Shuttle Flight to Be Delayed by Test-Firing

The director of the shuttle program said today Discovery’s three main engines will be test-fired before the next space shuttle launch, delaying the flight “a number of weeks.”

Arnold Aldrich, speaking at an annual aerospace industry conference, said a new launch date for the first American manned space flight since last year’s Challenger accident may not be announced for as long as two months. The launch had been scheduled for Feb. 18, 1988. But regardless of the addition of a flight readiness firing, the launch date is expected to slip up to six months because of a heavy work load of design modifications required in the wake of the Challenger disaster.

Internal Kennedy Space Center planning documents list a target date of mid-September, 1988, for the critical flight, but sources indicate that Aldrich is exploring the possibility of a launch in mid-July.

Aldrich said the delay in launching Discovery with a five-man crew is caused by the addition of a fueling test and the ground test-firing of Discovery’s three main engines.

“This will definitely affect our launch date by a number of weeks,” he said.

The fueling test involves pumping more than half a million gallons of frigid liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen into the shuttle’s external tank to practice countdown procedures.