Weather Threatens Scheduled Launch of Space Shuttle Columbia

With heavy fog threatening in the morning and low-lying clouds and thunderstorms blanketing the area, NASA meteorologists said Sunday that the space shuttle Columbia had only a 20% chance of making its scheduled launch Monday at 5:10 a.m. PST.

Air Force Capt. Thomas Strange said, however, that the chances of good weather will increase to 70% Tuesday and 80% Wednesday, and NASA officials are confident that the shuttle will lift off early in the week.

NASA officials began fueling the shuttle with half a million gallons of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen at 7:53 p.m. PST Sunday in preparation for a launch.

“With all due respect to Capt. Strange, the weather forecasters have been wrong before, and the weather has changed for the better,” said William B. Lenoir, a NASA associate administrator. “If there’s any chance at all, we’ll be ready.”

Once launched, the shuttle will deploy a Navy communications satellite into orbit and attempt to rescue a valuable scientific satellite that will crash into the atmosphere in March if Columbia cannot retrieve it.

The Columbia launch is already three weeks overdue because of bad weather and the need to complete refurbishment of launch pad 39A, which has not been used for four years. The changes were made to provide the astronauts with a way to escape from the orbiter in case of an accident on the pad and to provide additional weather protection for workers readying the shuttle.

Lenoir said Sunday that the delays should have no effect on the launch schedules of the other orbiters, but that they could cause a three- to five-day delay in each of Columbia’s next two missions.

Columbia will have a 52-minute window today for the launch, from 5:10 a.m. to 6:02 a.m. PST. It must launch during that window to be in the same orbital plane as the satellite to be retrieved. If launch cannot be attempted today, the window on Tuesday will be from 4:35 a.m. to 4:58 a.m. PST. The window opens about half an hour earlier each succeeding day.

Columbia’s main goal for this, the first of 10 shuttle missions planned for 1990, is the recovery of the school bus-sized Long Duration Exposure Facility, launched in 1984 to test the effects of the harsh space environment on the materials that are used in spacecraft and satellites. LDEF, as the satellite is known, was supposed to be picked up and returned to Earth within a year, but delays and the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger prevented its recovery.

Currently, LDEF is at an altitude of 179.5 nautical miles and dropping at a rate of about half a nautical mile per day, according to NASA Associate Administrator Arnold D. Aldrich.

Recovery of LDEF is scheduled to occur sometime between the fourth and the seventh day of the mission, depending on when Columbia lifts off.

The three-man, two-woman astronaut team came here Friday night and are all “healthy and ready to go,” Lenoir said.

The crew includes: Navy Capt. Daniel C. Brandenstein, 46, the mission commander; Navy Lt. Cmdr. James D. Wetherbee, 37, the pilot; and mission specialists Bonnie J. Dunbar, 40, Marsha S. Ivins, 38, and G. David Low, 33.

The mission is scheduled to last 10 days, the second-longest shuttle flight to date.