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Insight

Launch Delays for Shuttle Discovery

Aired July 13, 2005 - 23:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN ANCHOR: A day of anticipation becomes a day of disappointment for NASA. The United States was set to return to space for the first time since the Columbia disaster, but a faulty fuel sensor cancels the launch.
Hello and welcome to INSIGHT. I'm Michael Holmes.

It wasn't the weather but a fuel gauge that has put the shuttle's return to space on hold. Just 2-1/2 hours before liftoff, NASA scrubbed the launch of Discovery. It was to be the first shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster 2-1/2 years ago.

CNN's Sean Callebs joins us now from the Kennedy Space Center with the very latest.

Sean, obviously a lot of disappointment there, a sense of anticlimax. Was this a major malfunction?

SEAN CALLEBS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's not a major malfunction, but it is something that has been nagging at NASA for several months now. You talked about the faulty fuel sensor, one of the hydrogen fuel sensors in the external fuel tank. This was a problem that actually cropped up back in April during testing, an intermittent problem. NASA thought it had it licked, but that wasn't the case.

In a perfect world, the astronauts would be in orbit more than two hours right now, but the shuttle isn't in a perfect world. It is still on launch pad 39B. We can take you out there live and just look at this picture as dust begins to settle over this part of Florida. They were concerned about the weather, but it turned into a picture perfect afternoon.

Well, NASA found out pretty quickly once it began its tests to determine that the hydrogen fuel sensor was indeed malfunctioning, one of four. NASA has very strict guidelines and all four must be functioning. Basically, these are the sensors that monitor the fuel as it goes up and shuts the engine down at the proper time. If it would burn too long or too soon, the flight could end in disaster.

So when exactly will Discovery go up? Well, that's a question that the mission management team is wrestling with now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WAYNE HALE, SHUTTLE PROGRAM DEPUTY MGR.: We did a little review of the absolutely best case kind of scenario and decided that we would not in any conceivable way be ready to launch before Saturday. So that's probably the very best case scenario, and we're going to go where the technical data leads us until we solve this problem and we get to a safe posture to go fly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CALLEBS: If you wanted to see the face of disappointment, just look at these seven astronauts, most of whom were already strapped in, the mission being scrubbed just about 2-1/2 hours before scheduled liftoff, including commander Eileen Collins.

The crew is now back in its quarters. They are out of their suits, astronaut suits. They will be hanging around at least for a couple of days trying to determine if the Discovery will be able to go up as early as Saturday, but this could be somewhat of a problem. The hydrogen fuel sensor is very deep down inside the external fuel tank and if the problem is down that sensor, Michael, it could be very difficult to physically get to. They may have to take the external fuel tank back into the vehicle assembly building and get it out and take a look at it then, and that could be somewhat of a problem. They still have a window to launch all through July, from the 13th to the 31st, but it must be done during daylight hours, and the window every day is only about five minutes long -- Michael.

HOLMES: Sean, what if they don't make that window? What then?

CALLEBS: If they don't make that window, August is simply out of the picture. There are no windows open in August because they must launch during daytime hours. That's one of the new features that came out after 2-1/2 years of study of the shuttle. They are going to be photographing the shuttle from every conceivable angle during liftoff. Scientists and engineers are going to be pouring over those photographs to make sure debris did not damage the orbiter in any way during liftoff.

They would be able to liftoff in September, but certainly NASA is eager, ready to go, but made it clear they will not compromise safety.

HOLMES: All right, Sean, thanks very much. Sean Callebs there, at the Kennedy Space Center.

Well, the leader of the Discovery crew, Eileen Collins, became the first female shuttle commander back in 1999, and that mission was filled with problems. Columbia almost had to make an emergency landing and the shuttle leaked hydrogen fuel on takeoff. Collins says she is always aware of the dangers of space flight and is always prepared for the next emergency.

