Word: endeavour
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After a careful analysis of the risks, NASA is betting that the chances of catastrophe when the damaged space shuttle Endeavour returns to Earth on Aug. 22 are zero. If this were the NASA of old - the one that disastrously miscalculated the dangers of a leaky O-ring and a punctured heat shield to the Challenger and Columbia shuttles, respectively - you would surely have heard a round of protest from at least a few highly qualified aerospace engineers...
...making the decision Thursday night to fly Endeavour home as-is, skipping an untested-in-space repair job to the gouge on the shuttle's belly, NASA seems to have won the confidence of the whole shuttle engineering community. John Shannon, chairman of the Endeavour mission management team and the man who assessed the risk, made the call based on an abundance of testing and analysis over the past week, rather than from any rocket jockey arrogance, which was largely blamed for the last two shuttle losses. Among the 30 organizations from which scientists were called in for independent analyses...
Shannon spent five hours with a team of about 200 engineers and mission management folks going over the data on Endeavour's gouge, caused by the seemingly unstoppable shedding of foam insulation off the external fuel tank during launch. The gouge was determined to be of a size and in a location that would not create danger to the crew or ship. Shannon says the vote was not unanimous but "pretty overwhelming" for Endeavour to return home without repair...
NASA is sweating out another chip in the heat-resistant tiles of a space shuttle, the kind of damage that doomed Columbia. This time it's Endeavour, which was hit by debris on its way to orbit. The wound is near a wheel well, a bad spot because it can provide access to the ship's innards. Shuttles have withstood worse, but no one will relax until the fiery ordeal of re-entry is done. [This article contains a diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] Shuttle Endeavor...
...James Hartsfield says the new mission management team looks a lot like the old team, but with more people included in the inner circle, more freewheeling communication, and more hard data collected on each launch on which to base decisions. Indeed, a scenario similar to the current one with Endeavour was more or less envisioned in the "Return to Flight" (RTF) report that was issued following the 2003 loss of Columbia and her crew, whose fates were sealed by a gouge in the more critical leading edge of the shuttle wing. The RTF report anticipated more tile shedding and potentially...