Do the Right Thing

 After a tedious six-day review Barbara Morgan and her crewmates aboard shuttle Endeavour learned that the best brains at NASA believe the spaceship is safe to fly through the atmosphere without fixing a tiny but deep cut carved into two heat-resistant tiles on the ship’s belly.

 The tiles protect the ship from the fierce temperatures of atmosphere re-entry when the shuttle leaves orbit and heads back home.

 After all the analysis, computer simulations and laboratory tests, the vote was unanimous that the damage would not comprise the shuttle or crew’s safety. One group of engineers, however, believed NASA should go ahead and have spacewalkers fill the gap with a special putty to add an extra buffer.

 In the end, managers decided the risks of the spacewalk were greater than the risk of additional damage to the shuttle.

 "We have a lot of faith in the program and we'll do what the engineers decide is the best thing for us to do,” Barbara said during an in-flight interview. “We have all confidence we're going to be able to do the right thing."

 Her commander Scott Kelly said, “We agree absolutely 100 percent with the decision to not repair the damage. There was a lot of engineering rigor put into making this decision, it took some time but that was because there was a lot of testing going on … So even though a repair could potentially provide a little bit more margin, there is certainly more risk in doing the repair than we're willing to take. We were certainly concerned that if we did the repair we could potentially cause more damage to the underside of the orbiter.

 Heat shield damage is what triggered the loss of Columbia and its seven-member crew in 2003, so the issue is an emotional one. NASA developed a host of in-flight inspection tools, repair kits and other options to give astronauts more options in case of serious heat shield damage.

 The 3.5-inch long gouge on Endeavour, however, is only expected to raise the temperature of the underlying aluminum skin by 40 degrees Fahrenheit (the normal temperature in that area during re-entry is up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.)

 No sooner did NASA put the heat shield issue to bed, then it was faced with a new threat: Hurricane Dean, a monster storm chugging its way toward the Gulf of Mexico.

 Barbara’s mission may end a day early, as NASA scrambles to batten down the hatches at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which may be forced to evacuate. There’s an emergency mission control center that could be set up for the shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but managers would rather try to get the shuttle home before the storm hits.

 In an interview, Barbara told me that she has been busy documenting and absorbing as much as possible about what’s going on around her aboard the shuttle and the space station so that she can come up with more ideas about how to turn the spaceflight experience into hands-on activities for schoolchildren.

 She certainly will have a lot of adventures to choose from.