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Endeavour lands in Florida |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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 Endeavour and its crew of seven landed in Florida on Tuesday, wrapping up a nearly two-week orbital drama that centered on a deep gouge in the space shuttle’s belly and an early homecoming prompted by a hurricane. In the end, neither the damage nor the weather posed a problem for Endeavour's 12:32 p.m. ET touchdown at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
NASA determined that the 3.5-inch-long (9 cm) gouge in Endeavour’s belly would not endanger the shuttle or its astronauts, including teacher-turned-astronaut Barbara Morgan. Morgan had been teacher Christa McAuliffe’s backup for the doomed Challenger flight in 1986.
The damaged area on Endeavour faced 2,000-degree Fahrenheit (1,100-degree Celsius) temperatures during the hottest part of atmospheric re-entry, but engineers were convinced after a week of thermal analyses and tests that the spacecraft would hold up.
There was zero chance of a Columbia-style catastrophe, NASA managers said.
Endeavour’s re-entry path had the shuttle zooming over the South Pacific, crossing Central America and Cuba, then heading up the Florida peninsula into Kennedy Space Center. Its trip spanned 13 days and 5.3 million miles.
The shuttle wasn’t supposed to return until Wednesday, but over the weekend, mission managers decided to cut its space station visit short. At the time, NASA was uncertain whether Hurricane Dean might threaten Houston, home to Mission Control. Even though forecasters later put Houston out of harm’s way, NASA held to a Tuesday landing.
On Monday, NASA cleared Endeavour for landing after engineers finished evaluating the latest laser images of the shuttle’s wings and nose and concluded there were no holes or cracks from micrometeorites or space junk. The astronauts inspected the especially vulnerable areas Sunday, after undocking from the international space station.
During liftoff on Aug. 8, a piece of foam insulation or ice broke off a bracket on the external fuel tank. It fell onto a strut lower on the tank, then bounced into Endeavour and gashed it. Such damage has been a major concern since 2003 when a chunk of flyaway foam damaged Columbia’s wing, allowing hot gases to seep in and break the shuttle apart during re-entry.
Brackets have shed debris in launches since Columbia, but it wasn’t until Endeavour’s flight that such debris caused noticeable damage again. The damage triggered a weeklong analyses that involved hundreds of engineers and thousands of hours of supercomputer simulations.
NASA does not plan to launch another space shuttle until the problem is solved. For now, Discovery is supposed to lift off in late October.
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