This story was updated at
12:30 p.m. ET.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.
— NASA mission managers gave space shuttle Endeavour and its
seven-astronaut crew a green light for a predawn launch attempt on Tuesday as
fair weather continues to grace the Florida space coast.
Headed by commander Dominic
Gorie, the STS-123 space station construction mission will deliver a monstrous
two-armed Canadian robot, Japan's first permanent room in space and a suite of
medical, biological and physics experiments to the International Space Station
(ISS). Gorie and
his crew are slated to lift off from Pad 39A here at Kennedy Space Center at 2:28 a.m. EDT (0628 GMT) on Tuesday.
"It's great to be here
on the verge of this truly international mission," Scott Higginbotham,
STS-123 payload manager, said this morning. "This has been a long campaign
for us, but both my team and our international partners are excited for the
opportunity to finally see our
hardware do its thing in space."
Shuttle weather officer Lt.
Col. Patrick Barrett said it should be clear skies across Florida through
Tuesday — ideal conditions for the highly anticipated night launch of
Endeavour.
"We're expecting
favorable conditions all the way through tanking into launch time,"
Barrett said, noting that weather has no chance to hold up fueling of the
100-ton orbiter's 15-story fuel tank and only a 10 percent chance of scrubbing
the space shot.
Glove check
LeRoy Cain, chair of NASA's
mission management team, said the agency has found no launch-hindering issues,
but did note that a close watch will be kept on troublesome spacesuit gloves
during no less than five spacewalks planned for the STS-123 mission.
"We did find that we
had a small tear in one of the [extravehicular activity] gloves that was used
in a previous shuttle docked mission," Cain said of Atlantis' STS-122
mission. He explained that the damage wasn't discovered until the orbiter
returned to Earth last month, when technicians examined the gloves.
Although unlikely, NASA is concerned
that tears or holes in the Vectran-coated gloves could breach an astronaut's
pressurized spacewalking gear, and the problem has prompted glove redesign
efforts, Cain said. STS-118 astronaut Rick Mastracchio detected damage during a
spacewalk in August 2007, prematurely ending the outing.
"We've been looking
very closely at causes," Cain said, noting that dings from tiny pieces of space
debris in handrails the astronauts grab is likely the culprit. "It's
things like that that we're looking for."
Night walkers
STS-123 spacewalkers Rick
Linnehan, Robert Behnken, Mike Foreman and Garrett Reisman — an ISS
crewmember replacement — will frequently check their gloves for damage
during the mission, Cain said. Also set to launch aboard Endeavour with the spacewalkers
and commander Gorie is pilot Gregory H. Johnson and JAXA astronaut Takao Doi.
To prepare for the
overnight hours of their 16-day mission, hailed as the longest station-bound
shuttle flight NASA has ever attempted, the astronauts went to sleep around
8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT) Sunday morning.
The crew has shifted their
sleep schedule to opposite that of a normal work day because the space station,
traveling at more than 17,500 mph (28,200 kph), is in a fixed orbit that offers
Endeavour only a 10-minute opportunity each day to chase it down.
From Earth to the
station
As NASA gears up for its
own launch, test director Jeff Spaulding congratulated the European Space
Agency (ESA) on their successful
launch of the automated cargo spaceship Jules Verne, now bound for the
space station.
"We're very happy to
have that in orbit," Spaulding said of the double-decker bus-sized
spacecraft, which can ferry three times as many supplies than Russian Progress
spacecraft.
Spaulding also noted that launch
preparation crews at KSC haven't missed a beat in preparing Endeavour just one
month after shuttle Atlantis launched with the ESA's giant Columbus laboratory
on board.
"All of our systems at
this point are in great shape, our teams are ready to go," Spaulding said.
"They're very excited to be back again in this posture where we'll be able
to launch just over a month or so from our last launch."
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