As NASA honors the memories of
astronauts lost in the pursuit of human spaceflight, the commander of the
agency's next shuttle mission is also looking toward the future.
U.S. Air Force Col. Steven Lindsey,
commander of NASA's STS-121 Discovery flight, and his six-astronaut crew are
gearing up for a packed few months of training. The spaceflight's current,
20-day launch window opens on May 3, NASA officials said.
"We're getting really busy now with
the training to make that date," Lindsey told SPACE.com.
Lindsey, shuttle pilot Mark Kelly,
mission specialists Michael Fossum, Lisa Nowak,
Stephanie Wilson, Piers Sellers, and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas
Reiter are bound for the International Space Station (ISS) on what will be
NASA's second shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster.
Much of the crew's mission training
are refresher courses to maintain their skills, though several long, integrated
simulations with shuttle and ISS flight controllers are set for the next
few months, Lindsey said.
Slated to launch in September
2005 following NASA's first post-Columbia flight--STS-114, also aboard Discovery--the
STS-121 mission suffered a series
of delays
as engineers worked studied foam insulation debris problems associated with a
protective ramp on shuttle external tanks.
An unacceptably large piece
of foam fell
from the ramp during Discovery's STS-114 launch
in July 2005, but did not strike the orbiter. A similar foam shedding event
doomed Columbia's
Feb. 1, 2003 launch, when a chunk of insulation pierced the orbiter's heat
shield and left it vulnerable to hot atmospheric gases during reentry.
Last month, NASA decided to remove
the problematic ramp altogether, work that Lindsey and his crew have watched
closely.
"We're well aware of what's going
on," Lindsey said, adding that his crew planned to visit NASA's New Orleans,
Louisiana-based Michoud Assembly Facility--where
external tanks are built--to discuss the work and hand out merit awards to
facility workers.
NASA spokesperson Jessica Rye, at
the agency's Kennedy Space Center
in Florida,
said the STS-121 flight's external tank is expected to arrive at the spaceport in early
March.
Shuttle workers have already begun
stacking the solid rocket boosters that will launch Discovery and the STS-121
crew spaceward, with the shuttle itself is due to rollover to the massive Vehicle Assembly Building
for integration in mid-April, she told SPACE.com, adding that those
timelines revolve around the delivery of the external tank.
Some aspects of the STS-121 mission
have changed, including the task line-up for the spaceflight's three planned
spacewalks.
"Our second spacewalk did have a
couple of hours allotted for testing of the CIPAA system," Lindsey said.
CIPAA, short for Cure
in Place Ablator Applicator, is a backpack-mounted device designed to mix
and deliver a pink, ablative goo
called STA-54 into damaged shuttle tiles. William Gerstenmaier,
NASA's associate administrator for space operations, told reporters last month
that engineers were likely to drop the CIPAA system.
"That's one of the activities that
we feel like we've done enough investigation on," Gerstenmaier
said, adding that there were other potential techniques that were further along
in development and offered the same repair capabilities.
In place of the CIPAA experiment,
STS-121 spacewalkers Fossum and Sellers will likely
conduct ISS repairs or maintenance, Lindsey said. The crew will still place an
astronaut at the end of a 50-foot (15-meter) orbital
boom--which will be attached to the end of Discovery's robotic arm--to test
its stability as a repair platform, he added.
The STS-121 crew is also expecting more
of a time crunch during the early days of their spaceflight.
Unlike Discovery's STS-114 flight,
which carried seven astronauts dedicated to new inspections and tasks
instituted after the Columbia
accident, Lindsey's crew has six primary shuttle astronauts. Reiter is slated
to join the ISS
Expedition 13 crew--commanded by Russian cosmonaut Pavel
Vinogradov with NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams as
flight engineer--as the ESA's first
long-duration spacefarer.
"Prior to docking is probably where
it affects us most," Lindsey said, adding that Reiter will assist in general
shuttle tasks, but is not trained to aid the crew during operations like the
critical heat shield inspection
using the orbital boom.
The trio of NASA anniversaries beginning Friday, commemorating the loss of astronauts during the 1967 Apollo 1 fire, 1986 Challenger accident and 2003 Columbia tragedy, emphasizes the inherent risks of human spaceflight, but not to
the extent of preventing future exploration, Lindsey said
"We always need to [ask]...are we
taking the risks for the right benefit," he added. "I believe we are. If I
believed we weren't, I wouldn't take the risk to fly."
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