The heat shield on Atlantis–the blanket shield not the tiles–seems to have a 4-inch hole in it, but NASA professes not to be worried. First time in a long time they’ve had an all-male crew, but they’ll be coming back with a woman after one of them replaces her on the space station. All this work on the station has an air of anticlimax, since the shuttle will soon retire and the station itself may not last much longer. But these trips aren’t trivial. They will be generally useful for building a base on the moon, which has not much more gravity than low-Earth orbit.
UPDATE Problem or no, they’re going to fix it, anyway.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 