CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA firmed up plans Thursday for the mid-July launch of shuttle Atlantis on an International Space Station construction mission, but here's the catch:
The agency will have just one week to get the mission airborne before a complicated orbital mechanics issue and a desire to swap station crews prompts a two-month launch delay.
Five Atlantis astronauts, meanwhile, are taking the situation in stride.
"Our primary concern is we want to make sure to launch when we're ready, and not before we're ready," said Atlantis mission commander Steve Lindsey. "And if we need to wait longer for weather, or if we need to wait longer for some space station issue, or some shuttle issue, we'll do that, because we want to launch with a maximum probability of success."
As it stands, Atlantis and its astronaut crew are slated to blast off from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) at 5:04 a.m. EDT (0904 GMT) July 12 on a mission to deliver a new airlock to the station, where it will serve as a staging area for spacewalking work to be conducted outside the outpost.
Senior managers made the launch date and time official after an all-day flight readiness review here at NASA's coastal Florida spaceport. But any delay beyond July 18 stands to trigger a launch postponement until Sept. 22 at the earliest.
The reason: Between July 19 and Aug. 3 the station will be flying in an orbit that would expose a docked shuttle to extremely high temperatures that could foul its docking mechanism.A week's delay in the Atlantis flight, consequently, would prompt NASA managers to proceed first with the planned Aug. 5 launch of shuttle Discovery on a mission to ferry a new crew to the station and return to Earth with its current tenants.
In that case, the Discovery mission would take precedence because the station's current crew -- Yuri Usachev, Susan Helms and Jim Voss -- already signed up for an extra month in space to give ground engineers time to sort out problems with the station's new robot arm.
The $600 million construction crane is required to install the airlock on the station, so the Atlantis flight -- which had been scheduled for a June 14 launch -- has been delayed three times while engineers developed a fix for the robot arm troubles.
Complicating matters is a scheduled month-long shut down for the Air Force's Eastern Range, a widespread network of ground stations that provide range safety and tracking services for all launches from Florida's Space Coast.
The range shutdown will extend from Aug. 18 to Sept. 21, making Sept. 22 the first available launch date for Atlantis in the event of a lengthy flight delay.
In any case, the Atlantis crew -- which includes pilot Charles Hobaugh and mission specialists Janet Kavandi, Michael Gernhardt and Jim Reilly -- are pressing ahead with flight preparations.
The astronauts are at KSC this week, taking part in a standard, two-day dress rehearsal for launch. The five fliers will board the shuttle at launch pad 39B Friday for the last three hours of a traditional practice countdown before returning to Houston to complete training.
A three-day countdown remains scheduled to pick up July 9, the same day that the astronauts are due back at KSC to prep for an initial launch attempt.
"We'll just go with the flow," Lindsey said. "Even if we end slipping a lot later then we'll just roll with that. We'll be ready to go whenever the time is right."
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