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Shuttle, space station link amid NASA woes
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-07-29 07:10
The shuttle Discovery astronauts boarded the International Space Station high
above the Earth on Thursday, the first shuttle crew to visit since the Columbia
disaster and now because of new safety concerns, possibly the last for some
time.
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| A
view from shuttle Discovery's crew's hand-held video camera of the
International Space Station as it passes over shuttle Discovery's tail
during rendezvous manoeuvres before the docking of the orbiter to the
station July 28, 2005. [Reuters] | At Mission Control in Houston, NASA said it is confident it can fix problems
with the space shuttle's fuel tank, which shed four large pieces of insulating
foam during launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday, a
recurrence of a dangerous flaw the U.S. space agency thought it had fixed.
"No one is folding their tents. No one is down in the mouth. All I see from
the team is extreme determination to go and fix that problem," John Shannon, the
space shuttle flight operations manager, said at a news conference. "I think we
can get the tank in good shape to fly again." He added that so far the ship
appears in good shape for landing on August 7.
As NASA managers grappled with the foam problem, Discovery and the space
station, each weighing more than 100 tons, linked up with barely a bump when
commander Eileen Collins slowly guided the shuttle in.
Following U.S. Navy tradition, astronaut John Phillips
on the space station rang a ship's bell to welcome the shuttle crew aboard.
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