Nasa to launch faulty space shuttle
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| Monday, March 16, 2009 WASHINGTON: The US space agency will break with protocol and try to launch the space shuttle Discovery late on Sunday even though it has yet to uncover the cause of a hydrogen leak that delayed its mission earlier in the week, officials said. On Saturday, Nasa scheduled Discovery and its crew of seven, including a Japanese astronaut, for a blast-off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the International Space Station (ISS) at 7:43 pm (2343 GMT) Sunday, with a 10-minute launch window. "From a broad safety perspective we are fine.... We feel good about it," shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach told a press conference. He said that equipment replacement work was about three hours behind schedule but would not delay the launch, and that leak checks would be performed later on Saturday. But he acknowledged that "no, it's not usual" when asked whether it was normal to fly without resolving a problem such as the hydrogen leak. "We like to know the root cause for problems. I am a little surprised that we did not find something more obvious because it was a healthy leak," he said, referring to the leak Nasa discovered on Wednesday in the filling system for the shuttle's external fuel tank just hours before liftoff. Mike Moses, the head of the mission management team, noted that the leak occurred on the "ground side system," not on the shuttle or the external fuel tank itself. |
posted by Andy Says @ 7:36 PM
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