Live At KSC: NASA Gears Up For Shuttle Launch

LIVE IMAGES: The image above is from a video camera at launch pad 39A, where shuttle Endeavour is being readied for a 5:40 a.m. liftoff on Wednesday. It will automatically refresh itself to the most up to date image every 30 seconds.

NASA rolled a 13-story service structure away from Endeavour at Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A today, setting the stage for engineers to pick up an abbreviated countdown to a planned pre-dawn liftoff.

Endeavour and seven astronauts are slated to blast off at 5:40 a.m. Wednesday, or about 45 minutes before sunrise on Florida's Space Coast.

The weather forecast calls for an 80 percent chance conditions will be acceptable for launch. The prime concerns are a chance of rain showers within 20 nautical miles of the pad or a slight possibility that electrically-charged cumulus clouds might sweep into the area around launch time.

Check out the details in this Official Launch Forecast from the U.S. Air Force 45th Space Wing Weather Squadron.

Headquartered at Patrick Air Force Base, the wing provides tracking, range safety and weather forecasting services for all launches from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

NASA rolled back the Rotating Service Structure at the launch pad between 10:30 a.m. and 11 a.m., a key milestone that should lead to the beginning of external tank fuel-loading operations at 8:15 p.m. tonight.

It was a leak of gaseous hydrogen near the end of fuel-loading operations that prompted NASA to scrub an initial launch attempt early Saturday. A suspect valve and associated seals since have been swapped out.

You can watch live NASA TV coverage of the tanking operation tonight right here in The Flame Trench. Simply click the NASA TV box on the righthand side of this page to launch our NASA TV viewer, and be sure to refresh this page for periodic updates.

Live NASA TV coverage of the final countdown and launch will begin at 12:30 a.m., and then join us out on our home page -- www.floridatoday.com -- for live countdown status reports and interviews beginning at 5 a.m.

At 5 a.m., we'll chat with Joe Oliva, a senior program manager at ATK, about plans for the first test-flight of the new Ares I rocket, which is being developed to send American astronauts back to the moon by 2020.

At 6 a.m., Matthew Fields of The Boeing Co., will be live with us to talk about the Endeavour crew's plans to perform an unprecedented change-out of high-voltage batteries that have been powering station systems for almost 10 years.

Six of the $3.6 million batteries, each of which weigh 375 pounds and are the size of a small dining room buffet, will be swapped out during two of five spacewalks the astronauts aim to accomplish during what promises to be the longest station assembly mission to date.

At 6:30 a.m., Andrea Farmer of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex will tell us how we all can get an up-close view of the planned launch Thursday of an Atlas V rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The 20-story Atlas V is slated to blast off with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and a piggyback payload -- as early as 5:12 p.m. Thursday.

An Atlas V launch on Thursday is probably only possible if Endeavour's launch scrubs before midnight tonight. Two other opportunities would come at 5:22 p.m. and 5:32 p.m. that night.

Should the Atlas V slip until Friday, three one-second launch opportunities would come at 6:41 p.m., 6:51 p.m. and 7:01 p.m.

A shuttle slip Wednesday would push the Endeavour mission back to no earlier than July 11. The sun angle on the station between June 21 and July 10 would be such that the outpost would not be able to generate enough power, or dispel enough heat, to support a docked shuttle mission.

The Atlas-LRO mission also would have an opportunity on Saturday before its launch would slip until June 30. That is the next time Earth and the moon will be properly aligned for NASA to fly the moon-mapping mission.

ABOUT THE IMAGES: Click to enlarge and save the NASA TV screen grabs from the rollback earlier today of the Rotating Service Structure at launch pad 39A, where Endeavour is being readied for launch at 5:40 a.m. Wednesday.