Space Shuttle Damaged? So Far, So Good

July 16, 2009 — -- The astronauts of space shuttle Endeavour spent Thursday searching for damage to their ship after pieces of ice -- or perhaps insulating foam -- came off the shuttle's orange fuel tank during Wednesday's launch. and struck the shuttle. NASA says so far, so good.

"There is nothing we have seen on the orbiter so far that gives us any concern," said John Shannon, the Space Shuttle Program Manager, late in the day.

But inspection of the ship's exterior will continue.

Debris is not unusual during a launch -- usually one or two pieces are spotted -- but engineers said the amount of debris seen during this launch was remarkable. Video from a camera on the fuel tank showed at least a dozen instances of debris falling toward the shuttle as Endeavour rocketed away from the launch pad.

They've been down this path before. Endeavour landed in fine shape at the end of a flight in 2007, after mission managers spent much of the mission debating whether to do anything about a damaged tile near the shuttle's tail.

But NASA managers were shaken to the core by the Columbia disaster in 2003, when a suitcase-sized piece of foam broke off the fuel tank, broke a hole in the ship's wing – and was dismissed as routine. Super-hot gases, coming through that hole like the flame from a blowtorch on re -entry, doomed Columbia and its seven astronauts.

Ever since, NASA has had laborious procedures to check for similar damage, and that is what Endeavour's seven crewmembers began today. They used a camera, extended from the end of the shuttle's robot arm, to examine the shuttle's underside inch by inch – and they will repeat the whole thing before landing.

When they dock with the International Space Station, as currently scheduled on Friday afternoon, they will do a slow back-flip so the station's astronauts can also photograph the ship with using telephoto lenses.

They carry several repair kits, so that if there is a potentially-dangerous hole in a tile, spacewalking astronauts can fill it with heat-resistant putty, or cover it with a metal plate.