Space Shuttle Launch Set for July 1; NASA Overrides Chief Engineer and Safety Engineer Who Wanted to Delay Launch

NASA is jumping the gun again, preparing to launch the space shuttle Discovery on July the 1st.

In doing so, they seem hell-bent on ignoring the chief engineer and the safety engineer who wanted to delay the problem to deal with the foam problem that led to the destruction of the Columbia in 2003 and the endangerment of the Discovery one year ago when foam broke off the solid fuel tank but missed hitting the shuttle.

As I understand it they've improved the foam, but not in the areas on the tank where it seems to be breaking off from.

If they insist on launching the shuttle, then perhaps they ought to take a chapter from the Soviet playbook and make the mission unmanned. The Soviets did it with their space shuttle Buran back in 1988. It did everything they wanted, including landing itself. And they ought to take a look at the foam system that the Soviets used too as the design may well have been superior to NASA's design on the shuttle fuel tank.

The head of NASA is saying he will do everything in his power to kill the shuttle program if another shuttle is lost. If that's the case, then why are they going to risk losing seven more astronaughts too?

No, they don't have their act together yet. They should delay the launch and fix the problems like they were supposed to before they launched the shuttle a year ago. They were lucky that the foam that came off during the launch didn't hit the shuttle like what happened to the Columbia.

Their chief engineer is right. Hopefully his fears won't come to pass; it'll be the end of the shuttle program if it does.