The crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour was confident in a NASA decision not to repair damage the shuttle sustained during takeoff, Commander Scott Kelly said Friday, according to dpa. Kelly said in a news conference from space that the crew agreed with the decision reached by NASA late Thursday not to repair a gash in the underside of the shuttle. NASA had been considering a repair for most of the week, before deciding that the repair was not necessary and the damage posed no threat to the astronauts' safety. "We're certainly concerned that if we did the repair we could do more damage to the underside of the orbiter," Kelly said. "The shuttle crew and the staging crew agreed with the decision not to the repair." "I think it was absolutely the appropriate decision to forgo the repair, and that they took the appropriate amount of time to come to the decision," he added. There had been concerns that without repairs to the damaged tiles in space, the heat of re-entry might cause worse damage to the shuttle that would require more extensive repairs on Earth and even delay Endeavour's next mission. The damage is not enough to risk a catastrophic failure of the shuttle's heat shield, like the one that destroyed the shuttle Columbia on re-entry in February 2002, NASA officials said. The process of underside repairs during a spacewalk would have entailed risks for the astronauts during the process. Astronauts are to install and remove antennas on the outside of the ISS and conduct other construction projects during Saturday's sojourn outside the spacecraft.
