Sep 19
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The space shuttle Endeavour will take a piggy-back ride from a Boeing 747 as it journey to its final home. After a final review from NASA managers on Wednesday, the Endeavour will go on a cross-country flight from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Los Angeles where it will be put in display.
NASA is expecting that the space shuttle will draw crowds and onlookers as it passes over three space centers and make stop overs on the way. The Endeavour will end up in museum, just like the space shuttles Discovery and Atlantis after NASA ended its 30-year space shuttle program last year. The Endeavour is the baby of the space shuttle fleet as it was built as a replacement for Challenger, the space shuttle that exploded shortly after it launched in 1986. It rolled out of the assembly plant in 1991 and flew some of the most high-profile missions in history. It flew a spacelab mission and many International Space Station Assembly mission and also with the Russian space station Mir. The Endeavour was named after the first ship commanded by British explorer, James Cook.
The flight was originally scheduled on Monday, but was delayed due to unfavorable weather conditions.
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News Source: edition.cnn.com
Jul 22
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Just before sunrise, space shuttle Atlantis made its final landing in Florida, putting to bed the 30-year U.S. shuttle program and ending NASA’s 135th and final manned shuttle mission to space.
As a little white dot passed over the horizon, the crowd of spectators gathered at Kennedy Space Center to welcome the shuttle home.
Together with its crew members known as the final four : Christopher Ferguson, Douglas Hurley, Sandra Magnus, and Rex Walheim, Atlantis’ mission was virtually flawless, with the crew delivering five-and-a-half tons of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station.
“You know, the space station’s changed the way we view our world, and it’s changed the way we view our universe. A lot of emotion today, but one thing’s indisputable: America’s not gonna stop exploring,” Ferguson said, as the shuttle landed.
It was a bittersweet day for shuttle astronauts, crews and technicians. Today, United Space Alliance, one of the space program’s largest employers, will lay off about 2,000 employees.
“For some, Friday is their last day, and they performed flawlessly right up to the end,” Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana said. “I have extreme pride in every one of them.”
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Source: USA Today, cnet News, The Washington Post
Jul 18
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Atlantis astronauts sailed past the midpoint of NASA’s STS-135 final shuttle program mission on July 14, steeped in a demanding cargo exchange with the International Space Station, but working well ahead of schedule.
The 13-day flight to the orbiting science laboratory is scheduled to conclude with a dawn landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on July 21. Touchdown at the Shuttle Landing Facility is scheduled for 5:58 a.m. EDT.
“We’ve had a wonderful mission so far,” Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson reported as the four-member shuttle crew prepared to take several hours off to share an “All American” meal of barbecue with their six U.S., Russian and Japanese space station hosts.
“We brought up about 10,000 pounds of food and supplies, and that will hopefully sustain the station for about a year to come,” Ferguson said. “We have a couple of more days docked, then it’s the long road back to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.”
The transfers, overseen by Atlantis mission specialist Sandra Magnus, are intended to sustain six-person operations aboard the orbiting science laboratory through 2012, as NASA transitions to post-shuttle era commercial resupply services provided by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. The strategy, however, relies on regular launches of cargo-laden Russian Progress space freighters as well.
As they took their first break since the July 8 launch of Atlantis, the shuttle astronauts reported that 75% of the 9,400 lb. of food, spare parts and research equipment they delivered in the Raffaello Multi-Purpose Logistics Module had been off-loaded. More than half of the 2,300 lb. of equipment from the shuttle’s mid-deck had made its way across the station threshold as well.
Over the remaining days of the flight, 5,600 lb. of trash and unneeded station gear will be stowed aboard Raffaello, which was temporarily transferred from the shuttle’s cargo bay to the station on July 11. Another 1,500 lb. of station discards will return to Earth in the mid-deck.
“There are bags and boxes everywhere, just like your house on moving day,” says Chris Edelen, NASA’s lead space station flight director. “But it’s a controlled chaos. The [Mission Control] team is working very closely with the crew. They have choreographed the movement of equipment in and out of the logistics module so there is a place for everything.”
-aviationweek.com
Jul 06
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With little fanfare, the Kennedy Space Center shuttle launch team gathered Tuesday to begin the 135th and last countdown at 1 p.m. for a shuttle launch, aiming to get Atlantis and its four-member crew off the ground at 11:26 a.m. EDT on Friday.
