Topic: STS-134: Endeavour's last flight

[rickl]

It's scheduled to launch at 3:47 pm EDT on Friday.

Endeavour is the youngest sibling of the Space Shuttle family.  Built to replace Challenger, it made its first flight in 1992.

A storm passed nearby earlier Thursday, before the rollback of the service structure.


The rollback has now been completed.


As always, NASA TV and NASA Spaceflight.com will have the latest information.

[trapeze]

As great as the shuttle has been its legacy, sadly, has been that it stunted our exploration of space. Before the shuttle we used to actually go places. Perhaps SpaceX and private industry can lead the way back to true space exploration.

[John Florida]

I wanted to be there for the launch but now I have to wait again. They must think I have nothing better to do.

[rickl]

They scrubbed because of faulty thermostats in one of the APUs (Auxiliary Power Unit).  The APUs are used during landing to provide power to the ailerons and rudder.  I think there are three of them to provide redundancy, but they do not lift off unless all of them are working.  Without them the Shuttle would land like a brick.

There will be a minimum of 72 hours to check out the problem, so the earliest they will try again is Monday.  It's also possible that there could be other problems that caused the failure of the thermostats, and the worst-case scenario is that they might have to pull the shuttle off the pad and take it back to the VAB.

I was watching NASA TV at work today.  The crew came out of the building, got on the van, and headed to the launch pad.  The word came down while the van was en route.  They stopped and turned around before reaching the launch pad.  I've never heard of that happening before.

As always, you can get all the information you want and then some at NASA Spaceflight.com.  The launch thread has 22 pages of comments and photos and they didn't even launch!

[Glock32]

You know, if private space exploration had gotten off the ground say 40 years ago, there's no telling where we could be right now. It's not inconceivable that we could have a toehold on Mars, maybe even something as extensive as the domed colony depicted in Total Recall.

This is the profound frustration of our age. Centuries ago people like us, those who naturally bristled at groupthink and collectivist statism, could hop on a ship to the New World and make a go of it in an infant nation being carved from wilderness. Now as that infant nation matures, it is taking on many of the traits that so repelled the founding generations. Is this an inevitability of civilization? I suppose you could make a case for either position, but the point is we need a new frontier.

[charlesoakwood]

This thing is starting to move.  As soon as the rockets are moving and the economy is level congress will start regulating.  They need to get operations off world as soon as possible.

[rickl]

I was reading NSF.com and they think they've found the problem.  An electronics box that controls the thermostats will have to be replaced.  They're looking at May 8th or 10th for the next launch attempt.

[Libertas]

Still supposed to go off today?

[John Florida]

Still supposed to go off today?

 I don't think so. They said yesterday that the needed 48 hours to make sure of something or another.

[Libertas]

Hmmm.  The last launch is not going so smoothly.

[rickl]

They're going to try again, on Monday morning at 8:56 am EDT.

As always, NASA TV will have the video and liveblogging will take place at NASASpaceflight.com.  (That's a link to the STS-134 section.  The actual launch day thread hasn't been started yet, but it will appear there.)

NASA has a brand-new feature, which shows the ground track of the Shuttle in real time on Google Earth.  See here.

[rickl]

That screenshot is from NASA TV, which is live.  You can't see much of anything going on on the launch pad, but the clouds are moving.   

[rickl]

Wow, that was cool!  I downloaded the NASA groundtrack file from my link above (I already have Google Earth installed), and when it started up it slowly zoomed in and panned down the Florida coast, finally centering on a closeup of an animated Shuttle icon sitting on pad 39A.

[John Florida]

That is way cool.

[Libertas]

NASA TV has the countdown rolling!

[rickl]

I'm going to leave for work early so I can watch it there.  The launch time is normally when I would be arriving.

The launch window goes to 9:01 am EDT.

[Libertas]

It's up.

[John Florida]

It's up.

 Still amazes me.

[Libertas]

Yeah, I like rockets, these system is pretty darn old and never lived up to its "space bus" promise, but it is the closing act of an era.

Seeing Buzz Aldrin on Fox again talking about how private enterprise is going to have to save space exploration and expressing dismay that a politician has not or cannot launch a new initiative to lead us to Mars illustrates how far we've let space slip away from us.

When the shuttle retires we are left to rely on the Rooskies for rides into space...

 

[rickl]

When the shuttle retires we are left to rely on the Rooskies for rides into space...

 

For a little while...

Seeing Buzz Aldrin on Fox again talking about how private enterprise is going to have to save space exploration and expressing dismay that a politician has not or cannot launch a new initiative to lead us to Mars illustrates how far we've let space slip away from us.

Like I've said before, the main problem with a government-run space program (as opposed to a private-sector space industry) is that goals will constantly change every time the governing party changes, so that it's very hard to ever get anything done.  The entire Apollo moon program happened in about a decade, and one party (the Democrats) were in charge for almost the whole time.  (Kennedy and Johnson were Presidents from 1961-1969, and Nixon from 1969-1972.  Congress was controlled by the Democrats during the entire period.)

It's ironic that the only President whose name is on the plaques on the moon is Nixon, and he wasn't terribly enthusiastic about the space program.  But actually Johnson's last budget contained cuts for NASA.  The hardware that got us to the moon had already been paid for by that time, though.