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Tiles Have Bedeviled NASA for Decades.

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, February, 2003

The Orlando Sentinel, Fla. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Feb. 7--The thousands of ceramic tiles that prevent the space shuttle from burning up as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere have caused headaches for NASA engineers even before Columbia's first flight in 1981.

After a 747 carried the brand-new shuttle from a California manufacturing plant to Kennedy Space Center in 1979, engineers found that more than 5,000 of Columbia's heat-resistant tiles had fallen off.

Throughout the years, at least four shuttles have returned from space with tiles missing. And the fragile 6-inch squares that line the orbiter's underbelly are routinely battered and pockmarked by everything from pieces of foam insulation to space debris and even sand...

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