October 24, 2007—It was dismal and drizzly when I got to the Kennedy Space Center early Tuesday morning. But, as NASA Launch Director Mike Leinbach quipped, "sometimes you just get lucky". The skies cleared and Discovery roared to orbit. Now, NASA’s checking those cracked heat shields.
Docking is tomorrow, and the first spacewalk is set for Friday. BTW, I’m looking forward to meeting everyone at the St. Petersburg Festival of Reading on Friday and Saturday. I’ll be there as one of the featured authors to talk about "Final Countdown". The visit also means I get the added privilege of sitting down to talk with Susan Giles-Wantuck of WUSF-FM in Tampa. We’ll discuss the book and the festival during "Morning Edition" on Friday. Again, University Press of Florida’s web page on the book can be found at… http://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=DUGGIS07 See you there! More to come. Photo courtesy of NASA
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The astronauts will spend most of the morning using the Shuttle’s robot arm to grasp the fifty foot long "boom" extension, so they can scan Discovery’s heat tiles and shields for any launch day damage. The spindly periscope is pictured to the left from Endeavour’s August mission STS-118. NASA overrode the concerns of a Shuttle safety board and launched without replacing three of the heavy gray heat shields along Discovery’s wings. But, they also tweaked the scan plan to take the microscopic cracking on the shields into account. I asked NASA’s Leroy Cain about it, and he says they’ll modify some of the scanning passes to go more slowly along the wings’ leading edges. The point is so the "boom’s" cameras and lasers can get extra data.