“ Northern flicker nests typically run more than a foot deep, and the insulation was only three inches thick. He’d mistaken the 154-foot tall external fuel tank for a dead tree limb and proceeded to tunnel into the foam insulation in order to create a nest and attract a female.” “A love-crazed male woodpecker grounded our flight for a month. Thomas, recalled in an interview in 2013:
One of the astronauts on that flight, Donald A. The damage ranged was as minor as pecks and claw marks to holes four inches across, NASA reported. It was mating season for woodpeckers and the culprits, one or more Northern flickers, punched about 200 holes in the insulation protecting the external fuel tank of the shuttle Discovery.Īs the Times observed, the $2 billion spacecraft - “built to withstand the rigors of orbital flight, from blastoff to fiery re-entry” - was driven back to its hangar “by a flock of birds with mating on their minds.” Woodpecker damage to NASA’s Discovery space shuttle
Thagard - whom the New York Times referred to as “something of a lab rat for scientists interested in the biomedical effects of long space flights” - also was the first American to fly aboard a Russian spacecraft, at what was a time of studied cooperation between once-rival space programs.Īs I note in my latest book, 1995: The Year the Future Began, the year’s most improbable development in space flight came about five weeks earlier, on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Thagard, an astronaut-physician who had logged 115 days in space, then an American space-endurance record for a single mission. When Atlantis returned to Earth 20 years ago today, it brought home from Mir Dr. It was the first East-West space linkup since 1975. The crew traveled aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, which docked two days later with the Russian space station, Mir, forming what at the time was the largest craft ever assembled in space. The space agency in 1995 launched its 100th human mission, sending a crew of five Americans and two Russians into Earth orbit on June 27. Of space shuttles and love-sick woodpeckers, 1995įor NASA, 1995 was quite the robust year.
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