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...WHAT IS GAP FILLER AND WHY IS IT A PROBLEM? The underside of the shuttle flexes during the stress and heating of reentry. To prevent the rigid tiles from grinding or chipping, heat resistant cloth is fitted between them. Ordinarily, the filler is flush with the ship, all but invisible to the eye. But on Discovery, two pieces are protruding near the nose-one 1.1 inch, the other .06 inch, and need to be snipped away...
...WHAT DANGERS LIE AHEAD During re-entry, Discovery's nose and the leading edges of the shuttle's wings--and the atmosphere surrounding them--could heat to as much as 3000ºF (1650ºC). Any chink in the shuttle's heat-resistant armor could allow superheated air to penetrate unprotected areas, where it would act like a blowtorch--the same process that destroyed Columbia ?TILE DAMAGE One gouge is close to the wheel well, where an influx of hot gases could cause an explosion
...debris field that stretched from eastern Texas to Louisiana, NASA put out the somewhat disingenuous word that fumes from the fragments could be dangerous and that people who found them should leave them where they lay and alert the authorities--as if any toxic fuel could have survived the heat of re-entry. The more probable reason for the space agency's alerts was that tampering with the remains would make a proper investigation of the disaster that much harder. Worse, within hours pieces of debris purported to be from the lost space plane were already being hawked on eBay...
...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...
...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...