NASA Says Shuttle Repairs Not Necessary

A gouge on the belly of the space shuttle Endeavour won’t require repairs, NASA has decided.

The space agency announced that astronauts would not need to leave the station for another spacewalk after days of careful testing, analysis and deliberation.

They opted not to fix a small gouge in panels located on the shuttle’s belly based on the overwhelming – but not unanimous – recommendations of hundreds of engineers.

For several days now, NASA has repeatedly stated that safety was not an issue and that there would not be a repeat of the 2003 Columbia disaster that killed the entire crew. The concern was that the heat from re-entry could weaken the shuttle’s aluminum frame and result in lengthy post-flight repairs.

In the end, managers decided they couldn’t justify putting astronauts at risk if the vehicle was in acceptable shape to make the journey home just to save some repair costs. A spacewalk earlier this week was cut short by an astronaut’s ripped glove, showing how hazardous even a relatively routine mission outside the International Space Station can be, noted John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team.

“I am 100 per cent comfortable that the work that has been done has accurately characterized it (the damage) and that we will have a very successful re-entry,” said Shannon. “I am also 100 per cent confident that if we would have gotten a different answer and found out that this was something that was going to endanger the lives of the crew, that we had the capability on board to go and repair it and then have a successful entry.”

Johnson Space Center’s engineering group in Houston wanted to proceed with the repairs. But everyone else, including safety officials, voted to skip them.

The thermal shielding on Endeavour’s belly was pierced by a piece of debris that broke off the external fuel tank shortly after liftoff Aug. 8. The debris carved out a 3 1/2-inch-long, 2-inch-wide gouge and dug all the way through the thermal tiles. Left completely exposed was a narrow 1-inch strip of the overlying felt fabric, the last barrier before the shuttle’s aluminum structure.

However, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who served on the Columbia investigation board four years ago, Stanford University’s Douglas Osheroff, questioned NASA’s hesitancy to perform the repairs.

“I don’t see why NASA is going to invent a fix and not use it,” said Osheroff. “This attitude of, ‘It looks like it’s OK, let’s not do anything about it,’ it seems like the Columbia NASA.”

Osheroff believes it’s imperative that the decision be made by NASA’s upper management, not just left with the shuttle mission management team, which occurred during Columbia.