Well, the panel rip is, as of now, CNN.com's lead story; let's see how long it takes them to seize on the MMOD event...

Probably not long... after all, when it comes to reporting 'space' there's no news like bad news, right? I mean, forget the fact that we have just seen ISS's living and working space increased by almost 20%; forget the fact that there's been the historic first meeting on-orbit of two female spacecraft commanders; forget the fact that human beings are conducting risky spacewalks far above the Earth, let's focus on the BAD news...

Cue the "broken wing" headlines. Yes, I know neither word is appropriate, but that won't matter...

Press conference just wrapped up. In a nutshell:

- Still need to evaluate the high-res photos to determine just WHAT this tear is
- Arrays only short by 3% as far as power production
- Structural integrity at issue with full-deployment
- EVA 4 being evaluated for possible P6 activities
- SARJ troubleshooting still in work

Did I miss anything? Probably... but those were some highlights.

Why the hand-wringing? Obviously, it really isn't good news for the space station -- this isn't made up, or insignificant -- but the axiom that "good news" is no news is true for everything in the news business, not just space. And from the point of public relations, bad news can be "good news" if it's handled well; first, it gets the program noticed, which is "good news" for a program whose major PR problem is being ignored; second, "adversity overcome" stories are always good media (assuming the adversity is overcome).

From the point of view of reality rather than PR, aren't these basically engineering flights, and isn't the point to find out where things can go wrong in space construction? Obviously, everyone would prefer a clean, unproblematic mission, but it's the problems that really provide the lessons and boost us up the learning curve. What would be really bad news is if the same problems kept happening over and over again.

In other words, yes this is bad, but it's not the end of the world, nor the end of the space program, and if dealt with well it can be positive both for PR and for what we learn about dealing with construction in space.

I guess we have two general "stuffs" that give recurent troubles : Big solar panels and tethers

You're kinda preaching to the converted here David No hand-wringing going on here; I personally think that this could be a great opportunity for NASA to get some good PR - stressing how vital a human presence in space is to tackle just this kind of event, you know? Robots are fine, very clever little guys, but you can't beat a man - or a woman - on the scene with a keen pair of eyes and a spanner to thwack things with.

Guess we'll see how they handle it.

True enough...but what worries me is that media coverage of NASA invariably minimizes--or outright ignores--the positive & accentuates the negative, which always brings the "we shouldn't be spending all this money in space" crowd right out of the woodwork. It's been an uphill battle since Apollo 11, and there's no relief in sight.

PR aside, starting to worry a bit about task saturation for the crew of Discovery. Dealing with two new station maintenance issues plus the MMOD event are not insignificant add-ons to their workload...

NASA's manned space exploration program could get good - great - PR if they worked a bit harder at it. They almost seem embarrassed to stand up and shout how amazing the stuff they do is, I've always thought. And they don't make nearly as effective use of their on-orbit imagery as they could either. There's a website I use that puts up new images of a mission regularly, but for some reason they don't just add the new images onto the end of the existing ones, they roll a dice to decide where they're going to drop them in. So today any sane person would expect new images to start at p32 but they'll probably be somewhere between 22 and 26... it's ridiculous and not helpful at all.

But that's a minor, personal gripe. I'm just amazed by everything they do up there and wish they got more credit for it.

Here's a better view of the tear:

Damn. Frankly, I'm amazed that this only causes a 3% reduction in power production; looks like the rip severed one of the conductive paths. The arrays must be like really electrically parallel in design to minimize the effects of regional losses.

The way I'm hearing it, the 3% loss in power is actually due to the array not being fully deployed. The tear is not along any of the cells, so they are "fine." The task now is to get this tear into a configuration where the array can be fully extended, not only to maximize power but also to have it in a good structural posture.

Yeah, it sure does look as though a pathway was torn. But according to the presser earlier on that's apparently not the case.

*shrug*

We'll certainly know a lot more tomorrow.

EVA-4, originally scheduled for tomorrow, has been postponed until Friday at the earliest and is now dedicated to P6. Ground planners are apparently having a difficult time coming up with a good plan.

Meanwhile, EVA-5, which was actually a stage-EVA to be done while Discovery was docked, will now be done after Discovery departs.

EVA-4 now on for Saturday.

Station arm will grapple the OBSS (shuttle's inspection boom) for use as an extension, and spacewalker Scott Parazynski will be at the end of that.

This is pretty white-knuckle stuff!

I'm sure I'm not the only member of this forum who's old enough to remember the last time U.S. astronauts set out to fix a balky space station solar array ! Younger members might want to look at this before Saturday's EVA :


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTwUg76BCNE