The shuttle’s continuing vulnerability to damage from insulation foam falling from its external fuel tank at launch has led the US space agency to re-embrace traditional rockets for the next phases of its exploration programme, a senior Nasa safety official said yesterday.

Instead of being carried into orbit piggy-back like the shuttle, its replacement will be sent into space as the payload of a rocket, in similar fashion to the Apollo Moon landers.

Steve McDanels, manager of Nasa’s failure analysis branch at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, said that this was the only certain way of protecting crew capsules from the sort of damage that caused the Columbia disaster in February 2003.

“Having a payload-type craft application, where the craft is integral to the structure, is going to be the way forward,” he said. “There is no possibility of a foam strike that way.”

None of the designs currently under consideration for the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will replace the shuttle in 2012 features a winged, reusable craft, and it is highly unlikely that Nasa will return to the model that symbolised manned spaceflight in the 1980s and 1990s. “I think that won’t be at the forefront of the technologies explored,” Dr McDanels said.

While Nasa has spent millions of dollars improving the shuttle’s safety since the loss of Columbia, it remains vulnerable to insulation foam or other debris falling from its external fuel tank.

Columbia disintegrated on re-entry to the atmosphere on February 1, 2003, after its protective heat shield was damaged by a chunk of foam the size of a wide-screen television that had hit the orbiter during launch.

The change in design means that most of the hardware used to ferry astronauts into space will not be reuseable: only the crew module and solid rocket boosters will be recovered at the end of missions.

Dr McDanels was speaking yesterday on the legacy of the Columbia disaster at the Microscience 2006 exhibition in London.

The second shuttle mission to launch since the catastrophe is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday. Discovery’s crew includes the British-born astronaut Piers Sellars, who became a US citizen in 1991.

RISE AND FALL

1972 President Nixon announces plan to build a space shuttle

1977 Prototype, Enterprise, starts test flights

1981 Launch of first shuttle, Columbia

1986 Challenger explodes, killing all seven astronauts

1988 First flight after Challenger disaster

2003 Columbia breaks up on re-entry to atmosphere; killing seven astronauts

2010 Three shuttles left in Nasa’s fleet due to retire

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