Computer Failure Delays Space Shuttle Launching

NASA delayed the scheduled launching of the space shuttle Atlantis on Wednesday because a computer for one of the main engines failed in the final few hours of the countdown.

Launching director Bob Sieck said that the bad engine controller will be replaced this weekend and that the new part will be tested early next week. If all goes well, a second countdown for the satellite delivery and research mission could begin by the middle of the week, he said.

“There’s a lot of work ahead of us before we would feel good about a target date, but it would be sometime no earlier than late next week,” Sieck said.

Mission commander John Blaha said that he and the other four astronauts “wish we had launched and were up in orbit right now.”

“But we totally are behind the NASA decision to fix the problem. That’s the right thing to do,” said Blaha, who encountered further delay when the engine of his training jet would not start for the flight back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The 213-pound controller, about the size of a small filing cabinet drawer, serves as the brains of the engine. Each of the three main engines has its own controller, which communicates with the ship’s flight computers.

Workers were not expected to get into the crowded engine compartment to get at the controller until today, after the fuel had been drained from the shuttle’s external tank.

The shuttle program’s latest difficulties came hours before the Bush Administration approved a new space strategy, embracing unmanned launchers for military, scientific and commercial purposes and signaling the dusk of the space shuttle era.

Vice President Dan Quayle, whose National Space Council developed the new strategy, announced the decision during a visit to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

No new space shuttles are to be built under the new strategy, which calls for development of a new family of space vehicles by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Department, with a first flight targeted for 1999.

Officials at Rockwell International’s space systems division, which built the shuttle fleet in Palmdale, said that the corporation’s work force already had been trimmed after the delivery of the shuttle Endeavour. Quayle’s statement did not catch the firm by surprise and should not spawn further job cuts, they said.

While the new system will not be designed to carry humans, it will be capable of being modified for manned spaceflight in the future, according to a statement from Quayle’s office.

The new vehicles are to be developed within the decade, Quayle said, with shuttles and expendable rockets to be maintained and improved during the development period.