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...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...
...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 over one of the wooden beams that holds the wall up, as opposed to the unsupported...
...NASA plans to announce today whether it will send the astronauts outside to repair the damage - something they could do by attaching a protective plate, dabbing on insulating paint, or squeezing on a layer of epoxy-like insulation. None of the fixes is perfect, though all of them do help - and all of them entail the added danger of an unscheduled spacewalk. (Two astronauts went out on a scheduled spacewalk this morning to replace equipment on the international space station, and two more walks are scheduled for Wednesday and Friday...
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...
...these things are what educators call teachable moments - a valuable and elusive commodity in the profession that only the best teachers and students know how to exploit fully. The folks at NASA have had two tragic teachable moments of their own - in 1986 and 2003. So far, they don't seem to have learned much...