Aiming for May

Discovery's crew for Return to Flight, Part 2, is visiting the Orbiter Processing Facility and other places at Kennedy Space Center today. The astronauts held a press conference this morning, enduring paparazzi-level camera flashes and answering safety questions. "This is a test flight, and part of the purpose of this test flight is to test the changes we've made to the tank," Commander Steve Lindsey said. The crew, like NASA's managers, is training and aiming for the May launch window. Though the external fuel tank is now expected to be at KSC earlier than expected, wind-tunnel tests and analysis must still be completed before the launch can happen. Those tests are to ensure that removal of the Protuberance Air Load ramp of insulating foam from the tank was the right decision. A piece of that PAL ramp came off during Discovery's launch last summer; if it had hit the orbiter, the damage could have been dangerous. No one wants the kind of damage that caused Columbia to break up upon reentry, though everyone agrees some foam will still come off the tank.