No shuttle flights for a year?

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON — As NASA continues to assess the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the future of the shuttle program, at least one official is warning it could take up to a year before the next flight takes off.

The space agency grounded future shuttle flights after a fuel tank insulation problem was found during Discovery's mission a month ago. The pre-Katrina hope was for a new shuttle flight in March 2006, but after NASA’s Michoud facility in New Orleans was hit during the hurricane, analysts expected that mission to slip into May. That now may turn out to be overly optimistic — and not just because of the hurricane damage.

MSNBC.com has obtained an “extremely preliminary” planning document written by Wayne Hale, NASA’s deputy shuttle program manager, in which he concludes: “Launch dates before the fall of 2006 may not be credible."

Sources point out that this is not a proposed schedule, much less an official "schedule slip" — at least so far. A lot of "worst case" planning is going on, to identify bottlenecks. Once that’s been done, reallocation of resources and allocation of high levels of cleverness can do much to streamline the process, they said.

A NASA spokeswoman said Wednesday that no decision had been made yet on a new launch window and that the agency was still determining the extent of the hurricane damage.

Beyond the highly-visible impacts of damaged facilities and scattered workers, new delays entirely unrelated to the hurricane damage have also come to light. Solutions to the foam shedding problem are going to take a lot more time than space workers had initially hoped.

Shuttle plant workers homeless
Efforts continue to rehouse space workers from the Michoud plant that produced the disposable thirty-ton external fuel tanks used for shuttle launches. An estimated half of them are now homeless, and many have been relocated to temporary lodging near NASA facilities in Houston, Huntsville, Ala., and Cape Canaveral, Fla..

The critical work to diagnose the tank problem that caused unacceptable levels of foam shedding during Discovery’s launch — the same flaw that fatally injured the Columbia in January 2003 and led to the deaths of all seven crewmembers — is being transferred to surviving NASA facilities. These facilities are also assessing how reliably they could perform repairs or rebuilding of existing tanks.

Specialists inside and outside the program hope that a process can be quickly developed and implemented even after the hurricane disruption.

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