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Pat Duggins
Pat Duggins
Senior News Analyst
pduggins@wmfe.org


 

ENDEAVOUR—The worst case scenario

 

September 18, 2008—There will be a rare sight at the Kennedy Space Center on Friday. Two Space Shuttles will be out on launch pads. One will carry astronauts on NASA’s last planned repair flight to the Hubble Space Telescope. The other will be called into action for “the worst case scenario.”

 

UPDATE--NASA delayed the roll out by a day due to thunderstorms. the move is now set for Friday.

 

NASA hasn’t send a Space Shuttle to orbit with a four member crew since the maiden flight of Challenger in 1983 carried Skylab veteran Paul Weitz, Karol Bobko, Don Peterson, and Story Musgrave on the first Shuttle mission to include a spacewalk. Endeavour heads to the pad with one of two mission plans. One is a standard mission to the International Space Station. The other is STS-400. That’s the four man rescue team in case Atlantis gets into trouble during its flight to the Hubble Space Telescope. If that Shuttle is damaged during the launch, the crew can’t retreat to the space station. That’s when astronaut Dom Gorie will lead three crewmates on a rescue flight using Endeavour.

 

NASA has a carefully planned choreography where the Atlantis crew would put on heavy spacewalking spacesuits and float from their damaged vehicle to Endeavour for the return trip to Earth. The agency and the astronauts consider this a “worst case scenario” since there’s confidence in the heat tile repair techniques tested on previous flights.

 

On the book front, many thanks to all who attended my talk at the Florida Heritage Book Festival in St. Augustine, and to Karen Feagins of WJCT in Jacksonville for making the drive down to introduce me. I guess the day went okay, since the bookstore that sold books for the authors to sign sold out of copies of “Final Countdown” within an hour or so. I was certainly flattered!

 

More to come—

 

 

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