-------------------------------STS-70--------------------------------
It’s June 8 , 1995, we are T-55s before liftoff, Space Shuttle Discovery is ready to go, with his five person crew and satellite on board.
However things tend to change rapidly after a strange discovery was made at 50s before liftoff…
The Crew
STS-70, Discovery was made of 5 astronaut: Terence Henricks, Kevin Kregel, Donald Thomas,Nancy Currie and Mary Ellen Weber.
Houston, those are birds?
The launch operators looked at the front camera, that looks straight into the Shuttle External Tank. What they saw there, entered in the history, a pair of Northern Flicker were trying to burrow a nesting hole into the spray-on, foam insulation of the tank! Effectively , those birds planned to install their nest into one of these hole. They were persistent birds, they firstly tried to brake to aluminium protection of the tank but failed there, so they went over the isolation , where they founded some troubles too. As a result, ar least71 spots were discovered all along the tank. Each hole was measuring 2 to 4 cm of diameter and 4 to 7 cm of depth.
Afterwards
The mission was of course cancelled for today, the Space Shuttle was sent back to the VAB for changing the isolation of the ET and eventually for discovering others troubles the Flicker’s may have done.
Finally, Discovery took off from LC39-A on July 13rd , 5 days after landing of STS-71 !
A new patch was proposed after the mission, each astronaut received hundred of them. (See the first photo during introduction)
Hope you enjoyed,
Will try to do one or two space topic per day.
Have a wonderful day or night!