The astronauts of the space shuttle Atlantis on Friday put on their spacesuits, scrambled into their ship and buckled in for launch. But the crew will have to wait another few weeks for actual liftoff.
The practice run was a routine dress rehearsal for launch and the culmination of a three-day training exercise at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The six-member crew is due to blast off March 15 to deliver a new power module for the International Space Station.
NASA is under a strict deadline to finish the $100 billion, 16-nation project by 2010 before the shuttle fleet is retired.
Under the command of veteran astronaut Frederick Sturckow, the Atlantis crew plans to install a third set of power-producing solar wings onto the space station, in preparation for the addition of new laboratories built by the European and Japanese space agencies.
The European Space Agency’s Columbus module is scheduled to be delivered in October.
The crew’s biggest obstacle is likely to be the folding up of an old solar panel. The last shuttle crew faced a similar task in December and ended up having to spend an extra day in orbit for a spacewalk to manually guide the thin, flexible wing back into a storage box.
“We were able to take all of their techniques and summarize those down to where we feel that we could make a really efficient go at getting this solar array retracted,” Sturckow said on Thursday.
NASA managers plan to meet next week in Florida to assess plans for Atlantis’ 11-day mission and set a firm launch date, tentatively scheduled for 6:43 a.m. ET March 15.
