Return to Flight ... A Tale of Tiles ....

STS-114 Mission Commander, Eileen Collins, had a curious request fulfilled this "morning" (it was actually last evening, 11:39 PM, July 26th, Houston time ...) -- when Mission Control "uplinked" its first selection of traditional wake-up music for the Discovery crew ... to begin their second day "on orbit":

Before launch, Collins had requested for their first day's wake-up, a selection of specific music -- from the Bill Murry hit comedy of a few years ago, "Groundhog Day."

The "inside joke" was supposed to be that -- by finally launching successfully from Cape Canaveral yesterday morning -- Collins and her whole Discovery crew had "escaped from the NASA-Groundhog Day-type timeloop" that had kept them all "in quarantine since the scrub of their original launch, two weeks ago, on July 13th."

As I watched this "explanation" live over NASA Television from the high desert here in New Mexico, I couldn't help thinking that Eileen Collins was really trying to say something MUCH more profound ... about the entire U.S. Space Program ....

For--

What struck me even earlier yesterday morning, watching the "picture perfect" launch of the first Space Shuttle to climb into orbit in over two and a half years, was that we're ALL stuck in "a NASA-created, Groundhog Day" type timeloop!

And we've been stuck in it ... for over 50 years!

* * *

These strange feelings began as I watched throughout the night (over the NASA satellite link, from more than 2000 miles away ...) what I'd once witnessed "up close and personal" while covering these launches for good ol' CBS: the seemingly hectic and disorganized preparations "at the Cape" for yet another NASA mission; the blur of sights and sounds of engineers, scientists, and other NASA management and personnel -- to say nothing of the press -- gathering once more from all over the world to launch another crew of Americans from the Nation's only "Spaceport."

Many of us who had covered NASA during those events, and across all-too-many-years, had likened this "pre-launch, all-night ritual" to a kind of recurring "interplanetary Woodstock."

On satellite television late last night, it sure looked and felt like I remembered ....

* * *

Multiple television network "cabanas," built on the small hill overlooking the formerly dirt and gravel parking lot (where we used to park our fleet of rental cars ...), now filled with countless "remote trucks" -- television units from all over the United States (if not a good part of the Planet ...), each topped with the inevitable "uplink" ....

Then ... across this amazing "sea of dishes" loomed the might "VAB" -- that huge Vertical Assembly Building (still the largest structure in the world!) -- where, more than two generations ago, NASA had assembled Von Braun's amazing Saturn 5's ... then and now, the worlds most powerful vehicle ever built ... the rocket which, almost 40 years ago, had launched from here a dozen elite astronauts on their amazing roundtrip journeys to the surface of the Moon.

Farther out ... across three and a half miles of pitch-black "palm trees, grass and alligators"... lay the launch pads of the Saturn 5's themselves. In my mind -- seeing Pad 39-B in the distance, over-exposed like that, pinioned in the blinding lights of dozens of those million-candle-power klieg lights against the humid Florida night -- it was a Saturn 5 out there ... and not a NASA Shuttle ... about to send another crew of Apollo heros to the Moon ....

Only the intrusion of those damn satellite remote trucks spoiled the illusion.

It all came back as I watched those NASA TV cameras pan the scene ... the same bustle of immense energeies about to be released ... the same excitment before a coming launch ... the same launch vehicle bathed in those familiar starward stabbling flood lights ... the same VAB.

Only one thing was ultimately different, as I came slowly back to where we really were: all this activity was focused on the Shuttle -- which, unlike the behemouths I'd personally witnessed repeatedly leaving for another planet, decades earlier, would -- even if successfully launched on time, this time ... once again, only endlessly circle in Earth orbit ....

* * *

Where had we gone so wrong? Why, in the 21st century -- after almost 50 years of doing this (!) -- was the feeling of this place ... this technology ... the press covering the story ... even the Agency itself ... so much the same?!

And why were we still so worried about tiles ...?

I flashed on my first Shuttle launch from this same place I'd seen firsthand: the first flight of Columbia ... STS-1 ... in 1981.

That was also the first time I was inteviewed (and ultimately wound up working for) CNN ... years after my Apollo stint at CBS.

The Shuttle External Tank then was actually painted white!

Only later, did some smart guy realize that -- if they didn't paint the tank -- they could literally save several thousand pounds of excess weight ... and take that weight as extra payload into orbit ... in the Shuttle ... instead of on the Tank!

Learning curves ....

This was also the flight where we first learned to dread "the Tiles" -- or, in NASA-speak, the Shuttle's critical "Thermal Protection System" (TPS).

