Well I guess using the word "grounded" is a little bit bogus. They're grounded until they can figure out how to solve what's becoming a huge massive blinding headache for NASA Engineers: stop the foam from falling off the ET.
NASA's top priority in the wake of the accident - and the No. 1 recommendation of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board - was to redesign the way the foam is applied to the tank to minimize so-called foam shedding. Engineers were confident Discovery's tank would shed nothing larger than a marshmallow, repeatedly stating their belief that the new tanks were the safest ever built.
But during Discovery's climb to space, a few seconds after the ship's solid-fuel boosters separated two minutes and five seconds into flight, a relatively large, pillow-size piece of foam ripped away from an aerodynamic ramp intended to prevent turbulent airflow around cable trays and pressurization lines.
All that Engineering, all that effort, and they still didn't manage to eliminate foam debris...
"We think this vehicle is safe," Parsons said. "We think we can fly this vehicle and we think we can make this vehicle safe for the next flight. We feel very, very confident in our ability to make this vehicle safe."
I don't want to kick someone when they're down, because I can only imagine how far down those Engineers are feeling right now, but it almost sounds like this guy is trying to convince himself.
When this whole venture was started I was skeptical that any of this was useful. First of all there was no way to actually know what caused the last Shuttle to burn up in the atmosphere. Well we knew it was a missing tile, but knowing for sure that foam from the ET struck the wing that caused that tile to fall off is a little harder to prove. Testing was done to prove that foam, that was shown in footage to strike the right wing, could have caused a tile to fall off.
Does that mean it actually did fall off?
For years Space Shuttle tiles fell off routinely. Even the first Shuttle flight showed tiles falling off. This was just from the wear and tear of flight that they would fall off. So I was always a little skeptical that eliminating the threat of the evil bid pod ramp foam was going to solve anything.
Heck, even on this flight a tile fell off from a non-foam cause. Right now NASA is assessing whether or not the bird can re-enter safely without that tile.
Quite frankly, I have to say I doubt you can completely eliminate the chances of tiles randomly falling off the orbiter. Well, you could, but it would take a heck of a lot more time and effort and mulah. And if we're just talking about preventing the foam from being a cause and nothing else, I'd still say that it won't be easy.
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