Wayne Hale Quotes (29 Quotes)

The worst case that the engineers think would happen is a piece that is 0.05 pounds is the maximum-size piece that could come off, ... If you make a series of worst-case assumptions, then you wouldn't like the result.

The bottom line is there is large uncertainty because nobody has a very good handle on the aerodynamics at those altitudes and at those speeds. Given that large degree of uncertainty, life could be normal during entry or some bad things could happen.

We were playing the odds. The hardware was talking to us, and we were not paying attention.

The lowest risk, the best choice and the unanimous decision of the engineers in the management team is that we should re-enter as is.

Clearly you can't have many more big, long stand-downs and accomplish the number of flights that it's going to take to assemble the International Space Station by that date.

We have cleared Discovery to re-enter and we have decided not to take any action on the thermal blanket because we think that it represents negligible concern at this time.

that people have thought about, worried about.

If we had a catastrophic failure with Discovery, we'd need to figure out how to prevent that same problem from occurring on Atlantis.

People are already calling us and asking us can they display one of our orbiters in their museum after we're done. I'm not giving anybody anything until we're all agreed the station is complete and the shuttles' job is done.

Having three operational vehicles in the fleet affords the shuttle program great schedule flexibility as we move toward flying safely and completing the international space station.

We've looked end-to-end at the shuttle to make improvements and make it safer than it has ever been.

It was prudent to take action so that we wouldn't have to worry about some of the worst consequences.

That tank we have to do a number of things to, at the minimum removing and replacing the PAL ramps, re-working the bipod closeout area where we think the wire may have actually allowed cryogenic ingestion of air to condense in an area, ... We have a number of things that we've got to do before we're ready to do that work.

None of the things I showed you are satisfactory. The good news is that the orbiter Discovery appears to be in good shape.

We are under no thought of delaying launch.

However, based on the discussion we had at the program board yesterday it appears that the May launch window is something we can begin to work on -- the launch window May 3 to May 23.

Any time you have pieces come off your craft in flight it's a really bad day.

They're working to compress a decade's worth of study into two days.

The gap fillers, that's a product of the fact that we can see more and do a better job of evaluating. That's probably something that's happened in flight before, but this is the first time we've known about it and could take remedial action.

My immediate, knee-jerk reaction was that we can live with this, ... On the other hand, this is bigger than we've seen before.

We have released Discovery to reenter, ... We have decided not to take any action on the thermal blanket because we have determined it is a negligible risk at this time.

We have a considerable amount of work ahead of us. We won't proceed until we've done the work to prove that it's safe to fly.

We had a long conversation in April about what to do, so we changed out every cable connector, all the wiring and every electronic box. We felt we had a good system.

You guys ought to be aware, and we have got to make it clear to everybody we talk to, when we launch the next flight, there is still going to be foam come off the tank.

It's not going to be like, shuttle ends and we send out our resumes and see if we can find a job at Wal-Mart or McDonald's. This is going to be, 'Oh My goodness Where are we going to get enough people to do all the things on our plate

The thing that's going to pace getting Discovery off the ground is not the work we're doing at the Kennedy Space Center. It is the engineering analysis and tests that go toward proving what we have assembled is safe to fly.

I wanted to make sure everyone understands we are trying to eliminate critical foam loss, but we will expect to see foam coming off this next tank.

We have looked at that and it is a doable thing but the margins are small, ... It's better to have a plan, than to not have one.

Time will tell. This is not like the railroad.