“The team gets into the mode of ‘This is launch countdown,’ and that’s really the focus that everybody has,” says NASA test director Jeremy Graeber. “To do it one more time is a great feeling.”
The only cloud on the horizon for an on-time liftoff is, predictably, Florida’s thunderstorm-prone summer weather. With a front expected to move over the mid-Atlantic coast on Thursday, meteorologists with the U.S; Air Force’s 45th Space Wing are forecasting a 60% chance weather will delay launch.
“We’ll have real high moisture on Friday,” says shuttle weather officer Kathy Winters. “When we have high moisture, particularly in the low levels, we can pop those thunderstorms and showers early when the sea breeze forms.”
Specifically, the forecast calls for a chance of showers and thunderstorms within 20 nm of the Shuttle Landing Facility, a violation of NASA flight rules that protect for a contingency landing at the launch site, and cumulus clouds within 10 nm of Launch Pad 39A, where Atlantis stands poised for liftoff. The forecast improves for launch attempts on Saturday and/or Sunday, after which the Eastern Test Range schedule shifts to support a Delta 4 rocket launch on July 14 with a GPS satellite for the Air Force. The shuttle’s next launch window opens July 16 if the Delta launches on time.
The abridged, four-member STS-135 crew, headed by Navy Capt. (ret) Christopher Ferguson, arrived at the Florida spaceport Monday afternoon in a pair of T-38 training jets.
“It’s such a pleasure to come down here when you have a rocket on the pad and it’s got your stuff loaded on it,” astronaut Rex Walheim tells reporters gathered at the landing strip.
NASA pared the last shuttle crew from the normal six or seven members to four to accommodate an emergency return on Russian Soyuz capsules, as there is no second shuttle available to mount a rescue mission should Atlantis sustain significant enough damage during launch or while in orbit to prevent a safe re-entry. NASA has preserved a safe haven option for shuttle crewmembers aboard the International Space Station and shuttle rescue capability since returning the fleet to flight after the 2003 Columbia accident.
Ferguson, Walheim, pilot Douglas Hurley and mission specialist Sandra Magnus were all fitted for Soyuz Sokol spacesuits, though just Walheim’s is flying with the STS-135 cargo. The others would be flown to the station as needed.
“The plan would basically change the sequence of when people would come down,” Walheim said in a preflight interview. “Some of the folks on the space station would stay longer than they anticipated, and then as spots free up we’d cycle our crew down one by one. [Russia] also will launch Soyuz spacecraft with just two people instead of three, which leaves a spot for them to come down with one of our crewmembers. We will kind of methodically do that until everybody’s rotated down.” Walheim would be the first to return, followed by Ferguson, Magnus and Hurley.
The goal of NASA’s final shuttle flight is to deliver a year’s worth of food, clothing, supplies and equipment to the space station to buy time in case NASA’s commercial cargo resuppliers, Space Exploration Technologies and Orbital Sciences Corp., encounter technical delays with their programs.
-aviationweek.com
Mar 25
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At Johnson Space Center, preparations for STS-135 – a 12-day supply mission to the International Space Station and the absolute end of the shuttle program – are unfolding with increasing urgency despite the absence of congressional agreement on a 2011 budget.
The mission is slated to lift off from Kennedy Space Center on June 28 at 3:40 p.m. EDT.
At the Florida spaceport, Atlantis awaits the April 19 departure of Endeavour’s final mission, STS-134, before taking a place at Launch Pad 39A. In Houston, STS-135 commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley, Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim have transitioned from training for the rescue role they would shoulder if Endeavour sustained damage to her thermal protection system to preparations for a demanding resupply flight.
“I think there is still some speculation as to whether we will actually fly this flight,” Ferguson said March 23. “But with every passing day, I’m more and more convinced that NASA has the funding put aside and we have the tacit approval of Congress.” The flight is included in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act.
Ferguson, Hurley and Magnus spoke of the mission plans during a demonstration of their station rendezvous training.
NASA has not flown the shuttle with a crew of four since STS-6, a five-day satellite deployment mission in 1983. The basic flight plan has changed considerably since the 2003 Columbia tragedy and now includes time-consuming heat shield inspections on the second and next-to-last mission days. In addition, station missions, which usually include six or seven astronauts, require “all hands” for the manually flown rendezvous and docking on flight day three.
