The euphoria in the Nasa man’s voice was unmistakable: “Three, two, one and lift-off of space shuttle Discovery — beginning America's new journey to the moon, Mars and beyond.”
Many people were holding their breath as Discovery began its journey skywards last Tuesday. It was at this point in the take-off that Challenger, Discovery’s sister ship, had exploded, killing all seven crew in 1986.
Discovery’s journey into space seemed to be going smoothly, however. As it rose towards the sky the thunder of applause from thousands of spectators mixed with the dwindling roar of the rocket engines.
The fuel tanks and engines separated and fell away without problems, leaving the shuttle to continue into orbit and a rendezvous with the International Space Station.
Back on Earth, however, euphoria gave way to consternation within hours as engineers inspected film of the launch. Memories of another shuttle disaster returned — the loss of Columbia in 2003.
Then, as now, the launch appeared to go smoothly. Cameras spotted large chunks of foam ripping loose from the fuel tank, but the risk was dismissed as trivial. Only after Columbia burnt up on its way back to Earth did Nasa’s engineers realise that the foam had hit the shuttle’s wing, opening deadly cracks.
Since then Nasa has spent more than £750m trying to stop this happening again. The heat shields have been replaced, checked and checked again, as has the insulating foam on the fuel tank.
It seemed in the first few hours after Tuesday’s launch that those precautions had worked. As congratulations arrived, Nasa staff — and the shuttle crew — began to relax. America was back in space. For a country weighed down by Iraq, scared at the prospect of terrorism and with growing economic problems, it was just the news people wanted.
“We know the folks on planet Earth are just feeling great right now,” said Eileen Collins, Discovery’s commander, in her first message from orbit.
It was a feeling that would not last long. Even as President George W Bush was going on television to congratulate Nasa, pictures began to emerge showing that all was not well.
Once again the fuel tank had shed its foam cladding and once again the shuttle appeared to be damaged. The big question now was not whether the shuttle could get back into space: it was whether it could get back to Earth intact.
The crew themselves are not in immediate danger. But if the worst scenario evolves they will face a long and uncomfortable wait in space.
The implications of the rogue cladding are huge. Although Nasa managers deny it, if the shuttle has once again been damaged by falling foam then the three remaining shuttles could be grounded for good, removing all hope of completing the half-built International Space Station (ISS).
This would raise serious questions over Nasa’s longer-term aims to return to the moon and, eventually, to put humans on Mars — a programme announced by Bush only last year.
So there are huge stakes riding on what Discovery’s crew and Nasa’s engineers find during their intensive surveys of the ship’s hull. These began when Collins piloted the craft through a spectacular flip manoeuvre as it approached the space station. The turn allowed the station’s Russian and American crew 93 seconds to take a series of images of the shuttle’s underside.
The first results were good, suggesting that the nose cone and the leading edges of the wings were undamaged. These are the areas that feel the full impact of re-entry, when searing friction from the atmosphere can heat them to 3,000C.
There was, however, some concern over other damage, including the apparent loss of some of the heat-shield tiles from a point near the aft landing gear. Dr Peter Bond, a space technology expert, said: “This could allow hot gases to get into the wing. If that happened it would melt the aluminium just as happened with the Columbia.”
This weekend, after docking with the space station, the crew were using a 50ft-long boom attached to the shuttle’s robotic arm to inspect critical damage-prone areas. The boom carries imaging equipment and a video camera which feed images back to mission control on Earth for further analysis.
Meanwhile, engineers on Earth have begun studying thousands of images of the shuttle during the launch. More than 100 ground and aircraft-based cameras recorded every second of the shuttle's flight into space.
Thirty-seven were based on and around the launch pad itself with more situated around the spaceport perimeter. Further away there were powerful 70mm cameras based at six sites along the Florida coast, while 11 long-range cameras tracked the launch from sites up to 38 miles away.
It will take days to analyse all the images and other data but this weekend one simple message was already beginning to emerge: the shuttle should never have been launched.
Michael Griffin, head of Nasa, admitted as much when he said on Friday: “We made a mistake . . . Do I take responsibility? Absolutely.”
He confirmed that possibly as many as four large pieces of foam had broken away from the fuel tank during the launch and that some appeared to have struck the wing, although it was uncertain how hard.
Bill Parsons, the shuttle programme manager, said that there would be no more flights until a solution to the foam problem had been found. But Nasa bosses insisted there was no question of scrapping the shuttle programme, which is due to continue until 2010.
While recrimination grows on Earth, the crew of Discovery have been stoically carrying on. Collins’s loyalty appeared to be cracking, however, when she told an American radio interviewer that she was “very disappointed”.
“I don’t think we should fly unless we do something to prevent this from happening again,” she said.
If the damage to the shuttle appears to be minor they will set off for home on Sunday, as planned. If they land safely they will be heroes and Nasa will claim the credit.
The main alternative is to wait aboard the space station for rescue by Russia, the only other nation able to carry people into space and back. However, the Russian Soyuz craft can carry only three people at a time and some months would be needed to build the craft. For Nasa, having to be rescued by the Russians would be the most excruciating humiliation.
AS Nasa’s managers face up to that decision, calls are growing for the shuttle programme to be stopped. Not only are the shuttles themselves too old — they were built in the 1970s — but they are also inherently badly designed, say the critics.
The reasons for this go back to the early 1970s with the end of the Apollo programme that had first put men on the moon. With an election looming in 1972, Richard Nixon, the president, was anxious to keep the aerospace workers happy in politically crucial California.
The debate on the future of space travel boiled down to a choice between the shuttle and a smaller, more versatile X- series space plane. Bill Anders, the Apollo 8 veteran who served as executive secretary to the Aeronautics and Space Council, the body which approved funding for the shuttle, believes it was the child not of science but of politics.
“Nixon didn’t give a rat’s ass about the space programme; he gave a damn about being re-elected and the shuttle got more votes in California than a smaller X version would have,” Anders said. “I was right there and that was asked, ‘Which one’ll employ the most people — the big one? Then let’s do the big one’. It couldn’t have been more cynical.”
Gregory Benford, professor of physics at the University of California, said: “The shuttle should be scrapped. It is 10 years beyond its design lifetime and so plagued that it and the station only serve to justify the other’s existence; neither does much useful science.”
Daniel Sacotte, the European Space Agency's director of human space flight, who has seven astronauts in training for spells on the space station, said: “So far the damage seems to be small and if so then we shall try to continue.
“If, however, it is something that threatens safety then we will be in big trouble.”
This week the final job of the Discovery crew will be to load the shuttle with 13 tons of junk which has accumulated on the space station and is now destined for scrap on Earth. Will the shuttles follow it to the junkheap?
