NASA has done a fantastic job of adopting social media as part of its outreach, and it has invited groups of lucky Twitterers to watch recent launches. Sitting in between these two tents was the Tweetup tent. Unlike Boeing's design, Orion will do more than just travel to low earth orbit and back a week to the Moon, or even many months to Mars and back, could be in the cards. This was the actual test vehicle, festooned with data acquisition systems, fresh from undergoing a test drop out the back of a C-141 last year. Orion, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle under development for NASA by Lockheed-Martin, was in another tent. It's also where launch vehicles begin their slow journey atop a crawler-transporter to Launch Complex 39A, followed by a fast journey into orbit. This giant box-like building, the largest single-story building in the world, is where NASA put together the components of successive Apollo and Shuttle launch vehicles. The reality of the trip sunk in at our first sight of the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB. Rain battered the causeway as we drove to KSC on Thursday, but luckily my fears of aquaplaning to a watery death weren't realized. To make matters worse, if Friday did have to be scrubbed, Sunday would probably be the next attempt, as NASA wanted to give its teams enough time to get home, rest, and get back again, a process that would be seriously complicated by the hundreds of thousands of expected visitors and the traffic jams they'd bring. By Wednesday afternoon, the 45th Weather Squadron was predicting a 70 percent chance of delay. NASA scheduled the launch for Friday, July 8th at 11:26 am, with successive launch windows on Saturday and Sunday. This makes attending a launch somewhat fraught: the weather doesn't care about anyone's plans, plane tickets, hotel reservations, or work schedule.įurther Reading The Greatest Leap, part 6: After Apollo, NASA still searching for an encoreĭriving to KSC, things did not look promising. If it's raining at the launch site, flight path, or at the various emergency landing sites in France and Spain during that time, no one's going to space that day. Getting something into a specific orbit is more complicated than just kicking the tires and lighting the fires each day only has a discrete launch window of a few minutes. Launching rockets over the ocean has quite a few advantages, but it's also subject to the capricious weather patterns of the Atlantic. Last week, Ars braved KSC's heat, rain, and crowds to watch Atlantis, and the 30-year Space Shuttle program, head into space for the final time. Covering the northern half of Merritt Island, its 219 square miles are studded with launch complexes surrounded by semitropical nature. Located on Florida's Atlantic coast, an hour's drive east of Orlando's tourist spots, KSC has been NASA's site of choice for sending people into space since the 1960s. MERRITT ISLAND, Florida-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes space as "really big." Kennedy Space Center (KSC) might be peanuts compared to space but, for human-sized visitors, it's pretty big. Ars was at Kennedy Space Center on this day eight years ago, so we're resurfacing our report on the experience from July 2011. Today, however, marks the anniversary of a different historic NASA occasion-the last launch of the modern Space Shuttle program. But right now it's happening more often than usual given the rapidly approaching 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. EDT (0401 GMT), she added.Update: Around Ars, our minds tend to always gravitate towards space. The team will still have three days in reserve on Tuesday, when Atlantis is expected to begin the 3.5-mile (5.6-km) trip to Launch Pad 39A at about 12:01 a.m. NASA shuttle workers had about 11 days of padding in their Atlantis work schedule before Tropical Storm Fay hit, said KSC spokesperson Candrea Thomas. A worker watches as space shuttle Atlantis is carefully lowered so it can be anchored to the external tank in preparation for launch. "We have several days of cushion time," Beutel said. Launch preparations were also delayed by several days last week when NASA closed down its Florida spaceport during Tropical Storm Fay, but Atlantis work crews had some time to spare, they added. NASA opted to delay Atlantis' launch pad move to allow time for inspections and the reattachment of the fuel line umbilical, agency officials said. EDT (0534 GMT) with seven astronauts aboard to pay a final service call on the iconic Hubble Space Telescope. The space shuttle is now scheduled to roll out to the launch pad no earlier than next Tuesday morning.Ītlantis is slated to launch early Oct. "They got it out last night," NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel of KSC told of the pin today.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |