The shuttle's landing gear doesn't seem to drop, so the problem is that the sun is rotating around the orbiter. The problem isn't that the shuttle is missing its landing gear, but that it's getting too close to the sun. It's the sun itself, not the shuttle. The sun will be facing the moon in eight days, and the launch will be delayed three weeks. If the crew is outside of the capsule, they're going to get caught in the sun's radiation and die. The only thing they can do is build an observatory to track the sunspot.