Tim Furniss/LONDON
NASA has appointed an independent industry team to review the overall safety of the Space Shuttle and its maintenance and refurbishment practices. The team will be led by Dr Henry McDonald, director of NASA's Ames Research Center.
The move follows the discovery of maintenance-related damage to electrical wiring on the Space Shuttle orbiter fleet, which came to light after a short circuit nearly led to the July STS93 Columbia mission being aborted. The damage delayed subsequent Shuttle missions.
Inspection and repair of the wiring on the Endeavour and Discovery orbiters is taking longer than planned and NASA says that the earliest date for the next Shuttle flight - either the STS103 Discovery third Hubble servicing mission or the STS99 Endeavour Shuttle radar topography mission - is 19 November. No decision has been taken on which mission will fly first and much depends on which orbiter's wiring repairs are completed first.
Unless the second of these missions can fly before 12 December, it is likely that one of the flights will be pushed back to next year, leaving 1999 with only three flights, the lowest annual Shuttle activity since 1988. Further delays are already threatened for next year and the prospect of a spillover from this year's launch is causing grave concerns about the ability of the fleet to maintain the International Space Station (ISS) assembly schedule.
One ISS mission, the STS101 Atlantis, has already been pushed into next January from December this year, and further missions have been delayed. As a result, the Atlantis will not be ready for the first major ISS assembly flight, the much-delayed STS92, until March at the earliest.
The first three-man ISS crew is also scheduled to fly in March aboard a Russian Soyuz booster. The mission, however, cannot take place until STS92 has completed its flight. NASA and the Russian Space Agency are therefore considering an interim mission to be flown by two Russian cosmonauts on a Soyuz T spacecraft. The flight would take place after the 12 November launch of the Russian Zvezda service module aboard a Proton booster from Baikonur. The Russian two-man crew is already training for an emergency mission should the Zvezda docking not be completed properly.
Source: Flight International
