400 shuttle tiles damaged

Press, 1 May 1981, Page 6

400 shuttle tiles damaged

NZPA Cocoa Beach, Florida About 100 of the 30,000 heat-protection tiles on the space shuttle Columbia must be replaced and 300 others will have to be repaired, National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials have said, but they were still full of praise for the shuttle’s maiden flight into orbit. There was some damage to 414 of the silica tiles that protected the craft from the neat of re-entry into the atmosphere, John Yardley,

N.A.S.A.’s associate administrator said at the eighteenth annual Space Congress. He said that 303 were slightly chipped or gouged, 98 had outer-coating damage, and 13 were loose. Five or six tiles were missing altogether when the Columbia landed in California on April 14 after a 54-hour mission. However, “only about 100 of the tiles will have to be replaced,” said Aaron Cohen, manager of the orbiter project office at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston. He said the others can be re-

paired on the spacecraft, now at the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral being prepared for a second mission. The shuttle’s first flight was considerably behind schedule, and a main factor was the need to test and replace many of the tiles because of improper glueing. Mr Yardley, who headed a lengthy panel discussion, gave a generally positive update on all the shuttle’s systems, but said there was “concern over the source of the debris” which chipped

and gouged the tiles. Technicians were still examining the problem, he said. Re-entry temperatures were several hundred degrees less than expected and the thermal tiles eventually may be made thinner and lighter, saving money and weight on the spacecraft, he added. Mr Cohen said the Columbia’s lavatory facilities did not work and “we’re in the trouble-shooting mode now on that.”