NASA Releases Emergency Rescue Plan for Atlantis

While mission controllers are keeping an eye on the weather that may prevent the space shuttle Atlantis from launching tomorrow, officials at the American space agency have just released the plan they will follow in the event something goes awfully wrong with the orbiter while it's in space.

Every shuttle mission has a contingency plan, a set of carefully-thought-out measures that mission controllers will follow in the event of an emergency. Regardless of how remote a scenario might be, the agency needs to be prepared for it.

Until now, orbiters usually had each other's back, in the sense that if a crew remained stranded in orbit, another shuttle would have blasted off as soon as possible, in order to retrieve them. But this is impossible for the final mission of the Space Shuttle Program (SSP).

Endeavour and Discovery are already being decommissioned, after completing their final respective flights earlier this year. There is no way they could be made to fly in the time frame needed to allow for a successful rescue mission.

As such, NASA has turned to the International Space Station (ISS) as an option. If Atlantis were to become damaged in low-Earth orbit, its four-astronaut crew would join Expedition 28 on the space lab.

This course of action will be followed only if the orbiter is deemed unsafe for reentering Earth's atmosphere. This may happen if its heat shield is damaged beyond repair, or if some other glitch renders critical systems unresponsive.

NASA officials say that the ISS has the necessary resources to accommodate the STS-135 crew until a Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft can be dispatched to retrieve them. Still, even this scenarios doesn't cover all bases, because a Soyuz capsule can only hold three astronauts.

“Since Columbia we've had a very engaging program of inspection and the capability to rescue a crew in the event that the shuttle incurred some launch damage like Columbia did back in 2003,” NASA STS-135 Commander Chris Ferguson said in a preflight interview.

“Since there is no backup shuttle for this, we have to rely on alternate means to get the astronauts back, and they will be through the normal rotation of Soyuz vehicles that come up to deliver new crew members,” he added.

In order to prevent throwing the carefully-planned ISS crew rotation program from being delayed, NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency (RosCosmos) agreed to send the next four Soyuz capsule to the station with only two astronauts aboard.

The extra seat could then be used to take Atlantis' crew down to Earth, one at a time. “Instead of coming up with three people, however, they'll come up with two, which will leave an empty space for one of the shuttle crew members to get back,” Ferguson explained.

“It's a well-thought-out but lengthy rescue process,” he concluded, quoted by Space.