CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA is hopeful that the space shuttle fleet will resume flying as early as Sept. 12, 2004, but time-consuming efforts to develop in-flight repair kits and solve other technical hurdles could alter those plans.
Though such a delay would be fine, senior shuttle officials said Tuesday.
"We're trying to launch when we can, safely. And if that means we launch in September, that's fine. If it means we don't launch a flight, any flight, in 2004, that's fine too," said astronaut Jim Halsell, who is coordinating NASA's return to flight efforts. "It will be when it happens."
Halsell's comments were in response to a question from a reporter who asked what the current probability was that the space agency would be able to get two shuttle missions off the ground by the end of 2004."We have not asked ourselves that question because it's not relevant to what we're doing right now," the veteran shuttle commander said.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) report cited schedule pressure to complete the next phase of International Space Station construction as a contributing cause of the Feb. 1 loss of Columbia. As a result, the mantra of safety before schedule is trying to make a come back at NASA.
"Asking how late we can launch one flight to still make (a second) flight in 2004 is a throwback to the way we did business prior to STS-107. We're not doing business anymore like that," Halsell said.
Shuttle program manager Bill Parsons has ordered the United Space Alliance teams at Kennedy Space Center to prepare both Atlantis and Discovery for the return to flight mission.
Atlantis has the slight edge for flying first on the STS-114 mission and it won't be long before one or the other will have to be selected, but for now the agency is keeping its options open.
"Don't get caught up in which one is assigned at this point in time because that could change," Parsons said.
Both vehicles are far from being ready to fly right now. Discovery is being put back together following a major maintenance period, and Atlantis is missing several major components that were removed for testing.
As that processing work moves forward, shuttle workers in other parts of the nation continue their efforts to solve some of the specific technical problems addressed by the CAIB report.
The biggest hurdle right now seems to be how to detect flaws and then repair reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) in orbit.
The RCC material is used to form the leading edge of a shuttle's wings, as well as the nose cap and a panel between the nose cap and the nose landing gear bay. The composite material helps protect the shuttle from the hottest temperatures of re-entry.
It was a breach in an RCC panel -- caused by a piece of foam shed from the external tank during launch -- that allowed hot gases inside Columbia's left wing and triggered the tragedy.
Shuttle managers and engineers are working on ways to inspect the RCC material in space for any signs of damage and then be able to send spacewalking astronauts outside to take care of the problem if needed.
A similar effort is happening at the same time for the heat protection tiles, and Parsons said the tile repair process is a lot farther along than the RCC task.
"It's something we need to figure out a good way to repair. We have a concentrated effort on that but I don't know if we've made as much progress in that area as we have in the tile repair," Parsons said.
Meanwhile, deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale is continuing his task of overhauling the Mission Management Team (MMT), which the CAIB report was very critical of and was at the heart of the NASA cultural issues indicted by the investigation board.
The MMT is responsible for overseeing a shuttle mission from launch through landing and is supposed to be the independent authority outside Mission Control that decides what to do when things aren't going by the book during the flight.
Hale has been working on restoring the integrity of the MMT by holding simulations, providing training courses in the non-technical areas of sociology and even studying details such as the design of the conference room and the shape of it's table -- all with an eye toward breaking down any barriers to communication.
Monthly simulations are expected to continue, with the next one scheduled for the first week of December.
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