31-July-2006, 03:18 PM
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Vulcan Moderator
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Greenbelt, MD
Posts: 24,148
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Hubble Puzzle: How Safe is a Shuttle Servicing Mission?
Quote:
Despite the success of NASA’s second shuttle flight since the 2003 Columbia tragedy, the decision to launch astronauts to the Hubble Space Telescope remains uncertain as top agency officials debate its safety.
The shuttle Discovery’s near flawless STS-121 mission this month completed NASA’s return to flight effort and demonstrated that post-Columbia safety improvements appear to be effective.
But NASA chief Michael Griffin said mission managers and engineers must complete a thorough analysis of Discovery’s mission – and launch the upcoming STS-115 flight aboard Atlantis in late August – before deciding whether a Hubble spaceflight is safe to fly.
“No one wants to do a Hubble flight more than I,” Griffin said after Discovery’s six-astronaut crew landed on July 17. “But we do not want to get ahead of ourselves. We want to go about things in the right way.”
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