CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA's space shuttle fleet will be on the move in the coming two weeks, with two winged orbiters taking cross-country piggyback rides and a third thundering off for the International Space Station.
Mounted atop a specially equipped Boeing 747, fleet leader Columbia will take off Saturday from a shuttle assembly plant in Palmdale, California where it has been undergoing extensive inspections and modifications since September 1999.
| Ferry Flight Plan |
| SPACE.com will report every move of Columbia and Atlantis as they make their way back to Florida atop NASA's 747s. Stops enroute will be updated first on our STS-98 Mission Page. |
NASA's oldest orbiter is scheduled to make an overnight stop at Ellington Air Field near NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston that day before heading on to Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Weather permitting, Columbia and its shuttle carrier aircraft are expected to arrive back at its homeport around mid-day Sunday.
Sistership Atlantis, meanwhile, is being readied for a similar cross-country trip in the aftermath of its landing Tuesday at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The orbiter now is scheduled to depart the Mojave Desert military base Feb. 28 and, weather permitting, the ship and its carrier aircraft will arrive at NASA's coastal Florida spaceport the next day.The back-to-back ferry flights represent a new space first for NASA.
"I think we can say that if we pull this off, it would be the closest two ferry flights we've ever had," KSC spokesman Bruce Buckingham said Wednesday.
Closing out a successful mission to deliver the U.S. Destiny science lab to the international station, Atlantis was detoured to Edwards after three days of high winds and cloudy skies thwarted plans to bring the ship and its five astronauts back to KSC.
The Atlantis astronauts headed back to Houston Wednesday.
Preliminary inspections, meanwhile, indicate that their ship came through the mission relatively unscathed. Some 58 debris hits -- eight of which measured an inch (2.54 centimeters) or more in width -- were spotted on the orbiter's black-tiled belly.
"That's classified as normal," Buckingham said.
No abnormal wear was noted on the shuttle's tires or its brakes.
The Atlantis landing cleared the way for NASA's next shuttle flight: The planned March 8 launch of Discovery on a mission to further outfit the Destiny lab. Riding aboard Discovery will be the second full-time crew of the station, which includes Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev and American astronauts Susan Helms and James Voss.
The so-called Expedition Two crew will replace the station's current tenants -- U.S. astronaut Bill Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev. That trio will taxi back to Earth aboard Discovery March 20, capping a 140-day tour at the outpost.
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