SPACE.com -- Tight Security Greets Endeavour Crew at KSC for Practice Countdown

Shuttle Endeavour returns to Kennedy Space Center on May 9, 2001 riding atop a NASA 747 carrier jet, concluding STS-100.
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U.S. Air Force F-15 flies patrol above shuttle Endeavour as it rolls out to the launch pad on Wednesday, October 30, 2001.

Close view of Endeavour, with its F-15 fighter escort, on the way to the pad.

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	Tight Security Greets Endeavour Crew at KSC for Practice Countdown By Steven Siceloff FLORIDA TODAY posted: 10:00 am ET 07 November 2001

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- An Apache helicopter gunship and cadre of machinegun-toting guards watched over a team of astronauts Tuesday as they flew in for a practice countdown.

The four shuttle astronauts and the fourth group of International Space Station residents are to ride shuttle Endeavour into orbit Nov. 29 from Kennedy Space Center on an 11-day mission.

Touching down single file on the same runway the orbiters use, a flight of three T-38 jets ferried the astronauts from Houston's Johnson Space Center. Two more planes were delayed in Houston and arrived later.

The Apache circled the tarmac in an unusual display of power. Jet fighters have patrolled the space center since Endeavour moved to its launch pad last week.

The astronauts, led by commander Dominic Gorie, will practice the last hours of countdown and reacquaint themselves with the launch pad escape systems they would use in an emergency. Mark Kelly, Linda Godwin and Daniel Tani round out the crew.

Their main task is to deliver Russian cosmonaut Yuri Onufrienko and American astronauts Carl Walz and Daniel Bursch to the station for a four-month mission.

They will replace Frank Culbertson and Russians Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Turin who have lived aboard Alpha since August.

"We know we are returning to world that is different from the one we left," Culbertson said recently about his pending homecoming.

Onufrienko, Walz and Bursch are not scheduled to return until early May. If the shuttle mission on schedule, the crew will spend 162 days aboard Alpha, three days short of the record for that station. Alpha's second crew remained in orbit 165 days because of launch delays on the ground.

Culbertson, Dezhurov and Turin will come home having completed the shortest mission to the outpost 110 days.

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