After Tough Year for NASA, Shuttle Set for Launch
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. _ A diaper-wearing astronaut is charged with attempted kidnapping in a love triangle. A freak storm pelts shuttle Atlantis with damaging hail. A railroad trestle collapses, derailing a train carrying rocket booster segments.
It has been a weird, bad-luck year for NASA, now hoping for a reversal of fortune with a safe launch Friday night of Atlantis and its seven astronauts.
“Life is full of unexpected events,” said Wayne Hale, NASA’s shuttle program director. “The real key is having the flexibility to deal with it and the resilience to buck up to adversity and keep going.”
Absent any new mechanical, personnel or meteorological adversity, Atlantis will blast off from Launch Pad 39A at 7:38 p.m. EDT.
It will be the first shuttle mission of the year, and a successful liftoff will help the National Aeronautics and Space Administration set right what once _ and again _ went wrong this year.
Atlantis seemed in good shape and the weather seemed promising, with forecasters predicting an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions Friday night.
“After many months of hard work, Atlantis is ready to fly,” NASA test director Steve Payne said Thursday.
A review of NASA’s difficult 2007:
_Seven months after returning from space, Lisa Nowak allegedly drove from Houston to Orlando _ wearing adult diapers and armed with a BB gun, a knife and pepper spray _ to confront a rival in a love triangle involving astronaut William Oefelein.
Nowak was supposed to serve as a Houston-based “capsule communicator” between Atlantis’ crew and Mission Control, but was replaced by another astronaut.
“I’m quite confident there’ll be no impact on our mission,” said shuttle Commander Rick Sturckow.
During the 11-day flight, the crew will deliver components and supplies to the International Space Station and ferry one astronaut to the lab and bring one home.
_On Feb. 26, a thunderstorm that developed directly over the launch pad pelted Atlantis with hail, punching thousands of divots and dings into the crucial insulation of the ship’s huge external fuel tank.
The shuttle’s March 15 launch was scrubbed so the ship could be returned to the hangar for repairs that engineers say has rendered it ready for launch Friday night.
_In late April, a NASA contract employee fatally shot a co-worker at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, held another hostage and ultimately took his own life.
_Early last month, a freight train carrying eight segments of solid rocket boosters derailed near Myrtlewood, Ala., after a trestle collapsed.
Several people aboard the train were injured, but the 150-foot-long rocket segments did not leave the rail cars and the incident was not expected to delay future flights.
Only 13 more shuttle missions are scheduled before the fleet is retired in 2010.
NASA hopes to launch a crew aboard the still-under-development Orion spacecraft in September 2013, but things can go wrong, as NASA learned this year and in years past.
Nevertheless, Hale and others say the agency’s people can roll with any new punches from Lady Luck.
“They have shown real American grit to keep facing this adversity,” Hale said.
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GRAPHIC (from MCT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20070604 SHUTTLE Atlantis
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