NASA: September launch still possible

NASA probably can't launch shuttle Atlantis before a Sept. 7 deadline but the agency is considering easing launch lighting restrictions -- a move that could open up a launch opportunity in late September or early October, officials said today.

NASA shuttle program manager Wayne Hale and Mike Suffredini, the manager in charge of the agency's International Space Station project office, just finished an hour-long teleconference with news media.

The Sept. 7 deadline still is in place. Station project partners want to make certain that a crew returning from the outpost in late September can land their Soyuz spacecraft in daylight. That way recovery forces can quickly spot the craft and get to its crew after their Soyuz spacecraft parachutes into central Kazakhstan.

Launch windows for the Atlantis mission up until now have been dictated by post-Columbia launch lighting restrictions. The restrictions have limited NASA to launching during daylight and at times when the shuttle's modified external tank would be jettisoned on the sunlit side of Earth. The aim is to capture images of the tank so NASA can determine whether the foam-shedding problem that doomed Columbia's crew is under control.

Hale said a NASA team is revaluating the lighting restrictions. On the Atlantis flight, NASA primarily intends to see whether insulation breaks free from foam covers 37 metal brackets that hold pressurization lines to the side of the tank.

But the agency intends to select a new design for the covers in early October. So data gathered on the Atlantis flight would not be incoporated into the new design if the mission was delayed to a two-day window that opens on Oct. 26. That would be the next opportunity to launch after Sept. 7 if the current launch lighting restrictions remained in place.

A new crew is to be launched to the station Sept. 14. Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut Jeffery Williams then would fly a Soyuz now at the station back to Earth on Sept. 24.

Station flight rules call for a three-day buffer between the departure of a Soyuz and the launch of a shuttle crew.

Should NASA decide to ease the restrictions, an Atlantis launch around Sept. 27 presumably would be a possibility.