The Left Seat: Space
by Jim Slade
Discovery Goes
It's hard to decide if he was sagely wise or simply lucky, but NASA Administrator Michael Griffin ordered and got one of the sweetest space shuttle launches I've ever seen. What's more, it flew on The Fourth of July, giving the nation a whopping big birthday candle to boot.
In spite of the naysayers.
Including me.
Having said that, let me say this: it still disturbs me and other people I know well that Griffin walked around long-standing policies when he chose to go ahead in spite of objections from two senior managers who were still concerned about the potential danger from insulating foam that flakes off the shuttle's external fuel tank. The two wanted to wait for more fixes, but knowing that his crews can take sancutary on the International Space Station and wait for rescue if necesssary, Griffin decided to play the odds and won. I hope his luck holds.
Griffin admits he is against the wall. He has just four years until the shuttles retire. He has to get in at least sixteen more flights to finish building the now half-complete Space Station and he doesn't feel he can wait much longer.
As it turned out on this mission, foam did flake off under the shuttle's belly but it happened late in the climb to orbit when the spaceship was far enough out of the thick lower atmosphere that the flakes moved slow enough to not cause damage. Of the past year, engineers have removed thirty-seven pounds of foam from places on the tank that caused the kind of damage that brought shuttle Columbia to destruction. That seemed to have worked to good effect.
They will continue to improve it as they go along, but Griffin says they can't ground the shuttle fleet while the work goes on. There is an urgent need to finish the space station and the shuttles are the only vehicles to do it.
So, they fly.
Pray there are no more accidents while they do.
Now.
This is written the day after the last of three spacewalks scheduled for the Discovery mission. They, too, were done to perfection. Astronauts Piers Sellers and Michael Fossum spent more than  twenty hours outside the combined shuttle and space station, do some essential repairs to a trolley that moves the station's robotic arm from place to place as well as doing some proof-of-performance tests that help clear the orbiters for the job ahead. In this picture, you see the spacewalkers riding the end of the shuttle's extended robotic arm. The 50 foot arm holds a boom that effectively doubles its reach. Sellers and Fossum showed that two spaceworkers could ride it safely to the farthest reaches of the shuttle's underbelly, using the arm as a work platform to repair the spacecraft's heat shielding if need be.
They also tested what  they jokingly called a "Black Goo" that might be used as a patching compound for dings or gouges in the Reinforced Carbon Carbon (RCC) material that forms the leading edges of the shuttle's wings. The tests, done in the rear of the shuttle's cargo bay, seemed to go well, but a final decision on the stuff will be made in labs on the ground. Five test samples were run. Both astronauts are visible in this picture. All the pictures, by the way, are courtesy of NASA.
The upshot of all these experiments is that the results could give NASA managers the confidence to fly one extra shuttle mission; a trip to service the Hubble Space Telescope one more time. Since Hubble orbits in a plane that would make it impossible for the astronauts to take refuge on the space station if something went wrong, it's important they be able to make repairs on their own. We'll see.
Let's look at some more pictures.
 Astronaut-eye view.
On the move. First class transportation.
Shuttle below. Or is it above?
View from rear of shuttle's cargo bay toward space station.
 Working man.
Beautiful.
Just beautiful.
Keep a good thought for them, whatever you do.
Jim Slade
7/13/2006
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