At one point, Dittemore had told reporters that there was little that could have been done for Columbia even if Mission Control had known the shuttle's left wing thermal shield was damaged.
12.
Following the loss of the space station's thermal shield during launch, he assumed responsibility for the development of hardware and procedures for erecting an emergency solar shade and deploying a jammed solar array wing, operations which saved the space station.
13.
Boris Morukov, a Russian cosmonaut who was on an Atlantis space shuttle flight to the ISS in September 2000, said the catastrophe could have been caused by an internal equipment problem, such as an engine explosion, or a flaw in the thermal shield.
14.
Examples of unplanned in-space repair jobs include the Skylab thermal shield in the 1970s, the re-activation of the Salyut 7 space station in the 1980s, and the correction of JWST's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, in the 1990s after an error with its primary mirror was discovered . ( See also STS-61)
