Shuttle flights halted "indefinitely"

It seems that piece of insulation that broke off the Discovery is bothering a lot of NASA engineers, who after two and a half years of grounding the shuttle program, still did not succeed in fixing the problem.

This time the foam did not appear to have struck the Discovery, so the shuttle's 12½-day mission to the International Space Station will continue, officials said. But because NASA failed to correct the problem, despite hundreds of millions of dollars and two and a half years of trying, further flights will be postponed indefinitely, they announced Wednesday.

"Until we fix this, we're not ready to go fly again," William Parsons, the manager of the shuttle program, said at a news briefing at the Johnson Space Center.

I'm sure aliens with warp drive are laughing at us right now. Speaking of which, it looks like NASA is working on that right now. Will this become its new focus?