Word: shipping
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...that was before the hinky data started coming down from that same left side of the ship in the final seconds of the flight. Now the film that already got a once-over is going to be looked at a lot more closely. "We can't discount that those [events] may be connected," Dittemore admits, then hastens to add, "but a lot of things look like they're going to be the smoking gun in this business and turn...
...falling foam did damage the ship, the most disturbing possibility is that it chipped or broke one or more of Columbia's heat-absorbing tiles. The spacecraft is protected from the hellish heat of re-entry by thermal blankets and about 24,000 black and white ceramic tiles. The jigsaw-puzzle pieces have given the space agency fits since the very first flight of the very first shuttle--Columbia in April 1981. Handfuls of them often flaked away during lift-off, leaving NASA with nothing to do but wait out the flight and hope that the skin had not been...
Others are asking why, if a piece of foam was known to have hit the ship, an astronaut wasn't sent outside during the course of the 16-day mission to determine whether any damage had been done. Dittemore explains that this crew was not trained for that kind of extensive space walk, and even if they were and they found some damage, they could have done nothing about it anyway. "We had no capability to go over the side or under the spacecraft and look for an area of distress and repair a tile," he says...
...weren't responsible, the sheer turbulence of re-entry might have been. It's not for nothing that the first commander of a shuttle flight was Gemini and Apollo veteran John Young, widely respected as an iceman at the stick. If you're going to fly so tricky a ship, you have to be. "When you re-enter, you're moving at 25 times the speed of sound," says former astronaut Dr. Norm Thagard. Hitting the atmosphere at that velocity is "not unlike slamming into a brick wall, if you're not at the correct attitude...
...shuttle down to Earth, but they are a lot more complicated than simply slaloming down a ski slope. The spacecraft's engines are shut off for good once it leaves orbit, meaning its descent is powerless. Flying a brick with wings, as the engineers have often called the ship, has a very fine margin of error. Lose your purchase on the air and go into a spin, and there's almost no way to pull out of it. "The attitude needs to be very, very precise," says Thagard. "You can pick up heat so fast you get a breakup...