Fireworks on the Fourth

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 3 — NASA will try to launch the space shuttle Discovery on Tuesday despite having learned on Monday that a small piece of foam had fallen off the external tank, officials said.

"We're 'go' to continue with the launch countdown," said William H. Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for space operations." Liftoff was set for 2:37 p.m.

The small piece of foam insulation, which fell off a bracket that holds a fuel line in place, weighs less than one-tenth of an ounce, about as much as a penny, and would not have caused serious damage to the shuttle if it had fallen off during ascent, said John Shannon, deputy manager of the shuttle program.

NASA engineers and officials spent the day trying to determine, among other things, whether the remaining foam would stay in place and whether the missing foam might cause ice to form on the bracket that could fall and damage the shuttle.

At an afternoon briefing with reporters at the Kennedy Space Center, John Chapman, the external tank manager, said the loss of some foam did not automatically mean that the vehicle was unsafe.

Still, the decision is likely to raise concerns among those who worry that the space agency has let safety standards slip in the face of pressure to launch the shuttle...

In the afternoon briefing, managers seemed inclined to move toward launching without a close-up inspection, which would have required an extra day. They argued that the inspection team, working 25 feet from the structure that flanks the shuttle, had tools like borescopes that could help examine the tank for damage at a distance.

Ultimately, Mr. Gerstenmaier said, a plastic pipe extension for the borescope camera allowed an examination to take place from about a foot away, and so several inspectors get a close look. "We actually got data that's as good or better than we could have gotten by delaying," he said.

Though the discussion was lively, Mr. Gerstenmaier said, no one on the mission management team or the shuttle astronauts, who were listening in, dissented from the decision. The NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, listened "intently" to the discussion, he said, but "didn't raise any questions or comments."

In recent weeks, Mr. Griffin, overruled his own chief engineer and safety officer, who wanted to delay launching until more work could be done to resolve the foam problems.

On the first day of trying to launch the craft, managers decided that it was safe to fly despite problems that would probably have made one of the 44 on-orbit thrusters inoperable...

That's the CSC/ DynCorp Can Do Concern for Human Assets management philosophy.