After that first launch of STS-1 -- Columbia -- on April 12, 1981, the crew soon spotted (and sent down via on-board television, images of) several missing tiles ... on the rear "OAMS pods" of the Columbia Orbiter itself (below the vertical tail ...).

This immediately raised the spectre of additional "missing tiles" on the underside (the belly) of Columbia ... where there was no means (back then ...) of checking the extent of any losses of these essential Shuttle elements -- the only means of shielding the returning spacecraft from the searing heat of reentering the atmosphere from orbit.

This revelation, in turn, launched a veritable "feeding frenzy" in the press, regarding "the dire consequences of even one crucially-placed 'missing tile' on the fate of the returning Shuttle ... and her crew."

It was only after Columbia had returned safely from her mission, and did not burn up, that we learned that key spy satellites ("intelligence assets," as NASA termed them) had been pressed into quiet, covert service on Columbia's behalf -- to photograph the critical underside of NASA's first Space Shuttle while in orbit ... to verify that all the tiles were there ....

They were.

Now, jump ahead a quarter of a century ... to July 26, 2005. And, what is the topic of the day ...?

Why ... missing Shuttle tiles!

The fact that a new television camera on the Tank, looking at the underside of Discovery as she "rumbled toward Earth orbit" (in the words of AP's story ...) apparently has shown "a piece of heat shield tile breaking off from the underside of the shuttle ... [leaving] a one-and-a-half inch white spot near the nose landing gear doors ..." (below), once again has sent the assembled press into a flurry of stories, painting "dark possibilities" for the "Return to Flight Mission," if not the ultimate safety of the astronauts themselves.

How is this still possible ... a full quarter of a century after the first Space Shuttle Mission of Columbia ... and its continuing problem -- ultimately fatal -- with "the tiles?"

Because, as Eileen Collins was sublty reminding us last night, for that last quarter of a century -- if not for the full half century since NASA was created -- we have made essentially NO FUNDAMENTAL SCIENTIFIC OR TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS in getting off this planet into Space!!

We're still using the same obsolete rocket technology -- if not the same obsolete vehicles themselves (!) -- as we were using a quarter of a century ago ... to go ... nowhere.

We're stuck in "Groundhog day" ....

And are thereby doomed to relive the same fears and technological impediments which have kept us in Earth orbit since the brief glory of Apollo.

This, of course, is what the President's "new Vision" -- ennunicated just short of a year after the catastrophic demise of Columbia and all her crew ... ironically, to the same bitter fate we all worrried about over twenty years before (!) -- is now supposed to change. But, not if the Space Agency continues to pursue -- as NASA, even after the President's announcement, seemed intent on doing -- the same archaic tools ....

The same obsolete (rocket) technology of "throwing stuff away ... to go nowhere ...."

The one bright glimmer, in an otherwise desolate landscape regarding this stunning lack of any real progress for so long ... was the curious statement made by Mike Griffin yesterday morning, immediately after Discovery's return to space. Griffin is, of course, the new NASA Administrator -- charged by the White House now with carrying out the President's New Vision -- "back to the Moon ... then on to Mars ... and Beyond ...."

After Discovery had successfully achieved Earth orbit, Griffin -- at the obligatory "congratulatory press conference" about an hour after launch -- cautioned the packed auditorium of assembled media and press not to take Discovery's apparently "easy return to flight" for granted.

He said, in part:

"... I want to ask you all to take note of what you saw here today.

"The power and the majesty of the launch, of course, but also the competence and the professionalism, the sheer gaul, the pluckiness and grittiness of this Team -- that pulled this Program out of the depths of despair two and a half years ago, and made it fly.

"I want you to think about what it takes to get millions of different parts, from thousands of vendors across the Country, to work together to produce what you saw here today. To realize how chancy it is, how difficult it is ... at what a primitive state of technology it still is ....

Apparently, one key area where we have made some progress in these last fifty years ... is, finally, a NASA Administrator who has actual humility -- in the face of the real technological "miracle" represented by the current sorry state of what's laughingly called "space technology" (the miracle that it can actually get people into space!) ... and who, apparently, also truly understands what we must do technologically to achieve the President's New Vision.

Get rid of those incredibly complicated, if not equally primitive (and deadly) devices known as "rockets!"

This is not the first time Michael Griffin has hinted that what's needed for real access to space, if not Humanity's long-term expansion into and survival on the "High frontier," is a truly "better and advanced space technology" ....

But, will he act -- as NASA Administrator -- to bring about this critical technological transition ... and in time?

By all means, stay tuned ....

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