Cape Canaveral, Fla. – The chances that the space shuttle Atlantis would be launched into orbit this week diminished by the hour Sunday as NASA prepared for Tropical Storm Ernesto and the possibility of moving the spacecraft into shelter.
Workers on Sunday rolled to the launch pad a gigantic crane that could be used to move generators and other heavy gear at the launch pad in case the shuttle is moved back to the protection of the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building.
In addition, the huge crawler-transporter vehicle that would carry the shuttle was being run through tests, and crews prepared to make room inside the assembly building to accommodate the shuttle.
NASA officials planned to decide Sunday night whether to roll back or continue with a Tuesday launch attempt. Engineers must make that decision two days before the area is hit by winds of 45 mph.
“We have two competing objectives. One, we want to get the vehicle ready to fly. The other objective is we want to get the vehicle ready to roll back,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator. “At some point in the sequence you have to give up one or the other.”
Earlier Sunday, NASA delayed the launch from Monday to Tuesday in order to give engineers more time to figure out if a lightning strike Friday damaged the spacecraft’s solid fuel rocket boosters and other systems. Liftoff originally had been set for Sunday afternoon.
A National Hurricane Center forecast put the eye of Ernesto on Florida’s west coast, due west of the Kennedy Space Center, on Thursday morning.
If Atlantis moved back to the assembly building Tuesday, it could be returned to the pad and launched nine or 10 days later at the earliest, even though the fastest time NASA has done something like that is 11 days in 1999.
NASA has returned the shuttle to the Vehicle Assembly Building 16 times with an average launch day of 42 days. But Gerstenmaier was still hopeful about launching, even if there is only a single day left in the launch window to try.
“If we had a good opportunity to get off on that one day, in this unique situation, we might target for that one day,” he said.
The launch window for this mission only goes through Sept. 13 because NASA wants to launch the shuttle to the space station during daylight so it can photograph the shuttle’s external fuel tank, where insulating foam has fallen off during previous launches. The shuttle Columbia was doomed after foam hit a wing, causing a breach that allowed hot gases to penetrate during its return to Earth.
NASA hoped to launch Atlantis before Sept. 7 to prevent a traffic jam at the space station since a Russian Soyuz vehicle is set to blast off in mid-September carrying two new station crew members and a space tourist.
If NASA launches later, it will have to persuade the Russians to change their launch date and land at night – something the Russians do not want to do because they have a new private firm handling capsule recovery.
“We’ll talk to the Russians … we’ll get a general feel for them on what they think is the right thing to do,” Gerstenmaier said.
There were no immediate indications that any damage was caused by Friday’s lightning bolt, one of the most powerful recorded at a Kennedy Space Center launch pad. Rather than hitting the shuttle directly it struck a wire attached to a tower used to protect the spacecraft from such strikes – but it created a strong electrical field around the vehicle.
The solid rocket booster system wasn’t powered up at the time so engineers didn’t get enough data about the lightning’s effect on the boosters, which provide the main thrust to lift the shuttle off the launch pad, said NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham.
Atlantis’ planned mission is the first of 15 flights scheduled to finish constructing the half-built space station before the cargo-carrying shuttles are retired in 2010. Construction has been on hiatus since the 2003 Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts.
– On the Net: NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/