CNN's Miles O'Brien spoke with her and the rest of the Discovery crew.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN SPACE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Being the first is never easy and so it goes for the Discovery astronauts, the first shuttle crew to fly after the loss of Columbia. Good thing they're led by a commander well accustomed to the vanguard.

Eileen Collins, among the first women to fly in the Air Force, the first female shuttle pilot and then commander, she is at home in the hot seat.

EILEEN COLLINS, DISCOVERY COMMANDER: And I personally like being stressed out. I think it's good training for us. And on a real flight, if you only get one thing goes wrong, it's going to be much easier to handle it because you're trained to handle a lot more.

O'BRIEN: The real flight they're training for began as a typical shuttle run to resupply the Space Station. They were sent to launch not long after Columbia was due back in February 2003, but Columbia did not make it home. The crew of seven perished over Texas 16 minutes before they were due to arrive in Florida.

COLLINS: When the accident happened, I had an opportunity to just take myself off the mission and say I want to spend more time with my family.

O'BRIEN: Eileen Collins is not only an astronaut, she's a working mom with two young children.

COLLINS: I have never had any pressure from my family to not fly this mission. My parents, my husband, my children, my friends. You know, I would think that I would have, but I haven't.

Having said that, I have asked myself, "Do I really want to fly this mission" many times, and the answer always came back yes.

O'BRIEN: No surprise to anyone who knows her, not the least of them husband Pat Youngs, who met her 22 years ago when they were both in the Air Force. He marvels at his overachieving spouse who earned a Master's at Stanford in 11 months.

PAT YOUNGS, EILEEN COLLINS' HUSBAND: I recall helping with some of her homework and it was pretty difficult looking at it, and I remember she would just sit there and grind it out and sort it out, and I was thinking, "If I was doing this, I think I'd go play nine holes and come back and look at it later," but that's how she always is, and she just figured it out.

O'BRIEN: And for this mission, finishing safe and sound is the primary goal. Over the past 2-1/2 years, NASA has spent more than $1.5 billion looking for answers to what brought Columbia down.

ANNOUNCER: Booster ignition and liftoff.

O'BRIEN: The crews fate was sealed about a minute after launch when a 2 lb piece of insulating foam careened off the external fuel tank, piercing a lethal hole in the heat shield on the left wing.

The orbiter disintegrated 16 days later in the blast furnace of reentry.

NASA has redesigned the fuel tank, changed the way it applies the foam and removed it from some places to reduce the risk of a big piece breaking loose.

ANDREW THOMAS, DISCOVERY MISSION SPECIALTY: I don't think our vehicle is going to be plagued by problems (INAUDIBLE). There will be some small pieces of foam that come off. That always happens. We know from the flight history that happens. I don't think they're going to be serious, though.

O'BRIEN: They will launch under daylight hours under the gaze of a much more sophisticated network of tracking cameras to spot trouble. Heat shields on the wings will be rigged with sensors to detect a debris strike, and then once in space, the crew will conduct a painstaking survey of the orbiter with cameras mounted at the end of a newly-designed boon. And they will approach the space station belly-first, giving the station crew a chance to shoot yet another ream of photos.

There is good reason for all this checking and rechecking of the orbiter's wing protection.

CHARLES CAMARDA, DISCOVERY MISSION SPECIALIST: We thought we could survive a quarter inch hole in some cases and an inch hole on the upper surface. Right now, we believe that we cannot survive, if we see like a thumbnail-sized piece of coating loss from the outside surface in a critical region or on a leading edge.

O'BRIEN: The astronauts will try some new ideas for patching holes in the heat shield in space, but right now NASA does not have a lot of confidence in the techniques. So as a last resort, if the orbiter is damaged, the crew will simply stay on the space station, a safe harbor, waiting for rescue.

But all this attention on avoiding what happened to Columbia's crew leaves a nagging concern that other lurking problems might be overlooked.

STEVE ROBINSON, DISCOVERY MISSION SPECIALIST: It's the thing that we haven't thought of yet that will be the next thing that will surprise us. But there are a whole bunch of people who are out there worrying about that. It's just not as visible to the rest of us.

