Space Shuttle Mission 2007 Crack //free\\ Access

The year 2007 was a harrowing one for NASA’s Space Shuttle program, marked by significant structural and thermal shield concerns. 1. The STS-117 Hail Damage

At T+58 seconds into ascent, a 0.25-pound piece of foam insulation—precisely the kind that doomed Columbia —broke away from the external tank’s (ET) "bipod ramp" region and struck the underside of Endeavour near the landing gear door. High-resolution post-launch imagery revealed a gouge in tile number V6 (a reinforced carbon-carbon tile near the nose landing gear door). The gouge measured approximately 3.5 inches by 2 inches, with a depth of nearly 1 inch.

For the astronauts, the crack was an invisible enemy. Commander Kelly later wrote that knowing about the crack “was like flying a plane with a crack in the windshield—you can’t unsee it in your mind.” The crew had to trust ground analysis while looking at the very crack during spacewalks (the OMS pod is externally visible). Space Shuttle Mission 2007 Crack

The decision: , but with a modified reentry profile—a shallower angle of attack to reduce thermal and aerodynamic loads on the left OMS pod. They also added a 4-hour thermal soak at 160,000 feet to allow gradual heating.

Endeavour landed safely at Kennedy Space Center on August 21, 2007. Post-flight inspection showed the crack had grown by 0.05 inches—just enough to confirm the models were right, but not enough to fail. The tile repair held. The year 2007 was a harrowing one for

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But the deeper story unfolded days later. High-resolution post-launch imagery revealed a gouge in tile

In the end, the 2007 crack stayed small enough to ignore but large enough to remember. It was the sound of a program’s structural integrity quietly sighing under the weight of its own history.

During standard on-orbit inspection using the Orbiter Boom Sensor System (OBSS), engineers detected —specifically on the left-hand OMS pod’s titanium structure. The crack was about 1.2 inches long, located near a weld line. It was not caused by debris. It was a structural fatigue failure , likely initiated by a tiny pre-existing flaw from manufacturing in 1989.