Shuttle won’t fly until 2006

The space shuttle will not fly again until at least March, and the next mission will be flown by Discovery, not Atlantis as had previously been planned, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said Thursday.

The delay was caused by the need to address the problem of foam shedding from the external fuel tank during launch.

“It looks like we are going to have to do some repair on the tanks,” said William Gerstenmaier, who was appointed by Griffin two days ago to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s return-to-flight program.

Gerstenmaier said the external fuel tanks now at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will be sent back to the manufacturer in New Orleans for repair or replacement.

“We’re starting to understand the areas we want to do rework on,” he said. Because of that work, potential launch dates in September, November and January “are pretty much off the table.”

The delay will allow the agency to substitute Discovery for Atlantis in the next launch. Using Discovery will allow more preparation time for the following mission, in which Atlantis will carry a heavy truss to the International Space Station. Atlantis has the best heavy-lift capability of the three remaining shuttles.

Discovery was scheduled to begin its return to Kennedy from California’s Edwards Air Force Base aboard a specially modified 747 this morning. The flight had been delayed because of flooding of the runway by a rainstorm and difficulties in attaching a fairing to cover the shuttle’s three engines.

The 747 will first carry the shuttle to a military base in Texas, then proceed to Florida on Saturday, the agency said.

Discovery landed at Edwards last week, completing the first space shuttle mission since Columbia disintegrated on re-entry in February 2003. Columbia was damaged during launch when a chunk of foam fell off the external fuel tank, damaging the leading edge of its wing.

NASA “didn’t look in detail at foam shedding for 113 flights, and shame on us,” Griffin said. That was a mistake “that will be examined in textbooks for years to come.”

During Discovery’s launch, another large piece of foam fell off the tank, but it missed the craft.

That was “very embarrassing,” Griffin said.

NASA has grounded all shuttle flights until the foam problem has been solved.

Griffin and Gerstenmaier spoke a day after the formal release of a report from the Stafford-Covey Return to Flight Task Group, charged with reviewing NASA’s safety improvements to the shuttles. The gist of that report had been released before Discovery’s launch.

The panel said that NASA had not completed three of 15 major post-Columbia objectives, the most important of which was a failure to completely address the foam problem. The majority of panel members, however, said they thought the shuttle was safe to fly.

The published report contained written comments from seven dissident members of the panel, who argued, among other things, that the agency had neglected some safety improvements in its rush to return to space.

Griffin said that he had not read the minority reports and would not comment on them until he had studied them.