CNN.com (which occasionally gets things right) is reporting that a recent hailstorm has damaged the external tank and one wing of the Space Shuttle, and NASA will delay the flight by one month.
As you may recall, the external tank is covered with insulating foam, and it was a small piece falling off which damaged the Shuttle Columbia, causing it to disintegrate upon re-entry. Obviously, NASA takes damage to the tank very seriously.
I don’t know what this will mean to the overall schedule, or to the Hubble servicing mission scheduled for next September.
Oh– note to any NASA HQ people reading this blog: having the center web pages redirect to the NASA main portal is irritating but understandable. But why does http://www.ksc.nasa.gov redirect, but http://ksc.nasa.gov gives a "Server not found" error? The same is true for msfc and gsfc, by the way. Did someone not want to spend the money on the extra domain name? 
It’s not hard to get that set up on the server; see what happens when you use http://badastronomy.com. If I can do it, I bet NASA can too.
February 27th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I have to say it, “The shuttle got hailed,did it hail back?”. (little joke)
February 27th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
One wonders how much advanced warning NASA had about this storm? Even when on the launchpad, the Rotating Service Structure could be moved into place from the gantry and the related Weather Protection System deployed to enclose the shuttle.
Re
“Obviously, NASA takes damage to the tank very seriously.”
Now they do, post-Columbia Investigation Board. During the investigation persons who were identifying the foam as the leading culprit were ridiculed as “foamologists” by the (thankfully) former NASA administrator who’s now doing his thing at LSU.
February 27th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
http://ksc.nasa.gov vs http://www.ksc.nasa.gov is not a domain name issue — the both go to the same server, it’s just that they haven’t bothered to handle the shorter address. Should be a SMOP (simple matter of programming).
February 27th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Actually, no money should be involved for having both http://www.ksc.nasa.gov and ksc.nasa.gov. It’s just one line in your local DNS server configuration to make it work. I think a CNAME would do it. Eh, these kinds of things are getting overlooked all the time. There’s no accounting for people without OCD
February 27th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
NASA has been doing launches from Florida for what now, more than four decades? One would think that they would have figured out by now that Florida has weather. What would it cost – ten, twenty thousand dollars – to have a nylon or polyester fabric suspended tent-like over their two billion dollar asset for the several weeks it waits on the launch pad? Such a tent could have metal wires woven into the fabric, like the ESD-safe smocks worn in electronics manufacturing, to prevent damage due to a lightning strike on the launch complex, and the fabric itself would protect the shuttle assembly from hailstones and woodpeckers.
Hell, even if it cost a couple of million for such protection, it would pay for itself if it saved even one day of delay to a shuttle launch.
If the average Floridian moves his twenty thousand dollar car into the carport to protect it from a hailstorm, what possible excuse can the Very Big Brains at NASA have for not protecting something that costs five orders of magnitude more from the vagaries of nature?
February 28th, 2007 at 1:02 am
The lack of a DNS entry for the bare domain name is commonplace. It’s very very irritating – once upon a time, people differentiated between servers by hostname, so http://www.blah.com would be a webserver and http://ftp.blah.com would be an ftp server, etc. blah.com typically would only resolve for mail, if anything. Nowadays everything is decided on ports (and virtual hostnames) so connecting on port 80 to blah.com directs you to the webserver, and port 21 directs you to the ftp server, etc. This is simple.
It annoys the hell out of me that people are too lazy to set up their doimains sensibly and I have to type those extra four characters into my address bar – I mean, I’m using a web browser, of course I want the bloody web server to respond.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:56 am
Ed, I was just about to say the same thing! You’d think NASA would find it justifiable to invest in an umbrella.
What if a hailstorm ever delays a shuttle rescue mission (fate forbid we ever need one of those). Everyone would be up in arms about it.
I also suspect that if commercial operators succeed at sub-orbital flight and end up going orbital, they’re not going to be happy with vehicles which can’t handle ordinary weather at the launch site. I know the shuttle’s old tech, but really…
February 28th, 2007 at 3:55 am
It’s always been a little disturbing that “nasa.gov” goes nowhere. I do it everytime, too, before adding the “www.” prefix.
