ONE late September morning in 1988, the space shuttle Discovery roared into orbit while the world watched with bated breath. The flight was the first since the Challenger disaster two-and-a-half years earlier. After a 98-minute delay to replace some misbehaving fuses, the launch went without a hitch. Challenger had been a sobering lesson, but now the shuttle was back in business.
Last month Discovery reprised its "return-to-flight" role following the 2003 Columbia tragedy. But this time there is no sense of business as usual. Discovery's close brush with a large fragment of foam insulation has forced NASA to suspend all shuttle launches until the foam-shedding problem is reworked yet again. And the sight of astronaut Stephen Robinson removing strips of gap filler from Discovery's underside by hand highlighted the apparent fragility of the craft.
But the perception of a star-crossed mission is misleading. As NASA officials made clear, the decision ...
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