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Home Front: Tech
Discovery appears to be fixed
2005-08-03
EFL
SPACE CENTER, Houston Aug 3, 2005 — A spacewalking astronaut gently pulled two potentially dangerous strip of protruding fabric from Discovery's belly with his gloved hand Wednesday, successfully completing an unprecedented emergency repair job.
"That's one small pull for man..."
Astronaut Stephen Robinson said both pieces came out easily. He did not have to use a makeshift hacksaw put together in orbit that he brought along just in case.
In order to cut the fabric flush, they took the blade and wrapped one end with, you guessed it, Duct Tape!
"That came out very easily, probably even less force," Robinson said of the second piece. "I don't see any more gap filler. 
 I'm doing my own inspection here. It is a very nice orbital belly."
Once under Discovery's belly, Robinson expected to spend about an hour removing or trimming the fillers from two locations near the shuttle's nose. It took mere seconds for him to pull each strip. NASA thought the first gap filler was the trickier of the two. They believed it remained glued to a shim that was bonded to a thermal tile.
Good job, guys.
Posted by:Jackal

#5  Talking about taking another walk tomorrow to fix an insulation blanket trying to escape under the Shuttle window.
Posted by: 3dc   2005-08-03 17:14  

#4  NASA has managed to transform itself from a can-do agency into a can't-do-anything agency. It's major successes in recent years ala the recent Deep Impact mission (the only way short of actually landing on these objects and doing on site analysis is to hit them hard and do spectropsity (sp) on the out gassing) were really done by places like JPL. The shuttle is at best a compromised design. The core of the launch stack does provide a heavy lift vehicle and the use of the External Tank and SRBs for such a vehicle date back to studies for the Shuttle C starting in the late 70s IIRC. Four or five segment SRB derived launchers with a H2/O2 or JP-4/O2 upper stage have also been studied.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1055

Of course these are all paper studies. But the big question is just what do we expect to accomplish with any such program. That people will go back to the Moon and move father out into the Solar System is I think pretty much a given. And if the US and possibly Western Europe through the ESA have a presence on the Lunar surface then it is going to hard to squeeze them out. If the Chinese are the ones to go back to the Moon just how long before it is claimed lock stock and barrel.
Posted by: Cheaderhead   2005-08-03 14:51  

#3  If you want to work in space with bare hands, go ahead.

Since he did a visual inspection of the shuttle, I'm pretty confident everything up there is OK. On the ground, of course, NASA's a total mess and needs to be shut down.

The commentary from Mr. Medium Green was great.
Posted by: Jackal   2005-08-03 14:08  

#2  ...with his gloved hand

Who fixed it, Michael Jackson?
Posted by: Raj   2005-08-03 13:15  

#1  Don't get too excited yet. We won't know if it's really fixed until the shuttle lands safely.
Posted by: BH   2005-08-03 12:35  

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