MERRITT
ISLAND - "Nice shot!" Stephanie Stilson shouted as one of her teammates nailed the softball
and sent it flying. "Aw, come on," she said when the umpire called
the runner out.
The
manager for Discovery was taking a break from intense preparations to get the
shuttle flying again. It was the division softball challenge for Kennedy Space Center,
and the people who put together the shuttle were putting bat to ball and glove
to hand.
"You've
got a bunch of engineers playing in a softball tournament. Nothing's
easy," said Armando Oliu, the imaging expert who
will lead the examination of photos of Discovery's launch.
As
he waited for his team's turn to play, he watched with amusement as the players
checked out a cracked aluminum bat on the sideline.
"We've
got the mechanical guys analyzing the crack in the bat. The ops guys say, 'Use
as is,' " Oliu joked.
The
joke epitomized the tensions they were trying to work off on this beautiful, sunny
afternoon at KARS
park in early December 2004. The softball players
sipped beer, water and Gatorade, shouting friendly jeers and encouragement.
Launch
director Mike Leinbach showed up carrying a case of
Budweiser and handed out beer to Stilson and the
others as the game ended.
He
petted Stilson's Boston terrier, Scrappy Lou, as Stilson held the leash.
"Don't
bite him, Scrappy," she said.
"Don't
bite the hand that feeds you," Leinbach agreed.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER:
Long hours help workers catch up
The
hurricanes were over. Finally, the shuttle was coming together.
In
November 2004, the first piece of Discovery's twin solid rocket boosters rolled
slowly into the Vehicle
Assembly Building.
Meanwhile,
shuttle workers labored through the holidays. "I hate to even say it, but
it seems like things are going really well," Stilson
said in December.
That
month, workers installed the three main engines. The only goof occurred when
the hoisting machine tilted one engine during installation and dinged a heat-protection
tile on the ship.
In
January, as planned, the redesigned external tank chugged in from the ocean on
its barge, pushed by tugboats up the Banana
River and into the turn basin near the
Vehicle Assembly Building.
The next day, VIPs greeted the orange fuel tank's arrival with excitement.
"You
can feel the change in the air," said shuttle program manager Bill
Parsons, who lives on Merritt Island and splits
his time between here and his main office in Houston. For him, the tank was a great 48th
birthday present.
The
new tank was redesigned without the piece of insulating foam that fell off and
struck Columbia's
wing during launch, leading to a fatal breach when the orbiter tried to
re-enter the atmosphere.
A
new heater system and other small changes were aimed at eliminating ice and
reducing the shedding of foam at crucial areas of the new tank's surface.
Later
that month, workers installed a new extension to the shuttle's robot arm in
Discovery's payload bay. Its sensors would inspect the shuttle's heat shield
for damage in orbit. The sensors would require more work and testing, but the
installation of the 50-foot extension marked a major milestone.
With
so many modifications for this mission, every step toward flight was a
milestone.
LAUNCH COMPLEX
39: Rollover an emotional point on two-year trek
After
a wait of two years and two months, two more hours didn't seem that long.
Delayed
by several days, Discovery crept out of its hangar into the chilly early
morning of March 29. It was still night, really, and journalists stood by as
workers gave each other high-fives, handshakes and thumbs-up, taking snapshots
of one another in front of the shuttle.
It
came out slowly, tail and engines first, with bright white lights guiding it in
the darkness. The old orbiter looked almost new. Stilson,
the NASA manager who guided it this far, shed tears as
she walked out with her ship.
"Are
we really here? Are we really getting to the point where we're rolling
out?" she thought.
It
was like a strangely short parade, with members of the team of workers giving
up sleep so they could carry a banner ahead of the shuttle as it was turned
around and began rolling, nose first, toward the Vehicle Assembly Building.
"We're behind you, Discovery!" said the signature-covered banner.
Stilson barely
remembered the last two times her orbiter left its bay. This one, she knew, she
would never forget.
More
than a week later, the shuttle was ready to make an even longer trip -- to its
launch pad, at just under a mile an hour. Hoisted upright and mated with its
tank and boosters, Discovery sat in the VAB on the mobile launcher platform,
which rode the back of its huge Crawler-Transporter.
A
tiny crack spotted at the last minute in the external tank's insulating foam
was deemed insignificant. Finally, Discovery slipped into the hide-and-seek
sun, a spectacular sight, creeping toward pad 39B.
The
trip lasted a few hours longer than planned when workers had to replace a bad logic
card in the crawler. The shuttle docked at the pad at 12:30 a.m. April 7.
Stilson, about to get
her master's degree, about to see the culmination of more than two years of
tearing the orbiter apart and putting it back together, was exuberant.
"You
thought I was excited at rollover," she said. "I'm much more excited
now!"
SPACE STATION
PROCESSING FACILITY, KENNEDY
SPACE CENTER:
Station hardware sees multitude of 'mini-crises'
Raffaello is not going
easily into space.
The
cylindrical cargo carrier sports a new hatch -- a substitute for a suspect unit
that possibly wouldn't have opened when Discovery arrives at the space station
on a badly needed supply run. The 50-inch hatch is outfitted with a pressure
valve borrowed from a sister module. It will allow final leak checks before it
is transported to the launch pad.
New
fasteners anchor cabinets inside, after an 11th-hour cross-country scramble to
replace broken hardware. An internal panel is flying as-is after last-minute
analyses proved it would stay in place even though California factory workers
had failed to install one of about 16 bolts ringing its perimeter.
"Part
of making sure everything is right is having facts and data to go behind
decisions that you make," said NASA mission manager Scott Higginbotham,
the man responsible for preparing Discovery's cargo.
One
of three identical cargo carriers built by the Italian Space Agency, Raffaello was named after the Renaissance painter Raphael,
whose given name was Raffaello Sanzio.
The
size of a short school bus, the pressurized carrier will haul 2,600 pounds of
supplies to the station and bring home twice as much trash, outdated gear and
equipment to be refurbished for future use.
Also
in the shuttle's cargo bay is a dome-shaped gyroscope designed to keep the
station positioned properly in orbit so limited fuel reserves don't have to be
exhausted to do the same job.
The
660-pound flywheel is destined to replace a gyro that failed in August 2002.
And
among other things, there's an external stowage platform to be mounted outside
the station's U.S.
airlock, where it will serve as a warehouse of sorts. Spare parts for the
station's electrical power and radiator systems are attached to the platform,
along with video camera mounts.
Preparing
shuttle cargo for flight is never easy. Attention to details long has been
standard. That sensitivity has been heightened even more during return to
flight. So problems that might not have been flagged in the past are being
brought to light. While none that have cropped up are potentially catastrophic,
some could have threatened the mission's success.
"They're
good catches," said Higginbotham, a married father whose wife, Bridgit, also works at KSC. "And that's what they pay
us for."
Most
surfaced late and, as a result, had to be solved in a hurry. That's not
unusual.
"I
come in every day, and it's like, 'What new calamity
has befallen me today, and on what piece of hardware?' "
Higginbotham joked. "And it's been equal opportunity. Every little
piece we've had on the mission has had at least one or two of these mini-crises
come up in the course of getting where we are today."
Now,
everything is ready to go. But if not, NASA is ready to respond.
"You
never know what new, interesting wrinkle tomorrow will bring," he said.
Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2005 FLORIDA TODAY.
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