Little Exterior Damage Is Found on Shuttle

As the seven Discovery astronauts were welcomed back to Houston on Wednesday, a preliminary assessment of the shuttle’s condition showed that it survived the two-week mission in space with remarkably little damage.

“It’s as clean a vehicle as I have ever seen after a landing,” said Dean Schaaf, commander of the team that secures the shuttle while it is on the runway at Edwards Air Force Base.

Discovery touched down at Edwards in the Mojave Desert on Tuesday morning after bad weather prevented it from landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Schaaf’s team found about 20 dings one inch or longer, which “was quite a few less than in the past,” according to NASA spokesman Alan Brown.

Overall, there were about 100, some as small as a pin prick, he said.

All of the dings seen on the ground had also been noticed when the shuttle was inspected in space, so “there was nothing that dinged it on the way down or during the landing,” Brown said.

There was no damage to the nose cone or the leading edges of the wings.

During the flight, NASA engineers had been concerned about minor damage to an insulating blanket near the shuttle’s cockpit window. They had worried that the blanket could come off during reentry and damage the shuttle.

They considered a fourth spacewalk to try to repair it, but ultimately decided that such an attempt might do more harm than good.

Inspection on the ground showed no new damage to the blanket, Brown said.

“It’s more frayed or fuzzy than damaged,” he said, and it showed no sign of scorch marks from the reentry.

Engineers will perform further inspections in the next few days, looking primarily at the sides and top of the craft, he added.

About 100 people from NASA were dispatched to Edwards over the weekend to prepare for the possibility of a landing there.

After landing about 170 more employees and manufacturers’ representatives were dispatched to California to help with the processing.

Most of them were still arriving Wednesday afternoon, Brown said, “and we’ll begin in earnest” today.

They will work around the clock to check out the shuttle and then mount it atop the modified 747 that will carry it back to Kennedy.

It will probably take nine or 10 days for the turnaround, Brown said.

NASA estimates that it costs about $1 million to bring a shuttle from Edwards to Kennedy.

Meanwhile, more than 700 Houston residents and workers at Ellington Field near the Johnson Space Center welcomed the astronauts to the city Wednesday.

The astronauts actually returned to Houston on Tuesday, but spent a day in seclusion with their families before the public ceremony.

The crowd filling the massive hangar at the Johnson center waved American and Japanese flags and clapped loudly as the astronauts took the stage in front of a massive American flag.

The Japanese flags were for rookie astronaut Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

“In the last 2 1/2 , years, we have been through the very worst that manned spaceflight can bring us,” NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin told the crowd. “Over the last two weeks, we have seen the very best.”

Astronaut Stephen Robinson talked about the Discovery crew’s impatience with the launch delay caused by the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia and loss of its seven-member crew on reentry in February 2003.

“I don’t think any crew has ever been more happy to launch than we were,” Robinson said. “It’s incredible what we have gone through, and look at where we are today. We had an absolute blast up there.”

There were generally smiles all around, but astronaut Charles Camarda broke into tears as he described coming to NASA 10 years ago as a single father with a young daughter.

“What a lucky guy I am,” he said.