Foam loss grounds shuttle fleet again

Posted on: Jul. 28th, 2005 || Source: spaceflightnow.com | E-mail Article | Print Article

In a major setback for NASA, senior managers today grounded the shuttle fleet, saying no more missions will be launched until engineers figure out why large, potentially catastrophic pieces of foam insulation broke away from the shuttle Discovery's external fuel tank during launch Tuesday.

"Until we're ready, we won't go fly again," said shuttle program manager Bill Parsons. "I don't know when that might be, I'll state that up front. We're just in the beginning of this process of understanding. This is a test flight. This is a flight we had to go off and try to get as much information as we could and see if the changes that we had made to the tank (in the wake of the Columbia disaster) were sufficient. Obviously, we have some more work to do.

"I don't know if that's a month, I don't know if that's three months. We've got a lot of work in front of us to go figure that out."

See pictures of the tank here.

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