Space shuttle rolled out to Florida launch pad

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – The U.S. space shuttle
Atlantis was moved to its ocean-side launch pad early on
Wednesday, as NASA readies itself to resume construction of the
International Space Station later this month.

Twice thwarted from being rolled out by overnight
thunderstorms earlier this week, the shuttle began an
eight-hour crawl to the launch pad at 2 a.m. (0600 GMT).

Despite the delay, NASA still has plenty of time to prepare
the shuttle for blastoff as early as August 27, said Kennedy
Space Center spokesman Bruce Buckingham.

The mission will be the agency’s first space station
assembly flight since before the 2003 Columbia accident forced
NASA to ground the shuttle fleet for safety upgrades.

Columbia fell apart on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere
because falling insulation foam from the external fuel tank had
knocked a hole in its wing during liftoff. Seven crew members
died.

The three remaining U.S. space shuttles are the only
spacecraft capable of hauling large components to the $100
billion multinational space station, and the project must be
completed before the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010.

Shuttle Discovery returned from a successful test flight
last month, clearing the way for NASA to resume flying up to
five regular missions per year.

“We’ve gone through a very difficult period in the last
3-1/2 years,” Atlantis astronaut Joe Tanner said in an
interview.

“We needed to understand some things that we weren’t maybe
paying enough attention to before. We’ve done that work and
feel pretty good about it.”

Tanner and his crew mates have been training for four years
to install the station’s next major module — a second set of
solar arrays that will double the station’s onboard power.

With laboratories built by Europe and Japan due to arrive
as early as next year, boosting the station’s power supply is a
crucial step.

The solar array module that will be carried aboard Atlantis
weighs nearly 35,000 pounds (16 tonnes) — one of the heaviest
loads ever carried aboard a shuttle. It fills the shuttle’s
payload bay.

“It’s a bit of a shoehorn operation to even get it out of
the payload bay when we’re docked with station,” Tanner said.

Installation of the arrays requires back-to-back spacewalks
on three days of the flight.

Four of the six astronauts assigned to the flight have been
trained for spacewalks.

Tanner and his crew mates have one more major training
exercise planned before launch. Next week, the six Atlantis
astronauts are scheduled to scramble aboard the shuttle to
participate in a practice launch countdown.