As I said before, it's really amazing that we've ever flown this vehicle:

Current plans are for a 2:38 p.m. launch on Tuesday. However, the mission management team is meeting at 10 a.m. this morning to discuss "a range of possible options" related to the foam crack, NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham said. The options include repairing the crack before launch or flying as-is.

It's unclear if the repair can be done at the launch pad (though that seems very unlikely) or how long the work might take. If the work can't be done at the pad, this is a rollback situation and it's unlikely NASA could fly in this July window. The next window opens Aug. 28.

And there would go another few hundred million dollars.

It's enough to make one cry when one contemplates what that kind of money would do for a new space transport industry.

[Update in mid afternoon]

John Kelly has the latest. They're still going to attempt a launch tomorrow, but will have to do an inspection to ensure that ice isn't forming in the spot where the foam isn't. If it is, that will scrub the launch (and presumably necessitate a rollback, unless they can find some way to repair it on the pad).

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,201903,00.html
is reporting a crack in the booster insulation foam. We may lose another shuttle, but at least it was using the environmentally friendly version of insulation foam.
NASA needs, desperately needs, to go back to the decision to use envirofoam and can every single supporter.
Willful refusal to learn from the deaths of the previous shuttle loss and the last launch's near catastrophe.
Fired.
With prejudice.
Gross negligence.
Blithering incompetence.
maybe the third generation x-prize will be reaching the ISS with a useful amount of mass and cubage, because NASA is going to scuttle the shuttle program with PC.

Foam chunks are actually falling already, as reported on the "Flame Trench"

cmon. retire the thing or face the fireworks.

somebody should register a moneydownthetoilet.com or at least a web banner or something similar with a big fat dollar counter showing the amount of money ticking away each minute not flying this elephant.

Is the "environmentmentally friendly" version of the tank foam really lower quality than the old foam? For example, I read of a December 2004 internal NASA report (leaked for some reason in August 2005) that strongly warns about the foam on the external tank. Perhaps the factory got set back by Hurricane Katrina, but the problem with the foam was known long before the Columbia disaster.

My take is that environmentally friendly or not, the foam would still have these quality problems. Being PC may aggrevate it, but the foam would still be flawed.

I read of a December 2004 internal NASA report (leaked for some reason in August 2005) that strongly warns about the foam on the external tank.

I don't think anyone's claiming Columbia was the first sign the new foam was substandard -- although one would hope that the loss of a ship and all onboard would have made more of an impact on NASA management than some report that didn't have actual death and destruction backing it up.

So, is there a 'filler' material (presumably based on the foam itself) that can be used?

Unlike a TPS tile found to be damaged on-orbit, this would seem to be a rather easier thing to patch, even allowing for the low temps a filler has to function under.

Now wIll NASA retire the shuttles? Please? If they would just pour this money in to supporting development outside of the big contractors (Lockheed, Boeing, etc), they would get some truly revolutionary designs.

Oh, and get some serious money into the unmanned probe business. JPL has done some pretty spectacular work on short funds (and had some really bad failures too, thanks to F,B,C). Just think of how many spectacular discoveries have been made by Voyager, Viking, Pioneer, Mariner, Galileo, Cassini, the MER, Pathfinder's Sojourner, SOHO, and Hubble. I'm not advocationg getting out of manned flight. It's just from a current science perspective, these unmanned missions have done so much more than the space going dump truck.

I want to see us on the Moon and Mars, permanently ASAP, but NASA's business as usual attitude puts it all at risk. Close the ISS, after planning one more servicing mission to the Hubble ST, and get out of the shuttle business. We need a new approach, and NASA, so far, has not shown any leadership in making the hard decision that needs to be made. I wonder if the solution is to go back to the old NACA model or something simmilar, and have NASA serve in an advisory & developmental role, or they just lease the flight hardware, or something like that. What do you think?

I have a bad feeling about this.

Isn't this the second time for this launch that NASA management has decided to go ahead even though there were known problems? Shouldn't a crack in the ET foam, facing the orbiter, be considered, post Columbia, a serious problem? Is someone trying to destroy this thing?

Isn't this the second time for this launch that NASA management has decided to go ahead even though there were known problems? Shouldn't a crack in the ET foam, facing the orbiter, be considered, post Columbia, a serious problem? Is someone trying to destroy this thing?

Well lmg, if they wanted to keep the Shuttles intact, they'd already be in museums rather the far risky place on the launch pad, not that that would be a bad thing. I kinda feel like Greg here.

Greg, as far as the ISS is concerned, I don't see the need to "close" the ISS. Perhaps some of the ISS partners or some private group would be interested in what is currently up there. The clean approach would be merely to hand NASA's share over to the other ISS partners and let them figure out what to do with it.

Well lots of years ago when the first change to envirofoam happened, the # of damaged tiles replaced between missions went up almost a degree in magnatude. I don't have the link anymore (roasted WD hard drive) but as I recall it was up by more than 8X. And they were no longer singles missing but adjacent tiles for the most part. It does seem reasonable in hindsight to figure some change was
responsible for causing consistant impact damage to those areas.
Or we can blindly support the ecco-supporters and various strategic geniuses at NASA and wait for the next one to fall out of the sky.

J'hn1, that sounds pretty solid. Got to wonder why a jump in tile damage didn't result in a shift, then or now, back to what worked either. Still it sounds like more than just using a poor quality foam.