With less
than three weeks remaining before they rocket toward the International Space
Station (ISS), six astronauts
are looking forward to climbing inside their Atlantis shuttle Thursday for a launch dress
rehearsal at NASA's Florida spaceport.
Flight
controllers began counting down toward a mock liftoff at 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200
GMT) today, with Atlantis' STS-115
commander Brent Jett and his crewmates eager to practice the final hours of
their upcoming launch.
"We're
looking forward to a good practice countdown tomorrow," Jett told reporters
Wednesday at Atlantis' Pad 39B
launch site at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral.
Jett,
STS-115 pilot Chris Ferguson and mission specialists Joseph
Tanner, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, Daniel Burbank and Steve MacLean - of
the Canadian Space Agency - are going through a multi-day training session at KSC
known as the Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test (TCDT). The session allows
the astronauts, pad workers and flight controllers to practice flight and emergency escape procedures for the STS-115 crew's planned
Aug. 27 launch.
During
their mission, the STS-115 astronauts will deliver a 17-ton,
two-segment addition for the space station's truss backbone, as well
as a pair of new solar arrays to be installed on the orbital laboratory's port
side.
"This mission
marks the restart of the [ISS] assembly sequence," Jett said. "But it's just
that, it's just one of the assembly missions we have to get done."
NASA plans
about 15 shuttle flights to complete the ISS, where orbital construction has
been stalled since late
2002 following the 2003
Columbia tragedy, before retiring the remaining three orbiters - Atlantis, Discovery
and Endeavour
- in 2010.
With three
planned spacewalks - two of them back-to-back - alongside shuttle heat shield
inspections and the deployment of new solar panels outside the ISS, Atlantis' 11-day
mission promises to be a challenging one for its astronaut crew.
"I think the
most challenging thing for us on this flight is going to be our timeline," Jett
said. "It's probably the most aggressive timeline that's been flown on the
shuttle ever. We think we're ready for it, we've been training for it for four
and a half years."
NASA
managers have called the STS-115 mission the most challenging to date for the
shuttle program, though subsequent flights are expected to only increase in
complexity.
"Every crew
likes to say that 'Boy this is one of the most complex missions that we've ever
flown,'" Jett said. "They're all that way, and they will be that way until we
stop flying in 2010."
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