Foam Penetrated Heat Shield All the Way to Endeavour's Belly: Worst Case Scenario Playing Out Before Our Eyes

The news from orbit isn't looking good. The space shuttle Endeavour's heat shield has been cracked all the way through to the shuttle's felt underbelly from where a piece of foam hit it during last week's take-off from Cape Canaveral.

The astronauts may have to use untested repair techniques to try and repair the damage before they attempt to re-enter Earth's atmosphere.

A 2005 New York Times story also reported that shuttles have been hit 15,000 times by debris and posted a schematic of where the hits were on the shuttles over the years. Here's what it looks like:

Hopefully NASA's plans to deal with something as major as this will work. The last thing NASA needs is is to launch another shuttle on a rescue mission, knowing that the rescue shuttle may be damaged during take-off as well.

It would be fascinating to see the tests that NASA is conducting to determine if the heat shield will work now that it's been compromised. Hopefully the news is good and they'll be able to bring the crew and shuttle home safely, with minimal risk to everyone up there. No one wants to mourn the loss of another shuttle crew.

Once they're back on Earth safely, NASA needs to look at whether it's worth keeping the shuttle program going for another three years, or if they should pull the plug and divert their resources into producing the next generation space vehicle. I'd rather see them do the latter.

Shuttle Endeavour Damaged During Lift-Off; Ice Believed to Have Hit Shuttle's Belly

The space shuttle Endeavour was apparently damaged during lift-off from Cape Canaveral yesterday; video showed ice (or something) hitting Endeavor's belly, causing damage to some thermal heat tiles about 58 seconds into the launch.

NASA discovered some kind of gouge in one of the tiles, which is causing no small amount of concern at Mission Control. They may have to do a spacewalk to attempt a repair of the tile. It appears that there's just no way to prevent ice or foam from coming off the external fuel tank or booster rockets during the violent blast-off and atmospheric escape.

Since they can't get rid of this problem, it makes me wonder if every shuttle ever launched has sustained damage like this during take-off?

It took the destruction of the Columbia to make NASA realize how serious this problem is. It doesn't matter what they do to upgrade the rest of the shuttle; if it's pierced by foam, ice or other debris, and they don't detect it, the shuttle is doomed. The loss of the Columbia proved it.

It's a wonder we haven't lost more shuttles.