Shuttle Liftoff Falls Further Behind Schedule

The space shuttle Columbia’s twice-delayed liftoff fell another day behind schedule during the weekend, to no earlier than Friday, and problems could ground the ship until after Christmas, officials said Sunday.

Robert L. Crippen, shuttle program director, announced Columbia’s second delay Friday, saying he was “reasonably confident” the spaceplane and its three-man, two-woman crew would be able to take off Thursday--three days behind schedule.

But within hours of Crippen’s launch-delay announcement, the second in four days, engineers ran into more problems at launch pad 39A, and by Saturday managers had decided they would be unable to start the shuttle’s countdown today as planned.

As of Sunday, liftoff remained formally scheduled for 3:04 p.m. Thursday, but officials who asked not to be identified said the flight was off until at least Friday, and possibly Saturday, because of ongoing problems readying the shuttle and its launch pad for liftoff.

The goal of the 10-day mission is the deployment of a Navy Syncom communications satellite and the retrieval of an orbiting science package that is slowly falling back to Earth.

Commander Daniel Brandenstein, 46; co-pilot James Wetherbee, 37; and mission specialists Bonnie Dunbar, 40; Marsha Ivins, 38, and G. David Low, 33, plan to retrieve the Long Duration Exposure Facility science satellite on the fourth day of the mission.

But the flight, originally scheduled for takeoff today, has been repeatedly delayed by problems reactivating launch pad 39A, which was last used Jan. 12, 1986, just 16 days before the Challenger disaster.

While most engineers expected problems getting the sprawling launch complex back to flight status, NASA’s “success oriented” schedules do not typically allow time for unexpected snags. And while such schedules work on paper, they do not always work in the nuts-and-bolts reality of the rocket business.

Despite claims to the contrary, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is under intense self-imposed pressure to launch Columbia before Christmas Eve.

Agency managers have repeatedly said Columbia will not be launched on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day to give workers time off over the holidays. But they appear equally adamant about chalking up six flights in 1989.