Watching the Shuttle

This afternoon the Shuttle Endeavour closed in on the Space Station.  The the pictures were quite cool, and it’s all on your computer. NASA TV has a page HERE, from which you can watch live video of the mission (or anything else NASA broadcasts) in your choice of players.  And NASA’s Human Space Flight section shows where the shuttle and station are in orbit on a map HERE. An apology in advance on both of these: they can get overloaded when things are busy.    The Mission Management Team reported yesterday that the launch was clean.  They count nine pieces of foam that came off the orange external tank, and say they believe three of them hit the orbiter, but they say they’re not terribly concerned about them.   The astronauts are photographing the shuttle’s wings and underside now as a matter of course. The first foam hit was 24 seconds after launch, and bumped against Endeavour’s rear body flap–the horizontal fin just beneath the three main engines.  The second, just under a minute into flight, did hit the shuttle’s right wing, but does not appear to have done any harm either.  The last was nearly three minutes after launch, when the shuttle is high enough–and the air is thin enough–that a loose piece of debris doesn’t get slowed by the air around it.  All this may sound like rationalizing, but it’s genuinely different from what happened in the case of Columbia in 2003–when the shuttle apparently flew its entire mission with a hole in the wing, while a few engineers fretted over the possibility of trouble, managers said there was nothing to worry about…and nobody had a way to look.