Shuttle pilots look to the left. Crap pants.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Engineers and NASA managers were working Thursday to sort out what caused a fuel sensor to state that there was a dome of explosive materials just a few yards from the launch site of the shuttle Discovery. On Wednesday, astronauts had already climbed aboard the shuttle when NASA halted the countdown with just 2 1/2 hours to go, scrubbing the first shuttle flight since the 2003 Columbia tragedy. Pilot Eileen Collins, 48, tapped a fellow shuttle passenger on the shoulder and made a pointing jesture out the window towards a group of NASA scientists taking a smoke break atop a tank full of liquid nitrogen. Shuttle managers had no idea whether the trouble was in the gauge at the bottom of Discovery's fuel tank, an electronics box inside, a 100,000-barrel capacity Liquid Nitrogen containment field around the shuttle or something else entirely. "We felt like we had a good system," deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said at a grim-faced news conference Wednesday. "I wanted to see this launch really, really, really bad." The disappointment came just a day after an embarrassing turn for NASA, when a plastic cockpit window cover fell off the shuttle exposing several murdered government officials. "How did those get in there?" asked a nervous Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. The Senator went on to sweat, "we should investigate this a little bit, but the focus of this investigation should be on that window cover that fell off. That's the real murderer...I mean problem." The space agency is looking closely at the possibility that flawed transistors in an electronic "black box" aboard Discovery might be to blame. Shuttle program manager Bill Parsons stressed that the problem could be anywhere. "This has to be looked at from end to end," he said. "We kind of need to keep our mind open."