Discovery: Onward And Upward

After months of tests and analysis and simulations, NASA is hoping to send the space shuttle Discovery back into space for a rendevous with the international space station.

It's been more than two years since the last shuttle, Columbia, disintegrated in the skies above Texas, killing all seven astronauts.

Now NASA, which has already delayed the Discovery flight twice, says it's ready again to go uphill. That's their expression for the extremely dangerous and risky blastoff into space -- uphill.

The pressure's on, but you wouldn't know it from talking to the confident commander of the Discovery, a veteran astronaut, who's married with two young children.

Her name is Eileen Collins, and as Correspondent Dan Rather reported last spring, she seems to have no fear of flying.

But 60 Minutes II was surprised to learn that Collins is afraid of roller coasters.

"How am I supposed to believe that when you ride the fire on the Shuttle?" asks Rather.

"I tried last summer. I stood in line for 20 minutes, got all the way up to the top, took a look at what I was gonna get on, and I turned around and went right back down," says Collins, laughing.

Go figure why someone who's afraid of roller coasters feels comfortable on the shuttle, rocketing into space with 77-million horsepower, able to fly from Los Angeles to New York in just 10 minutes.

But Commander Collins says she is ready to fly. She's been training in a $100-million shuttle simulator, which looks and feels just like the real thing. She invited 60 Minutes II to go along for the trip uphill.

After we strapped in, the entire simulator tilted back to mimic the real shuttle cockpit on the launch pad. Astronauts say it can be uncomfortable, even painful, lying on their backs for several hours, waiting for the final countdown.

Everything shook as we accelerated from zero to 120 in under 10 seconds, from zero to a 1,000 miles per hour in just one minute.

"Six thousand feet right now, 7,000. 8,000. There's 10,000 feet. We're 400 knots right now," says Collins. "You're actually 100 knots by the time you clear the tower -- 100 miles an hour. Now we're going Mach One. We just broke the speed of sound."

In just two minutes, we burned through two million pounds of fuel. "My stomach feels like it's in my throat," says Rather.

Collins became an astronaut in 1991, five years after the Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, killing seven astronauts. She had her own close call in 1999, when she became the first female commander on a shuttle flight. The flight started with a dramatic malfunction, all because of one frayed wire.

"It was rubbing against the top of a screw, and rubbed through the insulation, and caused a temporary loss of power," says Collins. "We lost two main engine controllers. Little did we know we also had fuel leaking out of one of our main engines. We actually ran out of gas."

Backup systems and computers saved the shuttle then, and it made it safely into orbit. Four years later, a catastrophe hit. That same shuttle, the Columbia, broke apart and disintegrated, trying to return to earth after 16 days in space. Seven astronauts died.

Why take the risk again?

"Well, first of all, I love my job. And I think back to when I was a teenager, you know, I started to get interested in flying when I was a teenager. And I picked it up at age 20," says Collins. "And I started flying and I loved it. So, I joined the Air Force at a time when women were just accepted into Air Force flying. This was 1978. And became a pilot, and I said, 'Hey, this is something I can do.'"

Collins became a flight instructor in the Air Force and rose to the rank of colonel before retiring. The Discovery mission will be her fourth in space.

Is the shuttle safe to fly now? "Well, the shuttle is certainly safe to fly, and I certainly would not get on the shuttle if I didn't think it were safe," says Collins.

For the next mission, Collins will be relying again on the rocket scientists and specialists on the ground in mission control. For weeks, they've also been practicing computer simulations: liftoffs, docking with the international space station, space walks, and re-entries.

The man in charge in Mission Control is Flight Director Paul Hill. What's the riskiest part of the mission?

"If you had to pick one, going uphill, no question," says Hill. "Powered flight, 7 million pounds of fire. Controlling that fire as it comes out of the back end of the spaceship going uphill. Ten minutes later, we've gone from zero to 17,500 miles an hour. That's a scary proposition."

Is he worried? "We're worried, but we're always worried," says Hill. "There are things in space flight that can kill the crew."

"It's a dangerous line of work," says Rather.

"You bet," says Hill. "It's just as dangerous today as it was before the accident."

Collins says she has to live with that danger, and so does her family. She says her husband, a commercial airline pilot, understands. But it's been harder explaining it to her two children.

Do they know about the Challenger? Do they know about Columbia?

"About six weeks before the Columbia accident, I told my daughter," says Collins. "My daughter was 7 at the time. I told her about Challenger. … She didn't know about it. And I told her about the accident."

"I had a book. I showed her a picture of the crew. I showed her a picture of the explosion," adds Collins. "And I said, 'You know, I want you to hear this from me. I don't want somebody at school to tell you about it. And I want you to know that the shuttle is very safe and this accident is not gonna happen again.' And then, two months later, the Columbia accident happened." As the Discovery launch approaches, the people who work in Mission Control are still trying to deal with the tragedy of Columbia, and the loss of colleagues and friends.