Hurley says the demands on the small crew rival those of his previous flight, STS-127, a 16-day station assembly mission in July 2009 that included five spacewalks.
“It feels like I have three times as much stuff to do,” he says. “Everyone has two, three or four other jobs and each of us has to back up somebody.”
Without a shuttle on standby to serve as their rescue vehicle, Ferguson’s crew also will be trained more extensively than usual in space station operations. Should Atlantis reach the station but be unable to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, the shuttle astronauts would rotate back to Earth aboard a succession of Soyuz flights. Walheim would return after three months, Ferguson after six months, Magnus after nine months and Hurley after a year.
To help spread the workload, the Atlantis crew will launch 2 hr. earlier in the crew day than usual. The change will give them 8 hr. to prepare on orbit for the heat shield inspection on day two.
-aviationweek.com
-wikipedia.org
Nov 02
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It is expected that thousands will turn out on Nov. 3, Wednesday, to watch NASA’s space shuttle Discovery soar to space for the last time.
Luckily, a shuttle launch is such a bright spectacle that anyone on Florida’s Space Coast can get a decent view. Discovery is poised to blast off on Nov. 3 at 3:52 p.m. EDT (1952 GMT) to make one last delivery trip to the International Space Station.
Tickets are scarce, but there are still some steps spectators can take to make sure they have a memorable experience watching the shuttle Discovery’s last launch.
The best launch viewing spot available to the public is on the NASA Causeway, about 6 miles (9.6 km) from the shuttle’s Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA sells adult tickets for viewing from the causeway for $59 ($49 for children), which provides an unobstructed view over the Banana River.
However, if you don’t already have tickets for the causeway, you’re out of luck: They’ve been sold out for weeks. “The demand far outweighs the supply,” said Andrea Farmer, public relations manager at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Farmer also said that the number of people clamoring for spots on the NASA Causeway, as well as at the visitor center itself and the nearby U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, was so large NASA instituted a new ticket-selling policy for this final launch of Discovery.
People first had to register for a chance to buy tickets to these locations, and then names were randomly selected from the list to purchase the passes.
But for those without coveted NASA tickets, fear not! Opportunities abound for good viewing beyond the spaceport. All you need is a car and a good map.
One of the most popular locations is Space View Park in Titusville, Florida, just across the Indian River from Kennedy Space Center. “I would definitely say go to Titusville — that’s the best view and the closest view you can get without having tickets,” said Ben Cooper, a space photographer for NASA and other media outlets. “Anywhere along the river is good.”
Space View Park has the added benefit of an audio feed that plays the official NASA countdown, so people gathered at the site can stay updated on the launch status, Cooper said. “It’s definitely going to be mobbed in that spot,” Cooper said. “There really isn’t any place to go to get away from the crowds.”
Other good viewing locations in Titusville include Parrish Park, on the Max Brewer Causeway between Titusville and Kennedy Space Center.
To get a little bit off the (extremely) well-beaten path, viewers can head to Cape Canaveral and Port Canaveral, where cruise ships dock.
If all else fails, NASA’s shuttle Endeavour is currently slated to launch on its final mission to space on Feb. 27, 2011, at 3:38 p.m. EST (2038 GMT).
NASA has not yet sold tickets for viewing that launch. A NASA authorization bill recently signed by President Obama approved one more flight by the shuttle Atlantis, though that mission must be allocated funding by Congress before it is officially on. If this extra trip flies, it could be as early as June 2011.
-space.com
-wikipedia.org
Oct 15
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At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, space shuttle Atlantis is firmly secured to the fixed service structure pedestals at Launch Pad 39A.
The STS-129 mission will be commanded by Charles O. Hobaugh and piloted by Barry E. Wilmore. Mission Specialists are Robert L. Satcher Jr., Mike Foreman, Randy Bresnik and Leland Melvin. Wilmore, Satcher and Bresnik will be making their first trips to space.
Atlantis and its crew will deliver two control moment gyroscopes, equipment and EXPRESS Logistics Carrier 1 and 2 to the International Space Station. The mission will feature three spacewalks.
Atlantis also will return station crew member Nicole Stott to Earth and is slated to be the final space shuttle crew rotation flight.
Launch of Atlantis on the STS-129 mission is targeted for 4:04 p.m. EST Nov. 12.
STS-129 is the 31st shuttle mission to the station.
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