Hail damage delays next US shuttle launch

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Feb 28 (Reuters) Damage to the space shuttle Atlantis in a ferocious hail storm means NASA will not be able to launch the next shuttle mission in March as planned, the US space agency said.

The shuttle, which was pelted on Monday afternoon by strong winds and golf ball-sized chunks of ice as it stood on its seaside Florida launch pad, will be rolled back to a hangar for repairs, NASA officials said yesterday.

''The bottom line is, at this point we do not believe we can make the launch window for March,'' shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told a news conference.

''It will probably be about a month before talking about being in a launch posture, sometime in late April,'' Hale said.

''We are going to work toward the late April kind of launch date.'' The delay puts more pressure on NASA's already-cramped schedule as it tries to finish construction of the 100 billion dollars International Space Station before the US shuttle fleet is retired in 2010. Many of the station's modules were designed only to be carried in the shuttles.

Thunderstorms moved into the area around Kennedy Space Center in Florida late on Monday afternoon. Mixed with the rain were chunks of ice that drilled into exposed parts of the spacecraft.

The shuttle is wrapped in a protective metal structure on the launch pad, but much of its fuel tank and twin solid rocket motors are open to the elements.

FUEL TANK DAMAGED Hale said winds gusts reached 100 km per hour during the storm and the hail was the size of golf balls.

Damage was caused on all sides of the fuel tank and there appeared to be cosmetic damage to some of the protective heat-resistant tiles on the body of the spacecraft and its left-hand wing. Photographs posted by the newspaper Florida Today on its Web site showed thousands of divots and gouges on the surface of the tank.

Hale said hail was common in Florida, but the extent of the current damage was not. ''This constitutes ... the worst damage that we have ever seen from hail,'' he said, adding the repair work would likely take two weeks.

A six-member crew was tentatively due to blast off in Atlantis on March 15 for an 11-day mission to deliver a new power module for the space station.

NASA has devoted years and more than 1 billion dollars to fixing problems with the space shuttle fuel tanks since shuttle Columbia was destroyed in 2003 as it returned to Earth after a piece of foam insulation fell off its tank during launch and hit the shuttle's wing, piercing its heat shield.

Seven astronauts aboard the shuttle were killed.

NASA has had less serious problems with fuel tank foam as well. In 1995, a shuttle on the launch pad had to be returned to its hangar for repairs after woodpeckers punched about a dozen small holes in the tank's insulation.

REUTERS SBA RN0444