2008 Shuttle Launchings Doubled
“This pressure feels so familiar,” said Alex Roland, a former NASA historian with Duke University. “It was the same before the Challenger and Columbia disasters: this push to do more with a spaceship that is inherently unpredictable because it is so complex.”
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has recently decided to schedule six shuttle launches for this coming year,–double the usual launchings– even though the previous year of 2007 was not able to complete its scheduled missions without several postponements and safety issues. The goal, according the NASA, is to complete the International Space Station’s assembly regardless of budget issues, with political and safety maintenance issues a major concern of critics.
The shuttle fleet is planning on being retired in September of 2010 by NASA, with the space agency pretty confident that the scheduled spaceships can finish the job as planned. Unfortunately, with the previous track record over the past year or so, the critics may have a case for their worries about NASA’s new ambitious schedule being planned at the cost of safety concerns.
So far, December’s launching of the space shuttle Atlantis is still on the ground, with a “tentative” date of January 24, 2008 with a very high possibility it could extend to February 2nd. This is due to the engineers testing and repairing a suspect fuel sensor connector, according to NASA. John Shannon, deputy space shuttle program manager, has been quoted as saying that the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center experts are to test the connector from the Atlantis’s external fuel tank this week, in order for confirmation of whether or not this was the problem.
Shannon is also quoted through a telephone news conference from the Houston Johnson Space Center that technicians will begin to modify the space shuttle’s tank at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Unfortunately, all-together this is what is preventing the launchings which will carry the European and Japanese laboratory modules for their installation on the International Space Station grounded for weeks. “Everything has to go exactly right for us to make the 24th,” Shannon said.
Once the European laboratory module is on the ISS, plans were for Japan’s Kibo complex to fly about five weeks later on the Endeavour space shuttle, which is no longer possible. The danger in the sensors lies in they are part of an emergency system “to cut off the shuttle’s three hydrogen-burning main engines if the tank runs dry” due to an assortment of problems during the climb to orbit. If the fuel runs dry, the pumps can break and trigger a catastrophic explosion.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 9:16 am and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