O'BRIEN: For the astronauts of Discovery and their families, this will be a long, hard mission. Before Columbia, shuttle crews and their families all breathed a sigh of relief once the rocket engine stopped and the orbiter was in space.

JIM KELLY, DISCOVERY PILOT: Well, this time they're going to be sitting on the ground, you know, for two weeks, watching the clock tick and going, well, I'm still waiting for the event that killed the last crew. So psychologically, for the families, for NASA, for all the managers down there, for everybody, it's psychologically going to be a completely different thing.

O'BRIEN: Miles O'Brien, CNN, Houston.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES: And just ahead on INSIGHT, keeping a careful eye on the shuttle.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HOLMES: And welcome back.

NASA has a lot riding on a successful Discovery mission. The International Space Station needs to be finished, and the space agency needs to repair its tattered reputation.

For the NASA staff at mission control in Houston, it is a more personal story.

Once again, CNN space correspondent Miles O'Brien.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: Is it hard to look at still?

ARMANDO OLIU, NASA: Yes, I mean, it's tough. I mean, I probably seen this picture 10,000 times.

O'BRIEN (voice-over): NASA engineer Armanda Oliu looks at a lot of images like these. High speed, high resolution film of the space shuttle as it rockets toward orbit. His job is to look for trouble, anything unusual. And that is precisely what he saw on January 16, 2003, plain as day.

OLIU: It was obvious that we had the largest piece of debris come off the external tank we had ever had, and it was the largest piece of debris that we had ever seen strike the orbiter, and so right after that, we knew we had a major event.

O'BRIEN: But when Oliu grabbed film from a camera that had a better angle on the leading edge of Columbia's wing, it was out of focus and useless.

OLIU: I had nothing more. There was no way for me to know from this view or the other view -- there were only two views that showed the impact -- if there was damage on the wing. All I could see was that the foam, which we were pretty certain it was foam, had broken up.

O'BRIEN: So Oliu notified the shuttle managers, but foam hitting an orbiter was old news for them. It had dinged and dented spacecraft from day one, a maintenance headache, but not seen as a real threat.

NASA engineers held a series of meetings to try to guess how much damage the foam might have caused.

OLIU: And I knew some of those engineers. I was confident of that date it was valid. I was confident that the debris event wasn't going to be a catastrophic hit to the vehicle. It was going to be a damage site, but it was going to be survivable.

O'BRIEN (on camera): Over the years, shuttle managers had convinced themselves the ever so light foam that covers the shuttles external fuel tank was essentially not a threat and that the piece that came off of Columbia's fuel tank was tantamount to a Styrofoam cooler blowing off of a truck on the interstate. Startling perhaps, but essentially harmless.

(voice-over): And that is what Columbia flight director Leroy Cain had concluded on the morning of February 1.

LEROY CAIN, NASA FLIGHT DIRECTOR: When we came in that morning, it was like any other entry that I've ever been associated with.

O'BRIEN: But then the troubling calls from his team began filling his headset. This one at 8:52, from the controller in charge of maintenance, mechanical and crew systems, or MMACS.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: FYI, I just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle, the hydraulic return temperatures. Two of the on system one, and one (INAUDIBLE) of systems two and three.

O'BRIEN: Two minutes later Columbia's computes moved control flaps then fired rockets to compensate for the added drag on the left wing. Temperature sensors went up or completely failed.

Then at 8:59 and 13 seconds --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Tire pressure on left outboard and left inboard, both tires.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And Columbia Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not (INAUDIBLE).

(CROSSTALK)

O'BRIEN: That was the last anyone heard from Columbia.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Columbia Houston, com check.

O'BRIEN: No reply.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Columbia Houston, UHF com check.

O'BRIEN: Then no sign of Columbia on radar and then this, footage shot by a Dallas TV station, WFAA, aired on a TV tuned to CNN in the control room.

