Tough Choices for NASA Put Shuttle, Crew and Mission At Risk

Dec. 19, 2006 — -- The mission management team at NASA made the choice to do a final inspection of the Space Shuttle Discovery on Thursday and land on Friday or Saturday at the first available and weather-friendly landing site -- the Kennedy Space Center, Edwards Air Force Base or White Sands New Mexico.

The managers had faced a tough decision as to which was the bigger risk: skipping the late inspection to see if Discovery was damaged by a micrometeorite while it was docked with the International Space Station during the past week? Or running out of time to land Discovery safely when the shuttle's fuel reserves are close to empty?

The space shuttle has a failure rate of less than 1 in 50, having lost two orbiters in 116 missions. Some analysts argue it's a reasonable statistic because launching the space shuttle, or any other model of "booster," is inherently dangerous. These launches stretch existing technology to the limit. When you do that, it is unreasonable to expect zero failures.

The tough choice came as a result of a fourth spacewalk, which was added to an already packed mission. The spacewalk demonstrated that the Apollo 13 "failure is not an option" spirit continues to thrive at NASA.

In just two days, a plan was drawn up for a spacewalk the astronauts had not trained for, with tools that were already on-board. The tools were wrapped in insulating tape to keep astronaut Robert Curbeam from being electrocuted as he worked on fixing the solar array that would not retract.

The fourth spacewalk, however, took away the weather contingency day that mission managers like to build into every mission, just in case weather is bad at the three landing sites in the United States.

And weather doesn't look good for the landing sites on Friday and Saturday, so the mission management team struggled with the decision before ultimately choosing to complete the inspection Thursday.

Spaceflight is risky. Landing is risky. Anyone involved in the space program will tell you space is a risky business.

NASA prefers not to land at the Edwards Air Force Base in California or at White Sands in New Mexico because there are risks the shuttle is exposed to when it is ferried back to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

There is also pressure to finish the International Space Station.

Space station Program Manager Mike Suffredini is painfully aware that there is little room for error in the next 13 flights needed to finish the space station by 2010, when the space shuttle will stop flying.