Foam

HOUSTON - NASA put future space shuttle flights on indefinite hold yesterday after agency managers acknowledged that a piece of insulating foam nearly as large as the piece that doomed Columbia in 2003 fell off Discovery's external fuel tank during launch. The announcement of what NASA called a "debris event" threw the shuttle program into disarray a day after tens of thousands, including first lady Laura Bush, cheered Discovery and its seven-member crew as they began a mission to the International Space Station.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Amid lingering concerns that insulating foam might flake off the space shuttle's external fuel tank, NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin said yesterday that today's scheduled launch of Discovery is a risk worth taking. "You're not going to like this, and I'm sure I'm not going to like the way it sounds in print," Griffin said at a media briefing near the shuttle's launch pad. "But we are playing the odds." Balancing the danger of a catastrophe like the ones that destroyed Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 against the pressure to adhere to a schedule that calls for shutting down the shuttle program in 2010 "is what you pay us for as taxpayers," he said.

If your house isn't particularly energy-efficient, the first cold, windy weather of the season can start you thinking about ways to change the situation. One way to gain some improved efficiency is to reduce drafts. Although drafts are not the only way you lose heat, they are a significant factor. Houses lose heat in essentially two ways. One way is transmission of heat through the exterior envelope of the house. This has the dominant source of heat loss historically. But transmission loss is drastically reduced by thermal insulation, increasingly used in houses in the past 50 years or so. The other source of heat loss is air movement in and out of the house, through infiltration, "exfiltration" and ventilation.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- After working all day as a salesman for Grow Group Inc., a company that makes private-label cleaning products, Keith Williams would go home to his bachelor apartment in Rochester, N.Y., and a dirty, smelly, garbage disposal.He tried home remedies: Lots of water. Lemon peels. Bleach. No good. He went to the store: Nothing on the shelves promised to clean his disposal.So Mr. Williams called the chemists at the Grow Group factory here with his idea for a disposal cleaner that would dislodge encrusted and rotting food from hard-to-reach places.

It is getting to be door-closing season. When the weather is warm, I don't much care whether the doors in my house close snugly. But once the temperature starts dropping and the wind picks up, I feel the need to bar the door.Part of this feeling is hereditary. I come from a draft-conscious family. My mother has an uncanny ability to detect the presence of an invading wind. When I was kid, for instance, my mom would be sitting in the living room at night working the crossword puzzle, when suddenly she would announce: "There's a draft in here."

HOUSTON -- Investigators are looking at new scenarios for how hot gases entered shuttle Columbia's left wing, causing it to disintegrate over Texas on Feb. 1. Contrary to previous analyses, investigators said yesterday that they now suspect that an object seen floating near Columbia on its second day in space was a fragment of a carbon panel that wraps around the wing's edge or a seal from that region. Investigators think the piece came loose after being damaged by a chunk of foam insulation that flew off the external tank and slammed into the wing during launch.

HOUSTON - On the day shuttle astronauts exchanged hugs and received a traditional Russian welcome of bread and salt after docking with the International Space Station, NASA said yesterday that more pieces of foam came off Discovery during the launch and that one may have hit a wing. They said they were confident, however, that the suspect piece of foam was so small that it could have caused no damage that would prevent Discovery from returning safely to Earth. The foam piece was one of three revealed in new images released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

WASHINGTON - The hole in the space shuttle Columbia's left wing was large enough that a spacewalking astronaut or satellite cameras might have seen it, investigators said yesterday. The size of the breach - thought to be roughly six to 10 inches across - is "absolutely" within the detection capability of the cameras on board military satellites, said retired Adm. Harold Gehman, the head of the independent panel probing the cause of the Feb. 1 accident. Gehman said that as the board moves to finish its report, now expected late next month, its members consider NASA's management failures to be on equal footing with the foam as the cause of the disaster.

HOUSTON - An object seen floating near shuttle Columbia on its second day in space is almost certainly a tile-covered panel that somehow came dislodged from the edge of the ship's left wing, investigators said yesterday. Tests show that the so-called "carrier panel" most closely matches the object tracked by radar while the shuttle was in orbit, said Maj. Gen. John Barry, a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board overseeing the inquiry into the ship's breakup on Feb. 1. A missing panel might have created a vulnerable spot on the wing where hot gases could get inside as the ship slid through the atmosphere on its landing attempt.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The second space shuttle launch of 2006 is on track for Aug. 27 if NASA resolves a pair of technical issues as expected. Shuttle managers wrapped up a two-day flight readiness review yesterday with a decision to proceed with Atlantis' 11-day construction flight to the International Space Station. However, engineers continue to examine two issues. One involves bolts that secure an antenna to Atlantis. The other is a malfunctioning heater on another orbiter's hydraulics unit.