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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (CNN) --
NASA has grounded its space shuttles until engineers solve the recurring problem of falling debris, NASA's mission managers said Wednesday.
Pieces of debris tore away from the shuttle Discovery during liftoff Tuesday -- despite NASA spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to prevent a repeat of the problem that caused the 2003 Columbia disaster.
NASA has grounded its space shuttles until engineers solve the recurring problem of falling debris, NASA's mission managers said Wednesday.
Pieces of debris tore away from the shuttle Discovery during liftoff Tuesday -- despite NASA spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to prevent a repeat of the problem that caused the 2003 Columbia disaster.
Debate over risk to shuttle evolved until eve of breakup
Sunday, March 2, 2003
By Ted Bridis, The Associated Press
Before the Columbia broke apart, NASA experts debated over five days the risks to the space shuttle, moving from a telephone inquiry about tires to remarkably accurate fears focusing on the left wing.
Toward the end, engineers even identified with haunting precision which sensors might fail in sequence as the space shuttle raced through searing temperatures.
Dozens of pages of internal e-mails and other documents obtained since the Feb. 1 disaster offer a look at the inner workings of the $15 billion space agency.
They also show an advancing discussion that only reached an eerie prescience on the eve of Columbia's destruction. By then, William C. Anderson, a NASA contractor wondered in a message, "Why are we talking about this on the day before landing, and not the day after launch?"
The documents, mostly covering five crucial days in late January, also suggest a troubled lack of coordination across some parts of the agency during Columbia's flight: