ATLANTIS--On the "Shuttle Watch"
Weather may be the least of the concerns for the Atlantis crew, depending on how the repairs to its engine cut-off sensors went. That’s the glitch that’s kept the Shuttle on the launch pad since early December. The systems acts like the "low fuel" light on your car. When mine goes off in my SUV, I have enough gas to make it to a gas station. When the Shuttle’s ECO sensors trip, the message to the Shuttle’s computers is "you’re out of propellent, so shut off the main engines before they blow up". Since Atlantis uses almost every drop of fuel to make it to space, the astronauts say the repair delays on the fuel sensors are okay with them. See you on launch day! Also, join me this Saturday for a talk about "Final Countdown"on C-SPAN’s BookTV. The network has scheduled a re-airing this Saturday, February 9th at 8 am. Here’s the link to C-SPAN’s webpage. See you there, or set your DVR! http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ProgramId=8985&SectionName=&PlayMedia=No More to come--
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February 5, 2008—Boredom punctuated with moments of panic. That’s your average Space Shuttle launch summed up in a nutshell. Not that each is, in its own way, a great story of national interest, but you have to be patient. Even more so, if you’re a civilian launch observer. We reporters have to get to the Kennedy Space Center no later than three hours before liftoff, since that’s when KSC shuts its gates before the launch. Some spectators are known to pack their Winnebagoes and camp out twelve hours or more to get their favorite viewing spots along the Intracoastal waterway that separates the island containing Kennedy from mainland Florida.
This is a shot from a previous launch day, inside the KSC Media Center. When the countdown nears zero, we all scramble outside. This week, for the much-delayed Atlantis mission, we have a sixty percent chance that bad weather will scrub the February 7th afternoon liftoff—the press has to show up anyway. Bad weather days have resulted in launches, and after covering ninety or so blastoffs, I can tell you there have been good weather days where NASA scrubbed.