Advertisement

Storm Clouds Stall Space Shuttle Liftoff

Share
TIMES SCIENCE WRITER

After winning in the courts and having a few protesters jailed, NASA lost the chance to launch the shuttle Atlantis on Tuesday when a few storm clouds moved over the Kennedy Space Center.

The space agency plans to try again today when a 29-minute launch window opens at 9:50 a.m. PDT, but the weather was not expected to be much better.

Tuesday night’s earthquake in Northern California, meanwhile, gave the National Aeronautics and Space Administration some additional concern. The rocket that propels the Galileo spacecraft, now nestled in Atlantis’ cargo bay, is controlled in flight by an Air Force station in Sunnyvale, Calif. NASA said it had received reports that the station suffered some damage.

Advertisement

The station’s condition would have to be assessed before workers started filling the shuttle’s fuel tank early today, said Steve Nesbitt, a spokesman at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The launch delay Tuesday was another setback for scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who have worked for 12 years to get the Galileo launched to Jupiter on a mission that is several years behind schedule.

If Galileo is not on its way by Nov. 21 it will have to be put back on the shelf--where it has been several times before--for another two years, when the planets again will be aligned so that the spacecraft can get to Jupiter.

Air Force weather officials said there is only a 40% chance the weather will permit the launch today, and Thursday’s weather is expected to be worse.

Because of tighter weather restrictions imposed since the Challenger disaster, it does not take much to scrub a launch, and midday launches are particularly difficult because of storms that tend to drift across the coast during that time of the day. Atlantis had been scheduled for a 9:57 a.m. PDT launch Tuesday.

Advertisement