I love nasa and what they’ve done and what they can do. But this is really just a little chore like cleaning up some spilled milk. Eventually it sours.
Love your site BA. Keep on.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:01 am
Well, I wonder why the shuttle must wait over a month on the launch pad before lift-off? Maybe someone could exlain this to me. Is there no possibility to load the shuttle in the VAB?
February 28th, 2007 at 4:05 am
I know! Really, how much would a reusable umbrella cost to design and build? It can’t be more than a million dollars. Even if it only saved them time and money on the 3 occasions mentioned in some of those articles (maybe even in the CNN one, but I haven’t read that one specifically) it would have been worth it.
What really bugs me about this is now they are definitely going to have to push back the 5th (and possibly 4th) shuttle flight to 2008. They were already sweating about the timetable; now they definitely can’t meet it.
February 28th, 2007 at 5:06 am
The need to add the “www” is common to some .gov addresses, including some of ours (FAA). If you type in faa.gov, it works fine, but try “fly.faa.gov” — the site to keep travelers aware of airport delays — it’s NO GO without www.
Les (Friendly Airplane Asylum flack)
February 28th, 2007 at 5:14 am
I was so disappointed to hear this yesterday. I was hoping for a delay of TWO days as I’m arriving in Florida on the 17th (the original launch date was the 15th). After my three-time vacation changing fiasco to see STS 114 and to be almost at the viewing area when it was scrubbed, I feel I’m doomed to never see the shuttle go off in person. Grrrr. Our house is an hour south of KSC – I’ve never experienced heavy hail there on the coast, but certainly nasty weather, so, yes, it seems like an easy(?) problem to solve to keep it covered up while it sits on the pad and I’d like to know it was never done. Certainly the engineers have figured out more difficult things!
Well, Mak, instead of a cell phone delivered sonic boom, how about the sound of waves?
February 28th, 2007 at 5:18 am
Sorry about the double post, and the unclosed bold tag. I’m having issues with my mouse/browser such as when I hit the back button it’s going back two pages and the copy paste function is acting weird, so I’m clicking all over the place uncontrollably. I’ll try FF and see if it does the same thing….
February 28th, 2007 at 5:32 am
Ah well, better safe than sorry.
I agree that some form of covering ought to be in place over the ET, right up until a day or so before launch day.
I have to wonder; would this also be an issue with the Orion spacecraft, seeing how it has that BPC on it at launch?
February 28th, 2007 at 5:57 am
Yes, it is easy to implement the domain name fix. However, NASA has strict protocols and procedures for their web pages. Every change has to be approved and signed off by a change control board to insure that each and every official NASA web page is compliant.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:19 am
The domain issue, contrary to what has been said, was done on purpose and will not be ‘fixed’. It is part of the OneNASA campaign started by Sean O’Keefe to ‘properly’ identify all NASA centers as belonging to one agency. Part of that was to merge all websites into the same format with the same looks and root address.
If you live an hour south of KSC, what’s your escuse?
You should come to every launch regardless of the date and scrubs. I don’t understand why you refer to it as a vacation first and then say you live there.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Ovcolumbia, I live in Houston and my family has a vacation home in Florida, so I have to plan to be there during a launch. (Though they would sure be happy if I moved there!) Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:12 am
To ‘ovcolumbia’, have you never gone to a new city, or state and found that you have not been able to visit *every* place of interest, within the first couple of years?
I know that there are some places I didn’t get around to visiting, for one reason or another. But there have been others that I just happened to be there, saw an event I had not planned for, nor even known about before visiting.
But then I have not (yet) been to a launch at the Cape, as I’m still waiting to go to Florida. In fact I am still waiting for my second visit to the States! As they say,”It may not happen overnight, but it will happen”. At least I hope so anyway.
Ivan.
February 28th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
If an elephant is a mouse built to government specifications, what would a government built umbrella look like? The Astrodome?
Gary 7
February 28th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Yeah Gary, you’ve got a point.
February 28th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
I apologize on the second half of my comment, I was trying to be light hearted about that
I do hope you get to see a shuttle launch, it’s something everyone should get to see at least once before it’s over.