Word: spacecrafts
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...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...
...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...
...turns the pilots make are intended to bleed off speed in order to ease the 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...
...weeks and months to come, other, less likely scenarios will be examined too: a meteor or other piece of space debris could have struck the spacecraft, a growing risk given the decades of accumulated orbital junk that clutters the near-Earth environment. In this case, that's not likely, since the shuttle was already well into the atmosphere when it disintegrated. Age or metal fatigue could have been responsible as well. All four orbiters were temporarily grounded last June when cracks were found in their liquid-hydrogen fuel lines, damage that may have been caused by vibration, temperature changes...
...Florida Senator Bill Nelson--famous for having sweet-talked his way onto the same shuttle Columbia when he was a Congressman, landing just 10 days before the Challenger disaster sobered the space community to the risks of such joyrides--has been warning colleagues that budget cutbacks threatened to compromise spacecraft safety. "I have been perhaps the sharpest critic in Congress about the slowing down of safety upgrades," he says...