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Managers to meet Tuesday to resolve open issues BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: July 11, 2005 NASA's mission management team met today to assess the status of shuttle Discovery's launch processing and its readiness to take off Wednesday on the first post-Columbia mission. While the panel cleared most of the open items on the agenda, engineers were asked to work through the night to resolve a few final questions. Discovery is scheduled for blastoff at 3:50:52 p.m. Wednesday and forecasters say they expect a 70 percent chance of good weather.
But, Hale added, "there comes a point in time when you decide we have reached an acceptable level of risk to go carry out the mission we have." "We're at that point," he said. "We're not going to be so much dramatically safer in the next short period of time that it's worth our while to delay. Now's the time to go fly." During today's mission management team meeting, Hale said a "spirited" discussion covered a variety of open issues. One of them involved how hot the bipod strut fittings that attach the nose of the shuttle to its external fuel tank might get due to atmospheric friction as the ship rockets toward space. The bipod attachment fittings used to be covered by foam insulation, the same insulation that broke away during the shuttle Columbia's external tank during launch in 2003. The bipod ramp foam, intended to prevent ice buildups before takeoff, was eliminated in the wake of the disaster in favor of heater strips. As a result, the fittings are exposed to the elements during launch. "The balloons that we launch here at the Kennedy Space Center that we do analysis on to determine if the winds aloft are acceptable to fly ... there's one new test that we've added since the Columbia accident for heating on a certain part of the vehicle that we're having trouble passing with the balloons," Hale said. "We think we may have put in an overly conservative constraint. Folks are off looking overnight to see if that's the case and if not, what are we going to do about it. So we have a couple of loose ends to tie up, but I wouldn't say they were major. I would say we do have to resolve these issues before we go fly." Engineers are also working to close out open questions about an "unexplained anomaly" that occurred during a fueling test in April when two of four hydrogen fuel sensors failed to operate properly. All four must be working at launch and engineers were never able to pin down what went wrong. Discovery ultimately was attached to a different tank, using different sensors, and Hale said all the cabling and the electronic "black box" in the shuttle that routes signals to and from the sensors were replaced. But engineers are still assessing potential failure modes and final resolution is expected at the mission management team meeting Tuesday.
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