This decision was not an easy decision. We looked at every possible way around this and finally concluded it was far smarter for us to be conservative and to take the safe route. |
This is a life-or-death kind of situation. You want to shut the engines down if you are running out of gas. |
This is a life-or-death kind of situation. You want to shut the engines down if you're running out of gas, but you don't want to shut the engines down early if you're not running out of gas. Either way you can get in trouble. |
Thousands of man hours [were spent] in developing new techniques so that foam in part and other components of the flight vehicle do not come loose during supersonic flight in the atmosphere as the orbiter climbs to orbit, |
Thousands of man hours [were spent] in developing new techniques so that foam in part and other components of the flight vehicle do not come loose during supersonic flight in the atmosphere as the orbiter climbs to orbit. |
Time will tell. This is not like the railroad. |
to set our minds at rest. |
We are absolutely operating in a fishbowl. It means that every day you have to tell the truth. There's not an option to say anything but the absolute truth. |
We are continuing to work toward the July 1 launch opportunity. We have a huge amount of work ahead of us but we have a good plan. |
We are good for landing. |
We are still going to fly with some risk. To characterize it otherwise would be inappropriate. |
We are taking the step of removing the sensors from the bottom of the hydrogen [fuel] tank. It will take about three weeks and move us out of the May launch window to July 1. |
We are under no thought of delaying launch. |
We are, however, working toward technical solutions of our problems. ... We have a number of critical things ahead of us that we have to evaluate before we set an official launch schedule. However, based on the discussions that we had at the program board yesterday, it appears that the May launch window is something that we can begin to work toward now. |
We don't exactly know what to do. If the intention is to keep the blanket on, we have nothing to do that. And removal of the blanket has a high potential to cause other problems. ... The remedy that might be called for to make it better is worse. |