I'm beginning to feel very bullish about the possibility of making May, |
I'm beginning to feel very bullish about the possibility of making May. |
I'm feeling very confident that this is not going to be anything significant for us to worry about. |
I'm not here to tell you that we are 100 percent confident that there is no risk during entry. ... We believe that the chances of anything happening with this piece of fabric is remote. |
If it's relatively simple, why worry? Why would you not just go take care of it [with a spacewalk] if you had a simple plan to deal with it? |
If we had a catastrophic failure with Discovery, we'd need to figure out how to prevent that same problem from occurring on Atlantis. |
If we were not to tell you about this stuff, then I feel like we would get in trouble the other way. We want to be very open. |
In the long run, we have decided we would like to remove this fairly large piece of foam, just eliminate the hazard that it might cause. We think we have a very strong case to be ready to take that ramp off by the third flight tank. Some folks believe we can accelerate that and potentially even remove it for the STS-121 tank. |
It appears that the May launch window is something that we can begin to work toward now. |
It does depend on what happens with those flights because when we get back from a mission, we have to see if there's anything that affects the next flight. |
It was a great day. |
It was prudent to take action so that we wouldn't have to worry about some of the worst consequences. |
It's been an outstandingly successful mission, ... We accomplished everything that we set out to do and more. |
It's been an outstandingly successful mission. We accomplished everything that we set out to do and more. |
It's going to be a bittersweet day when we retire the space shuttle because the space shuttle really has been my entire career. I understand its shortcomings. But I'm going to be sorry to see it go into the Smithsonian. |