(on camera): What was that like, seeing that? That just kicked me in the gut.

CAIN: Yes, that was -- that was hard to look at, because we were -- we needed to go continue to do our jobs at that point and so I, you know, looked at it, saw it, it confirmed what I had heard, and fortunately I was able to treat it as data at the time.

O'BRIEN (voice-over): What began as data turned to raw emotion, sadness and grief.

CAIN: None of us wanted to personally or professionally fail. None of us wanted to personally fail the crew. These were friends and neighbors of ours, you know. Their kids go to school with our kids, that kind of thing.

O'BRIEN: And as that subsided, the shuttle team went back to work, doing what engineers do, understanding the problem.

There assumptions were wrong. The foam blasted a huge hole in the leading edge of the wing. Despite all that, Leroy Cain will be back in the flight director's seat when Discovery launches and lands.

(on camera): So you don't dread going back to it?

CAIN: I don't dread it at all, no. I couldn't have predicted it back then, but I had to get to a point, get myself to a point of being able to say I'm still about doing this job and being in this business, or I'm not. And if I am, is it for all the right reasons.

O'BRIEN (voice-over): And Armando Oliu will be back as well, manning his new and improved post at the Cape, watching for trouble in ways he could only imagine before. NASA has spent millions to add new shuttle- tracking cameras, many more images, much clearer, nothing out of focus.

(on camera): Can you say fairly categorically if something falls off, one way or another, you're going to see it?

OLIU: We'll definitely either see the event, the debris coming off, or see the evidence of the debris coming off.

O'BRIEN: It's like night and day.

OLIU: It's night and day. Night and day.

O'BRIEN (voice-over): The hope is everything at NASA is now like night and day.

Miles O'Brien, CNN, Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES: And we'll take another break here on INSIGHT. When we come back, the future of the space shuttle.

Stay with us.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL GRIFFIN, NASA ADMINISTRATOR: We think we can get around 20 flights out by the 2010 retirement date President Bush has required, and we're looking right now to see what those flights should carry, what the assembly sequence for the International Space Station should be, given that flight sequence, all that sort of thing. But we think about 20.

O'BRIEN: That's a busy five years.

GRIFFIN: That's a busy five years.

O'BRIEN: Can you do that safely?

GRIFFIN: We think so. We will do it safely. If we don't get 20 flights, then we don't. But we will do it safely.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES (voice-over): It was almost a quarter century ago that the space shuttle made its maiden voyage, NASA launching Columbia in 1981. Now NASA is looking to retire the entire shuttle fleet to make way for an ambitious space exploration program.

GEORGE W. BUSH, U.S. PRESIDENT: We do not know where this journey will end, yet we know this: human beings are headed into the cosmos.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HOLMES: And welcome back.

Well, last year, U.S. President George W. Bush laid out his vision for space exploration. He wants to send astronauts back to the moon in the next decade and use the moon as a base for a mission to Mars. The plans include scrapping the shuttle program and developing a replacement.

Well, joining us now to talk about the future of space exploration and the Discovery launch delay is NASA astronaut Jim Riley.

Jim, good to see you.

First of all, I was reading a "New York Times" article earlier today. It said that the future of the shuttle program rests on the wings of Discovery. Is that a fair weight to place on this mission.

JIM REILLY, NASA ASTRONAUT: Well, I would say that we have to get back into space to complete the rest of the Space Station and we're going to have to do that beginning with the first flight of Discovery S-114 (ph). So, yes, I think that would be a fair assessment, at least in some aspect of it.

HOLMES: How much of a setback was today?

REILLY: I don't think it was that much of a setback, because we're going to be looking at a few days maximum slip, no matter what we end up having to do as far as the detailed work that has to be done to correct the problem.

So all it's going to do is push our schedule to the right a little bit. It's not going to really postpone the launch more than a week or so based on what we've gotten from our preliminary indications today.

HOLMES: You've had more than 500 hours in space, I think three space walks, how is the crew feeling?

