Such a package could include tax credits, financing programs and training grants amounting to millions of dollars, said Matt McCollister, the seven-county chamber's vice president for economic development. PlanetSpace's chairman, Indian-American entrepreneur Chirinjeev Kathuria, told MSNBC.com he expected the incentives to amount to "somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million."

"The nature of the object that hit the shuttle radiator isn't known," a NASA update said, adding that shuttle processing crews discovered the hole while working on the spacecraft.

The impact also damaged a one-inch (2.5-centimeter) area in the radiator's honeycomb-like aluminum mesh, but did not sever any of the panel's 26 vital coolant tubes as it passed through the half-inch wide panel.