CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. NASA will try to launch shuttle Endeavour to the International Space Station on April 19 and an April 28 Russian Soyuz taxi flight to the complex will be delayed if need be to give the crew on the outpost a breather between upcoming visits.
That was the word Thursday as senior NASA managers met here at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to fix a firm launch date for launch of Endeavour and a seven-member crew. Their mission: To deliver a Canadian construction crane to the outpost, which now is occupied by a Russian commander and two American flight engineers.
Concerned that the two missions could end up overlapping, NASA officials considered delaying the Endeavour flight to early May and also looked moving the shuttle launch up a day.
But in the end, the Russian Space Agency agreed to postpone the Soyuz flight if the Endeavour launch runs into minor delays.
Doing so would enable project officials to maintain a two-day gap between the shuttles departure from the station and the arrival of the Russian craft.
"That will allow the station crew enough time to prepare for the Soyuz after the shuttle departs the station," KSC spokesman Bruce Buckingham said. "It just makes sense for everybody all around to keep the shuttle on the 19th."
Pushing the shuttle launch back into May would have delayed critical construction work at the international outpost. Moving it up to April 18, meanwhile, would have placed an additional burden on the stations second resident crew, which includes Russian commander Yuri Usachev and U.S. astronauts Susan Helms and Jim Voss.
"As everything stands, the onboard crew has a lot of work to do already before the shuttle comes up," Buckingham said. "They have a full day every day before the shuttle arrives."
Endeavour and its seven-member crew remain scheduled for launch around 2:41 p.m. EDT (18:41 GMT) April 19. The shuttle would dock at the station two days later and then depart the complex on April 28 after a week of spacewalking assembly work at the outpost.
A three-man Soyuz crew that includes U.S. millionaire Dennis Tito, meanwhile, remains scheduled for launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 28. Headed by two veteran Russian cosmonauts, that crew would arrive at the station two days later.
The job at hand: Dropping off their fresh Soyuz and then departing the station six days later in an identical craft that has been parked at the outpost since early November.
The Soyuz craft which have an orbital life of about six months serve as emergency lifeboats at the station and must be replaced twice a year.
The lifeboat now at the station is expected to deplete its fuel reserves sometime in May, but NASA officials are confident the shuttle mission can be launched and completed in time to send its replacement aloft.
"There is a (Soyuz) lifetime issue," Buckingham said. "But were not in danger of running up against that if we launch (Endeavour) around the 19th."
Still unclear is at what point NASA and its Russian counterparts would have to reverse the order of the two upcoming flights if the shuttle launch ran into significant delays.
The Endeavour mission will be the 104th for NASAs shuttle program and the sixth space station construction mission for the agencys shuttle fleet in the past eight months.
An on-time launch would lead to an April 30 shuttle landing here at KSC.
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