REILLY: I would guess that by now they're pretty relaxed. You know, initially I'm sure they were quite disappointed. Fortunately, I've never had to scrub like they did today, so I've never been out in the vehicle getting ready to go. So I would imagine initially they were a bit disappointed, but once they're back in crew quarters, they're probably kicked back and relaxing and probably getting ready to go to bed here in the next hour or two.

HOLMES: You know, these shuttles are rebuilt, they're basically new each time they fly, particularly on this occasion, but they are nonetheless old. This is 1970s stuff. Are they outdated?

REILLY: No. Actually, there are some aspects of the hardware that you could say is old because it's the original design. But, for example, the software that we fly in the orbiter, we're on the 30th version of the flight control software. So a lot of what we were flying today is considerably different than we would have had just even 10 years ago, and certainly a lot different than it was back in 1981, when Bob Griffin and John Young flew the first space shuttle mission.

HOLMES: What's the concept for the future -- Jim.

REILLY: Well, the basic plan, and this is one that is being worked right now by a group here at NASA, both at headquarters and at Johnson Space Center and Marshall Space Flight Center, is to look at building the next vehicle and what is it going to look like.

The concept is to build a system that would be able to support the International Space Station, but not only that, but carry us on to the moon, go back to the moon and put a permanent presence there, and then eventually take humans to put the first footsteps on the surface of Mars.

HOLMES: And how far away is that sort of technology, that sort of development of a vehicle that could do that?

REILLY: Well, the plan we're hoping is to have the first flight of the vehicle somewhere around 2014, which is fairly ambitious for a brand new design. But a lot of what we're being able to do is leverage off of existing technology.

For example, portions of the space shuttle that you see out behind us today would be used as part of a heavy lift capability that is one option that they're considering. Another is to use the solid rocket booster as the beginnings of a two-stage vehicle that would take the crew capsule, the crew exploration vehicle, into orbit.

In addition, there are commercial launch vehicles that we're looking for as far as the freight-carrying capability. So it's a pretty broadly- based and pretty wide-ranging set of options that they're considering right now.

HOLMES: To a laymen like me, 2014 is not that far away, so, yes, ambitious indeed. But until then, the shuttle is it, and obviously that's crucial to the Space Station. It's not just crucial. It has to be.

REILLY: Yes, we've got a lot of freight that's got to go up and even more that's got to come down, and that was one of the primary objectives of this particular flight, was to restart, resupply and return for all of the equipment that we've got onboard the station right now.

HOLMES: I could talk about the Space Station all day. It's just an extraordinary thing. Where is it at in terms of its construction?

REILLY: We're about two-thirds of the way through the assembly, and next set of flights that we're going to have up here, the next five flights, we're going to end up completing the first stage of the solar array truss (ph) element, which will then have solar arrays out on both sides, both on the right and the left of the Space Station, and then we'll be flying up the node (ph) and then the international partner laboratories, the Japanese experiment lab, which is a gem from Japan, as well as the Columbus orbital facility, which is ISIS's (ph) contribution to the International Space Station over the next couple of years.

HOLMES: It's been put on hold for a while. I know our Miles O'Brien was very interested in this. Do you see space tourism in the future?

REILLY: Absolutely. I don't see any reason why we couldn't. Right now we're kind of in the 1920s of space flight as far as a comparison to aviation in that it was kind of a rich man's game but, you know, it's not too far from the 1920s to 1945 to '50, when commercial air travel became a common place way for people to get across the country. I wouldn't be too surprised to see the beginnings of a commercial space industry here in the next couple of decades.

HOLMES: With Miles O'Brien looking for a free ticket.

I want to thank you, Jim. Thanks, Jim Reilly, NASA astronaut, a man who's been up for many hours in space. Thanks so much.

REILLY: It's my pleasure. Thanks very much.

HOLMES: And that is this edition of INSIGHT. Discovery may be up by the weekend.

I'm Michael Holmes. The news continues.

END

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