CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Even as NASA carefully lays out its plan to return the space shuttle to flight, workers at the Kennedy Space Center are busy with a list of things to do on each of the surviving spaceplanes.
"It's anything but people standing around here looking for work to do," KSC spokesman Mike Rein told SPACE.com.
The next shuttle scheduled for launch is Atlantis.
Although the missions exact details have yet to be decided, KSC workers this week have been active in the orbiter's cockpit removing hardware for inspections, checking out the environmental control system in Atlantis' cargo bay and examining the miles of electrical wiring that snakes through the vehicle.
The major effort in the Orbiter Processing Facility hangar centers on Atlantis' wing leading edges and the reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) panels that shape the front of the wings and are designed to protect the shuttle from the hottest temperatures of re-entry, Rein said.
It was a hole in an RCC panel on Columbia -- created by a chunk of foam that fell from the external tank during launch -- that triggered the series of events that led to the Feb. 1 loss of the shuttle and its crew.
As a result, much of the return to flight attention is on making sure those RCC panels are in good shape after flying all these years. In fact, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board has required the panels be inspected between future flights.
In Atlantis' case, all of the RCC panels were removed and shipped back to their factory for inspections as engineers still are determining the best way to inspect the panels in place on the shuttle wings, yet without damaging the structure.
Three of the panels have since been returned from the vendor, are back up to their original standards and are being re-installed, Rein said.
Nearby, another set of shuttle workers recently had a reason to cheer when they turned on the electrical power to Discovery for the first time in months.
"It was a big milestone," Rein said.
Discovery has been going through an Orbiter Major Modifications (OMM) period, the first one since NASA officials decided to do all OMM work in Florida instead of the shuttle factory at Palmdale, Calif.
In performing an OMM the shuttle was basically gutted so all of its major systems, structures and wiring could be inspected. As the shuttle was put back together, new and improved systems were installed in some areas.
The OMM work began before the Columbia tragedy and continued in the aftermath, giving a team of several hundred workers assigned to Discovery something to focus on and keep the shuttle program moving forward, Rein said, noting that the OMM for this orbiter came in "on budget and on time."
Meanwhile, NASA's newest shuttle -- Endeavour -- is in the early stages of its own OMM here in Florida.
This week workers are removing Endeavour's Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) pods from the tail and trucking them over to a hazardous processing facility. The OMS pods contain the rocket engines a shuttle uses after launch to adjust its orbit, as well as to de-orbit to begin the trip home. A collection of steering thrusters also is contained in the pods.
At the same time, inspections are taking place inside Endeavour's main propulsion system plumbing. Workers are looking for signs of any cracks in the critical piping that carries the supercold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen from the external tank to feed the three Rocketdyne main engines.
advertisement
