The shuttle
Atlantis rolled out to its Florida launch pad Saturday as NASA prepares for a
December construction flight to the International Space Station (ISS).
But whether
the space station will be ready for Atlantis's planned Dec. 6 launch from NASA's
Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to deliver the European-built
Columbus laboratory is still uncertain. The station's Expedition 16 crew is in
the midst of a challenging
month of spacewalks and construction to prime the ISS for Atlantis's
STS-122 mission.
"I think it
is not outside the realm of possibility, based on discussions we've had with the
International Space Station (ISS) team, that they may be ready for us to launch
on Dec. 6," said Wayne Hale, NASA's space shuttle program manager, after Wednesday's
successful landing of the Discovery orbiter. "We'll see how that plays out
over the next couple of weeks."
ISS
Expedition 16 commander
Peggy Whitson and flight engineers Yuri Malenchenko and Dan Tani performed their
first
spacewalk this month on Friday, with two more set for Nov. 20 and Nov. 24.
On Monday,
the astronauts will use the station's robotic arm to move attach a shuttle
docking port to the tip of the outpost's Harmony connecting module, the
destination for Atlantis's Columbus lab payload.
Harmony and
its docking port are slated to be permanently installed at the front of the
station's U.S. Destiny laboratory on Nov. 14. Discovery's STS-120 astronaut
crew installed Harmony during a 15-day mission to
the ISS.
Only once
Harmony and its docking port are attached to Destiny and fully activated will
the station be ready to host a visiting space shuttle crew, mission managers
said.
Commanded
by veteran shuttle astronaut Stephen Frick, Atlantis's STS-122 crew will install
the European Space Agency's (ESA) Columbus laboratory to the space station's Harmony
connecting node. Frick and his six crewmates - two of whom are ESA astronauts -
will also replace Tani with ESA spaceflyer Leopold Eyharts as an ISS
flight engineer during their planned 11-day mission.
Atlantis,
fresh off a June ISS construction flight, has a slim December window to launch
to the station due to the available sunlight for the orbital laboratory's
expansive solar arrays.
Hale said
the window, which currently runs form Dec. 6 to Dec. 13, could be stretched one
or two days. If Atlantis cannot launch in December, the shuttle would lift off
no earlier than Jan. 2 to avoid flying during the holidays, he added.
Atlantis
began its slow trek to the launch pad atop a massive NASA crawler-transporter
vehicle at 4:43 a.m. EST (0943 GMT). The shuttle took about seven hours to make
the three-mile (4.8 kilometer) trip.
Meanwhile,
ISS mission managers said they are hopeful that they and the Expedition 16 crew
will have the space station ready in time to meet Atlantis's December launch window.
"My
understanding is that the shuttle program is still working at having the
orbiter ready to launch on Dec. 6," Derek Hassmann, Expedition 16's lead ISS
flight director, said Friday. "We're working hard to get there."
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