Launch A First For the Fourth

Photos
Space Shuttle Discovery Returns to Flight
Space shuttle Discovery, trailing a tail of yellow fire and billowing gray smoke, launched into central Florida's dazzling summer sky Tuesday like an outsize Independence Day Roman candle.

About 13 minutes later, at 2:37 p.m. and 55 seconds, Discovery lifted off, rattling windows five miles away.

Liftoff followed a tense off-day in which engineers studied the loss Sunday of a bread-crust-size piece of foam insulation from the external tank, finally deciding the mishap posed no problems for launch.

Despite what appeared to be a minor glitch in launch preparations, any problem with the external tank foam rates major attention from NASA in the aftermath of the 2003 loss of the space shuttle Columbia. It disintegrated on reentry after a large piece of foam breached the orbiter's heat shielding during launch.

Foam loss during a launch last July grounded the shuttle fleet for a year, and Tuesday's launch was preceded by prolonged disagreement among top NASA officials over whether engineers should have first redesigned foam insulation covering brackets that hold pressure lines and cables to the side of the orbiter's external fuel tank.

Hale said late Tuesday that the decision to eliminate a foam ridge from the external tank after last year's flight "appeared to be a good aerodynamic move" but said it was impossible as yet to assess the effect of this modification on the bracket foam.

NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin made the decision to fly the current mission, pointing out that the dangers of foam damage threatened the shuttle, but not its crew, which could take "safe haven" aboard the space station.

"I run the agency, and I'm responsible for the decisions I make or don't make," Griffin said in a recent interview. "If I stand down, I'm responsible for spending another $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money without flying for a year. That's what it means to be boss."

The mission is a critical benchmark for the shuttle program, for NASA and for President Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration," which calls for the shuttle to be retired in 2010 after finishing construction of the space station. After that, NASA will focus on returning to the moon by 2020 and eventually traveling to Mars.

For this ambitious program to be fulfilled, the shuttle must fly more than four times per year for the next four years. While another Columbia-style tragedy would undoubtedly shut down the shuttle program, Griffin has refused to speculate on the consequences of a relatively minor problem such as last year's, which could ground the shuttle for months.

"That question is too open-ended," Griffin said. "What this program needs is restoration of a normal ops tempo. If we have another interruption, we'll deal with that when it comes up."

In a partial signal of a "return to normalcy," Discovery will deliver Reiter to the space station, where he will join commander Pavel Vinogradov of Russia and flight engineer Jeffrey Williams of the United States, bringing the station's crew up to its normal complement of three for the first time since the Columbia tragedy. Reiter will stay aboard for about six months.

Besides Lindsey, with three previous space missions, and Reiter, with one, Discovery's crew includes space veterans Mark E. Kelly, the orbiter's pilot, and spacewalker Piers J. Sellers. Cargo handlers Stephanie D. Wilson and Lisa M. Nowak are both space rookies, as is Fossum, the second spacewalker.

Discovery's 12-day mission will focus on spacewalks to test new shuttle equipment and repair station machinery. If, as seems likely, managers add a day to the trip, Sellers and Fossum will undertake a third spacewalk to test repair techniques for the "reinforced carbon-carbon" thermal shielding on the leading edges of the orbiter's wings and on the nose cone.