Cape Canaveral, Fla. – NASA decided Thursday that no repairs are needed for a gouge in Endeavour’s belly and that the space shuttle is safe to fly home.
Mission Control notified the seven shuttle astronauts of the decision right before they went to sleep, putting an end to a week of engineering analyses and anxious uncertainty – both in orbit and on Earth.
“Please pass along our thanks for all the hard work,” radioed Endeavour’s commander, Scott Kelly.
Mission Control replied: “It’s great we finally have a decision and we can press forward.”
After meeting for five hours, mission managers opted Thursday night against any risky spacewalk repairs based on the overwhelming – but not unanimous – recommendations of hundreds of engineers. The massive amount of data indicated Endeavour would suffer no serious structural damage during next week’s re-entry.
Their worry was not that Endeavour might be destroyed and its seven astronauts killed in a replay of the Columbia disaster – the gouge is too small to be catastrophic. They were concerned that the heat of re-entry could weaken the shuttle’s aluminum frame and result in lengthy postflight repairs.
The chairman of the mission management team, John Shannon, said Johnson Space Center’s engineering group in Houston wanted to proceed with the repairs, but everyone else, including safety officials, voted to skip them.
“I am 100 percent comfortable that the work that has been done has accurately characterized it (the damage) and that we will have a very successful re-entry,” Shannon said. “I am also 100 percent confident that if we would have gotten a different answer and found out that this was something that was going to endanger the lives of the crew, that we had the capability on board to go and repair it and then have a successful entry.”
The astronauts had spent much of the day running through the never-before-attempted repair methods, just in case they were ordered up.
Endeavour’s bottom thermal shielding was pierced by a piece of debris that broke off the external fuel tank shortly after liftoff last week.The only way to fix the gouge would have been to send a pair of spacewalking astronauts out with black paint and caulklike goo and maneuver them beneath the shuttle on the end of a 100-foot robotic arm and extension boom, with few if any close-up camera views of the work.
The spacewalk would have had added risk, so much so that mission managers did not want to attempt it unless absolutely necessary. Engineers were especially worried about how the goo – untested in space – might behave in the gouge. NASA plans to test the substance on a future shuttle flight, Shannon said.
Earlier Thursday, astronaut Alvin Drew said from Endeavour that he was comfortable with the prospect of flying back to Earth in a gouged ship. Engineers seem confident, he said, “and I trust their confidence that we can get home safely even with the divot that we have in the belly.”
“Spaceflight is risky,” noted astronaut Barbara Morgan, the backup teacher for Challenger’s doomed mission, “but we have all confidence that we’re going to be able to do the right thing.”
