NASA gave a green light today to proceed with plans to launch shuttle Endeavour on Friday, and the agency is not working any technical showstoppers as countdown clocks tick toward what should be a relatively rare night launch.
"Night launches are special -- they sure are," NASA Shuttle Launch Director Mike Leinbach told reporters during a traditional pre-launch news conference at here at Kennedy Space Center. "I don't care whether it's dark outside or the sun is bright and shiny, the feeling in the Firing Room is the same, and we treat them all the same. (But) It'll be fun to cap the year with a night launch. I like them, myself, personally."
Endeavour and seven astronauts remain scheduled to blast off at 7:55 p.m. EST Friday -- right in the middle of a 10-minute launch window. The launch -- which will be only the 31st after-dark shuttle liftoff - is precisely timed to put the shuttle on course for a docking at the International Space Station on Sunday evening.
Veteran shuttle pilot Chris Ferguson will be in command of the shuttle, and his crew includes pilot Eric Boe and mission specialists Heide Piper, Don Petitt, Shane Kimbrough, Steve Bowen and Sandra Magnus. Mangus will be replacing Gregory Chamitoff as a flight engineer on the station. Chamitoff will return to Earth with the Endeavour crew.
A three-day countdown picked up at 10 p.m. Tuesday. The big ticket item today will be loading liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the shuttle's fuel cell system.
The weather forecast for the launch remains the same. There is a 60 percent chance conditions will be acceptable for launch. The prime concerns are the chance of rainshowers within 20 nautical miles of launch pad 39A and a chance of thick clouds that would obscure the view of the shuttle during the critical early portions of flight.
Launch weather rules call for a ceiling of 8,000 feet so that range safety officers can eyeball the shuttle and make sure it continues to fly on course. The shuttle is equipped with a flight termination system that would enable range safety officers to deliberately destroy the shuttle's twin solid rocket boosters if the vehicle careened out of control and threatened populated towns and communities surrounding NASA's storied KSC launch site.
The launch will be the 124th for the shuttle program since Columbia made its maiden voyage on April 12, 1981 -- the 20th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first flight into orbit. The second launch of the shuttle program was 27 years ago today.
The flight will be the 22nd for Endeavour, which was built to replace Challenger, and the 99th shuttle mission since the Challenger accident in 1986.
"Endeavour is ready. The crew is ready, and the Mission Management Team gave a go for proceeding (with the countdown) today," said senior NASA manager LeRoy Cain, chairman of the MMT.
"We're not tracking any issues that would prevent a launch at this stage," Leinbach said.
The Rotating Service Structure at pad 39A will swing away from the shuttle at 11:30 p.m. Thursday, and a three-hour external tank propellant-loading operation is set to begin at 10:30 a.m. Friday.
ABOUT THE IMAGES: Refresh this page to see the latest still images from live video feeds in the Launch Complex 39A at KSC. The image at the top left shows pad 39A and the image at the top right shows the crawlerway between the 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building and NASA's twin shuttle launch pads.
No comments:
Post a Comment