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Space

NASA boss takes responsibility for foam loss

SPACE CENTER, Houston - NASA's boss took responsibility Friday for the alarming loss of a big piece of fuel-tank insulation from Discovery and refused to give up on flying another space shuttle later this year.

Administrator Michael Griffin said a new "tiger team" of engineers will seek solutions to the problem that brought down Columbia and continues to haunt the space agency. "By being smart and working hard," NASA might be able to launch another shuttle by year's end, he said.

"I think we're going to fix it in short order and we're going to get back flying," Griffin said. "We don't expect this to be a long drawn-out affair, to be honest with you."

Nonetheless, Griffin has his staff looking at what Discovery's astronauts can do to help out the international space station over the next week - like leaving any surplus food, water, laptop computers or other supplies, just in case the shuttle fleet is grounded for longer.

Mission managers may keep Discovery docked at the station an extra day because of the extra work, which would stretch the shuttle flight to 13 days.

Asked if he takes responsibility for the space agency's failure to make sure big pieces of foam debris didn't fly off the shuttle at launch, Griffin replied, "Absolutely."

Discovery lost four pieces of foam during Tuesday's liftoff that were "bigger than we wanted to see come off," he said.

Despite 2 1/2 years of tank redesign and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on that alone, he acknowledged: "We clearly haven't done our best yet."

[Last modified July 30, 2005, 01:10:15]