Endeavour Not Ready to Launch Yet

Though the American space agency had originally planned to delay shuttle Endeavour's last launch from Friday, April 29 to Monday, May 2, apparently this schedule cannot be kept. Officials at NASA said over the weekend that engineers need at least a week to fix issues affecting the spacecraft.

At first, experts at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) expected that replacing the auxiliary power unit that failed on Friday would take only a day or so. However, mission controllers don't want to take any chances with Endeavour, and so they decided not to try for a launch window today.

Given the schedule conflicts that the KSC has with the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station starting May 4, the weeklong delay means that the orbiter's next launch window opens on May 8. The CCAFS needs to launch an Atlas 5 rocket within the next couple of days.

At this point, mission controllers have not yet proposed an official launch date for Endeavour. However, they are working on making the delay as short as possible. If it prolongs for too long, then it could go on to affect shuttle Atlantis launch schedule, at the end of June.

In principle, the KSC engineering team needs about two months between shuttle launches to make the necessary preparations to the Launch Pad 39A facility. If Endeavour is delayed, then Atlantis – the next orbiter in line for launch – could experience delays from its planned, June 28 launch date.

“Right now we're not ready to set a launch date. We know right now that [May] 8th is our next available opening,” said the leader of the Endeavour mission management team, Mike Moses, during a briefing he held yesterday, May 1.

“We need to go in and change out that box. Once the box comes out we have to verify circuitry and prove the box itself was the failure. We still have a lot of work,” Moses added, quoted by Space.

“Responding to problems is one of the things we do best around here, and the team always likes a good challenge. It's a machine and occasionally machines break. That's just part of the business,” explained the shuttle launch director, Mike Leinbach.

The top priority for NASA right now is to ensure that Endeavour is in perfect condition when its launch is finally approved. All other aspects are secondary. However, Leinbach added that the electronics failure plaguing the shuttle is fairly normal.

He underlined that the glitches that affected the aft electronics box are normal, and that they are in no way indicators that the spacecraft is starting to show its age. Endeavour is one of the newest shuttles produced, and is only 18 years old.