14 DAY TRIAL // With the recent decision approved by Congress on September 29, the American space agency has received orders to add a new shuttle launch to its manifesto. Most likely, the new mission will be carried out by Atlantis in June 2011.
US President Barack Obama still needs to sign off on the document before it goes into effect, so some uncertainty about the flight remains.
However, as analysts accurately point out, Obama is very likely to sign the document as it supports most of the proposals he put forth earlier this year about the future of space exploration in the US.
At this point, NASA has only two additional space shuttle missions planned. Discovery is to blast off on November 4, while Endeavor is to go to low Earth orbit (LEO) in February 2011.
But the passage of the Senate 2010 NASA Authorization Act (S. 3729) means that STS-135 will need to be added to the flight manifest. Given the rotation shuttles undergo, it will be flown on Atlantis.
This orbiter, which registered the most flights of any spacecraft in the fleet, flew this May in what was supposed to be its final mission to the International Space Station (ISS), dubbed STS-132.
In selecting the orbiter that will fly STS-135, mission planners at NASA had to choose between Discovery and Atlantis. The latter was the logical choice because it had been stationed at its hangar for longer.
The shuttles are parked in the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF), at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Given that Atlantis has been there since May, engineers have more time to get it ready.
“Having an additional shuttle flight will keep the national treasure we have in the space station very well situated in consumables and supplies,” explained Lori Garver, the NASA Deputy Administrator.
“I don’t see it as either a luxury or necessity, it us just making good use of a resource and doing it in a safe manner,” the official said during a media briefing on Thursday, Space reports.
In charge of safely carrying out the STS-135 flight will be Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim, who are already training.
If the mission launched to the ISS, it will resupply the station with the Raffaello Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM), and with a Lightweight Multi-Purpose Carrier (LMC).
The shuttle will be manned by only four astronauts, which will make it the most “under-maned” mission since 1983, Universe Today reports.
But there is a good reason for that. If anything goes wrong in space, the smaller crew could be evacuated with Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft.