Countdown to Saturday Shuttle Launch
Preparations for the planned launch of the space shuttle on July 1 are entering the critical phase: the countdown will start in Cape Canaveral on Wednesday evening at 11:00 p.m. CEST. The Shuttle Discovery is scheduled to lift off from the spaceport at 3:49 p.m. local time on Saturday. To prevent a start delay due to any problems, a window of 28 hours has been calculated in which the countdown is temporarily stopped.
Like the last one in July 2005, the launch will be accompanied by extensive safety precautions. Leading engineers recently warned that the fundamental problems that led to the crash of the shuttle Columbia in 2003 have not been solved. Even today, parts of the foam lining of the outer tank could still crumble off during the starting process and damage the heat shield. Columbia was destroyed on reentry because of this.
There is no immediate danger for the Discovery crew at the start, according to NASA, because damage caused by a large number of cameras and new sensors would hardly go undetected. Whether a shuttle with a damaged heat shield can be repaired in orbit is questionable, despite a series of space repair simulations during the last flight. If the worst comes to the worst, the seven-person crew will transfer to the International Space Station. There the crew would have enough oxygen for around 80 days, during which a rescue by the sister ship Atlantis could take place.
With the flight, the fate of the entire shuttle program, which is considered expensive and technically outdated, is once again at stake. At the moment, the Nasa budget plans for Atlantis to take off again in 2006 after Discovery's successful flight. A total of 17 more flights are to be carried out by 2010, among other things in order to meet NASA's obligations to maintain the ISS. A service flight to preserve the Hubble telescope is also scheduled to take place by early 2009 - if everything goes well with the forthcoming launch.
