NASA Focuses On Endeavour Preps

NASA is pressing ahead with plans to launch shuttle Endeavour in November while sistership Atlantis likely will remain stacked in the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building until early next year.

Senior shuttle managers are meeting here today in a program-level flight readiness review for the planned Nov. 14 launch of Endeavour on an International Space Station outfitting mission. The two-day meeting will be followed by an executive-level flight readiness review on Oct. 30 and Oct. 31. A firm launch date will be selected at the conclusion of that review.

Atlantis had been slated to launch a week ago today on a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA pushed the flight back to February after a critical instrument control and science data formatter on the 18-year-old observatory failed, prompting an automatic shutdown of almost all Hubble science observations.

Atlantis will remain in the assembly building until a spare instrument control unit is readied for flight at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and then shipped to KSC early next year.

If all goes well, Atlantis would return to launch pad 39A in January, and Discovery would be moved out to pad B to serve as a rescue vehicle in the unlikely event that Atlantis sustains critical damage during the Hubble mission.

The Atlantis rollback cleared the way for the planned roll-around of Endeavour to pad 39A from pad 39B on Saturday. Endeavour was moved to pad 39B to serve as rescue vehicle for the Hubble mission.

Now seven astronauts will fly Endeavour up to the station and deliver equipment that will be key to preparing the outpost for larger crews. NASA and its international partners aim to increase the size of resident crews to six from three next spring.

Led by veteran astronaut Chris Ferguson, the Endeavour crew will fly to KSC on Sunday to take part next week in emergency training and a Termination Countdown Demonstration Test -- a two-day practice countdown.

Ferguson and his crew will don partial-pressure launch-and-entry suits and climb aboard Endeavour at pad 39A on Wednesday for the last few hours of what amounts to a launch-day dress rehearsal.

The crew includes pilot Eric Boe and mission specialists Stephen Bowen, Robert Kimbrough, Heidimarie Stefanyshyn-Piper and Don Pettit. Sandra Magnus will fly up to the station on Endeavour and current station flight engineer Gregory Chamitoff will return to Earth with Endeavour's crew.

Magnus will join recently arrived Expedition 18 commander Michael Fincke and flight engineer Yury Lonchakov on a tour of duty aimed at prepping the outpost for larger crews.

ABOUT THE IMAGES: Click to enlarge and save the spectacular images of shuttle Atlantis rolling back to the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building from launch pad 39A, where it had been scheduled to launch a week ago today on NASA's fifth and final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. You can also click on the enlarged images to get even larger, more detailed views. Photo credits: NASA/Kim Shiflett.