HOUSTON
- When the space shuttle Discovery lifted off Saturday, it left some serious
destruction in its wake.
NASA
inspectors found damage of an "unprecedented" magnitude at Discovery's
Florida launch site, said LeRoy Cain, chair of NASA's mission management
team, at a briefing here at the Johnson Space Center.
Strewn all
over the seaside Launch Pad 39A area at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape
Canaveral, Fla., inspectors found bricks and mortar from the trench designed to
catch the flames that shoot out beneath the shuttle when it launches. The
debris flew as far as the perimeter fence 1,500 feet (457 meters) away from the
pad.
NASA
officials say they are unsure what caused the destruction, the level of which
has been unseen in previous launches, but they have already assembled an
investigation team to look into the issue further.
"We'll go
figure out what caused this much damage and we'll fix it," Cain said.
In addition
to being unusual, the pad damage is somewhat worrying because NASA has only two
shuttle launch pads and both must be in working order for its next
planned mission, the STS-125 flight to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope,
to launch in October as planned. Unlike current shuttle flights to the
International Space Station, where astronauts can take refuge if their
spacecraft is damaged until a new one can be launched, the mission to Hubble
has no such safe haven. So instead, NASA needs a second shuttle on a second
launch pad to serve as a rescue ship.
For
STS-125, NASA plans to prepare a primary shuttle to launch from Pad 39A, as
well as a backup rescue shuttle that would be ready to launch from its other
pad, 39B, if needed.
So giving
up on Pad 39A completely is not an option, Cain said. "We need both launch
pads, so that's not a negotiable term at this point."
Switching
to Pad 39B as the primary launch pad would also present issues, as this site is
currently being readied for use in NASA's next manned spaceflight endeavor, the
Constellation program. Ground crews have already begun converting Pad 39B from
a shuttle launch site to the liftoff pad for the Ares I rocket, the booster
intended to carry the capsule-based shuttle successor Orion to space.
The last
time this pad was used for a shuttle launch was on Dec. 9, 2006, for the
liftoff of Discovery's STS-116 mission.
"If our
plan were to go launch again off of Pad B, there would be things we would be
doing that we are not doing and have not been doing," Cain said. To switch
would, he said, cause "some aches and pains."
Both launch
pads date back to the days of the Apollo program in the 1960s, so it's possible
that the site is just getting old, NASA officials said. It will take more
investigation to determine the reason for the destruction, they added.
Despite the
puzzling nature of the issue, Cain said he cannot foresee it causing a delay to
either of the two remaining shuttle flights scheduled for 2008. The shuttle
Atlantis is slated to launch toward Hubble on Oct. 8, with its sister ship
Endeavour to follow on Nov. 10 on a space station-bound flight.
"I have no
reason to believe that we'll delay the mission in October," he said. "I'm
completely confident that we'll be able to put the necessary repairs in place."
Though the
damage may raise questions about future missions, it should not have any effect
on the shuttle
currently flying. Mission managers do not believe any of the flying
wreckage hit Discovery as it was launching to cause harm to the craft.
"We have
seen nothing of any of this debris coming back to the vehicle," Cain said.
"From the standpoint of the ongoing mission, it's not going to be a concern for
us."
Meanwhile,
Discovery's current STS-124 mission to the space station is going well.
Commanded by veteran shuttle flyer Mark Kelly, the shuttle arrived
at the station on Monday to begin about 10 days of joint work to install a
new Japanese laboratory the size of a large tour bus, fix the orbiting lab's
space toilet and swap out one member of the station's three-man crew.
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