The Waterkooler

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A glorious launch. A wayward chunk of foam. And another black eye for the space agency. Should the shuttle fleet stay grounded?

Bread and salt were waiting for commander Eileen Collins and her crew when they docked the space shuttle Discovery with the International Space Station last Thursday. Station commander Sergei Krikalev had prepared the little ceremony, a Russian tradition intended to bring good luck to a visitor to your home. After the shuttle's stunning lift-off two days earlier--the first since the loss of the Columbia orbiter in 2003--it didn't seem the crew would need such happy charms. But now it appears the shuttle program as a whole--if not the astronauts themselves--may need a lot of luck indeed.

'04 Report Faulted Application of Shuttle Foam. story

• An internal NASA report last December warned of deficiencies in the way insulating foam was being applied to sections of the fuel tank to be used on the shuttle Discovery's current mission.
  
  
• The December 2004 report, by Conley Perry, a retired NASA division chief for quality engineering at the Johnson Space Center here, said it was obvious that Lockheed's external tank engineers "did not do a thorough job" of identifying the quirks and variations that can occur when foam is applied by hand.
  
  
• According to the report, even after two years of effort to correct the foam debris problem, "there will continue to be a threat of critical debris generation."
  
  
• "This variable could reasonably be eliminated," the report went on, "and yet it continues."
  
  
• Nasa responds: "NASA and its contractors have made a number of process and quality improvements in the manual application of foam on the external fuel tank which have resulted in substantially less debris coming off the tank at launch. But as we saw, we still have work to do with the foam."
  
  He continued, "There are still issues that we need to address and we will do that."
  
  

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