"The public sees astronauts like the folks that are portrayed in the movies. They see them like rock stars and movie stars and athletes. And that's great," says Hill.

"Because they are heroes. But they're also friends of ours. … Accepting risk on their behalf is not something we do lightly. We know that if we make a mistake and fail the next crew, friends of ours could die. It's not all about, 'Gee, NASA's gonna look bad. Friends of ours are gonna die if we're not good enough and don't make the right decision.'"

NASA acknowledges it made wrong decisions before the Columbia flight. And the official accident report says NASA's decision to ignore warning signs from past missions ultimately doomed Columbia: "Organizational practices detrimental to safety were allowed to develop."

"The investigation of the disaster was hard on NASA," says Rather. "What did you learn from it?"

"We made some bad engineering decisions before the accident that we now can't take back, and we want to be more vigilant and see if we can't encourage people to step up even more than some of us think they could have before the accident," says Hill.

"With hindsight, should Columbia been allowed to fly?" asks Rather.

"Oh no," says Hill. "I mean, in hindsight, absolutely not."

The official accident report says NASA knew about the problem that eventually caused the accident, but did not think it was a threat. However, pictures of Columbia show how wrong they were. A chunk of insulating foam broke away from a strut connecting the shuttle to the external fuel tank. The foam crashed into the left wing and left a gaping hole, and extensive testing later demonstrated the kind of damage the foam could cause. On re-entry, superheated air gushed into the hole and melted the wing.

"Little more than a pound and a half of foam knocked the most complicated machine man ever built out of the sky," says Hill. "A pound and a half of foam caused the deaths of those people on the STS 107. And that gives you an idea how thin the darn margins are."

NASA says it's changed the way foam is applied to the external fuel tank now, and eliminated the foam that doomed Columbia in part by using heaters to help prevent ice build-up. The agency has also installed more sensors and cameras to take pictures of any damage.

But Hill says the biggest threat to any mission is likely to be a problem no one has even thought of yet: "You know, in all likelihood, the next accident we have will not be the last accident we had, or the last one before that. It won't be the last failure we had. It will be something else. I mean, that is the nature of the beast."

"If … there was something cataclysmic happening, can we escape?" Rather asks Collins.

"No, we have no ejection seats," says Collins. "We can't eject out and come down in a parachute."If there is serious damage to the shuttle, the astronauts will dock on the space station and try to fix the damage. They've been testing new repair techniques and safety procedures in the huge NASA pool. The astronauts suit up and are helped under water, so they can practice space walks in conditions approaching the weightlessness of outer space.

The hope was that by now they'd have reliable new tools and kits to repair any damage to the shuttle, to plug holes or repair tiles during their real spacewalks. But the problem has proven more difficult than expected, and the tools available to Collins and her crew will help with only minor damage.

"If there's damage to the shuttle, are you confident that the repair kits can make the repair and get you back safely?" asks Rather.

"Not at this point in time," says Collins.

If they can't fix the damage, the astronauts will jettison the Discovery. As it burns up in the Earth's atmosphere, the astronauts will wait on the space station for another shuttle to come uphill and take them home.

It's a risky line of work. "Without a doubt, space flight has a certain amount of risk to it," says Collins. "So, our job is to keep the risk to a minimum, to be smart enough to know what the risk is, and where it is. But the only way you can get your risk to zero is by not flying at all."

"Man is an explorer. Man needs a horizon to be going to," says Hill. "Our horizon today is out there at the Moon, and it's at Mars, and it's getting out of lower Earth orbit and pushing the human frontier out. The only way we can do that is accept some risk."

"When we talked to you some months ago, you said that the NASA community was still grieving over Columbia," says Rather to Hill. "Is the grieving pretty much done now?"

"Oh, no. Oh, no. I mean, there's scars that'll never heal. There's scars today that go back to Challenger. Some of that just never goes away, because those people are still dead," says Hill. "Now, when we return to flying, that's gonna be a huge step in recovering from that. But we won't fully be over the fact that on that day, we weren't good enough for that crew."

Since that disastrous day, NASA says it's made more than 20 major safety changes on the shuttle, and on its fuel tank, engines and solid-fuel boosters. And NASA seems confident that Collins and her crew will soon be able to start their trip uphill.

"Before a flight, do you and your husband talk about it a lot?" asks Rather. "What do you say to one another?"

"You know, my husband and I … we're not real emotional people. We're both like engineer-mathematician types of people that are just -- we deal a lot with facts and what's gonna happen next," says Collins. "We don't get real mushy good-byes or anything like that. I don't like doing that. So we just say good-bye, see you in 12 days."