The space
shuttle Atlantis may begin a cross-country trek atop a tricked out jumbo jet as
early as Sunday to fly from a California landing site to its Florida home,
weather permitting, NASA officials said.
Atlantis
will ride piggyback atop a modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet during the planned
ferry flight, a $1.8 million trip aimed at returning the shuttle home from
California's Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California. The shuttle landed
on backup desert runway there last Sunday to end a 13-day mission that overhauled the
Hubble
Space Telescope for the last time.
Bad weather
prevented several attempts to land at NASA's primary shuttle runway at the
Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The center is the launch site and
home port for NASA's three-shuttle
fleet.
Tracy
Young, a spokesperson for NASA's Florida spaceport, said weather in California
and across the country may also play a role in Atlantis' trip home.
NASA
currently plans to try and begin ferrying Atlantis home at about 9:00 a.m. EDT
(1300 GMT) Sunday, which will be before local sunrise in California. High winds
at Edwards have delayed some ground processing work, but the agency is still
hopefully to make that departure target. NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center
at Edwards is overseeing the work.
"It's
depending on weather, just like during a shuttle launch," Young told SPACE.com
from the California landing site.
While local
conditions are expected to be favorable for a Sunday takeoff, NASA is on the
lookout for harsh weather ahead of the shuttle-carrying mother ships, known as
Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, as they hop across the country from military air base
to air base. The heavily laden aircraft can sometimes fly as low as 10,000 feet
(3,048 meters) in order to seek out favorable weather, NASA officials have
said.
NASA
typically does not fly the modified 747 jumbo jet carrier vehicle through
turbulence or rain during ferry flights to avoid damage to the 100-ton space
shuttle strapped to its back. A weather spotter plane will fly about 100 miles
(160 km) ahead of the shuttle-carrier combo to make sure conditions are right
en route to the next pit stop, Young said.
Shuttle
mission managers prefer to land orbiters in Florida because it saves about a
week of transport time and the associated $1.8 million cost of the process. The
agency tried three times to land Atlantis in Florida last week, but
thunderstorms repeatedly thwarted each attempt.
The weather
is still foul at the seaside spaceport and has delayed preparations to move
Atlantis' sister ship Endeavour from Launch Pad 39B to the nearby Pad 39A for a
planned June 13 blast off toward the International
Space Station. NASA kept Endeavour on standby atop Pad 39B during the
recent Hubble repair mission in case Atlantis suffered critical damage and its
crew required rescue. No such space
rescue was needed.
Once
Atlantis returns to Florida, shuttle engineers plan to study a short circuit in
that orbiter that occurred during its May 11 launch. The glitch afflicted one
of four redundant electronics boxes governing Atlantis' flight control surfaces.
Engineers want to be sure a similar issue does not occur aboard Endeavour
during its upcoming flight, mission managers said.
If the
weather falls in Atlantis favor, the ferry flight could return the shuttle to
Florida by Monday, Young said. The last shuttle to catch a piggyback ride home
atop a jumbo jet was the shuttle Endeavour, which returned home from the
California landing site last December after its STS-126 mission to the space
station.
"We're just
waiting to see how it works out with the weather," she added.
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