14 DAY TRIAL // NASA experts announced on Sunday that they would try to launch the space shuttle Endeavor towards the International Space Station on Wednesday, June 17th, despite the fact that this date would put the STS-127 mission in direct conflict with the launch of the LRO/LCROSS lunar probes. Officials said that it was all a matter of prioritizing the missions, in terms of importance. If Endeavor doesn't launch by June 20th, then it would have to wait until July 11th to get another window of opportunity.
The shuttle was originally scheduled to take off on Saturday, but early that morning engineers found a leak in the hydrogen fuel tank, which could have jeopardized the entire mission and all of its seven astronauts. As soon as the malfunction was discovered, mission controllers aborted the launch sequence, and said that they would consider the options they had over the course of the weekend. At this point, the final decision about which of the two scheduled missions will go first will be taken later today.
“From a priority standpoint, what we are trying to do in the agency is maximize our launch opportunities,” the NASA Deputy Shuttle Program Manager, LeRot Cain, from the agency's Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, said in a Sunday briefing, Space informs. While Endeavor will launch from the facility's Launch Pad 39A, the two lunar probes will take off from the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. Weather over the next few days was expected to be as nice as it got for both launches, weather forecasters at the KSC announced on Friday.
Pete Nickolenko, who is the launch director at the American space agency, said that the schedule for the next few days was, indeed, very tight, but not impossible to achieve. Careful coordination between the teams managing the two launches could ensure that both crafts take off safely. However, mission planers announced that, if some unforeseen circumstance delayed the repairs on the shuttle and the launch pad by even a few hours, then it would become impossible to launch on Wednesday.
If the June 17th launch for Endeavor remains a possibility, then the craft would take off at around 5:40 am EDT (0940 GMT), from Launch Pad 39A. In this case, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the LCROSS lunar impactor would have a window to launch on Friday, only two days later than their originally proposed lift-off date. The shuttle, once in orbit, will spend 16 days repairing and upgrading the ISS, and will also be responsible for breaking the record of most people in space at the same time. When STS-127 docks, 13 astronauts will be on the space facility at the same time.