Space slot in 1985 were at the liftoff, as were a number of relatives of the astronauts lost in the 1986 explosion. NASA was almost defensive in insisting that Endeavour is a sound ship, pointing out that in the nearly five years since it last flew it's undergone improvements so extensive as to leave it almost unrecognizable. "It's like a new space shuttle," shuttle program manager N. Wayne Hale told a news conference...