Shuttle crew to take close-up look at damaged tile

NASA ordered Endeavour's crew to take an unusual close-up look at a damaged tile in the space shuttle's delicate heat shield early Saturday morning.

Using the shuttle's robotic arm, astronauts will scrutinize the gouge on the shuttle's underbelly with a high resolution camera and a laser attached to a boom.

"There's nothing alarming here and we're not really concerned," said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the shuttle mission management team that decided Friday to order what's called a "focused inspection."

Cain said the two-hour maneuver is being done out of an abundance of caution and won't cause any disruption to the crew or its 16-day mission to the International Space Station.

The damaged tile was spotted in photos snapped by the station crew just before the shuttle linked up Wednesday. Initially, the photos showed seven sites with dings or gouges, but six of them were further analyzed and turned out not to be a problem.

The one site that remains a concern is the size of a deck of cards, just below the rear landing gear.

The location and size gives engineers a bit of confidence that the damage is not the type that caused the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. They also note that similar damage on Endeavour in 2007 -- coincidentally commanded by Scott Kelly, brother of current commander Mark Kelly -- turned out not to be a problem.

Cain told reporters that it's so unlikely that the gouge will be problematic that NASA hasn't even considered making contingency plans for fixing the tile in flight. NASA can repair damaged tiles using a souped-up version of a caulking gun during a spacewalk.

The delicate tiles are part of an intricate heat protection system that keeps the shuttle, especially its bottom and edges, from burning up during its fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. In 2003, damage to the edges and tiles allowed too much heat in, destroying Columbia and killing seven astronauts.

Since then, shuttles have been checked in flight for any ice or foam debris damage from liftoff, to make sure the shuttle is safe to fly home. This is only the fifth time an extra inspection has been needed in 21 flights.

For Saturday's inspection, the camera will take just three close-up photos from 7 feet away and the laser will get two sets of data. Officials expect that will be enough information to plug into computer models to assure them that the damage isn't anything to be worried about.

This is Endeavour's last flight and the second last of the 30-year space shuttle program. NASA is shutting down the program to focus on eventual missions to a nearby asteroid or other places further out than Earth's orbit. Shuttle Atlantis is tentatively set to make the last flight on July 8 with a load of supplies and equipment for the station.

Friday turned out to be a day of small concerns for NASA, after an early morning routine spacewalk had to be cut a tad short because of a sensor problem on an astronaut's spacesuit.

Nearly five hours into the 6 1/2-hour spacewalk, mission controllers noticed that Gregory Chamitoff's carbon dioxide sensor wasn't working. NASA needs to know if levels of carbon dioxide -- expelled when you breathe -- get too high.

It's likely that moisture caused the infrared sensor to fail, said lead spacewalk officer Allison Bolinger.

The levels were probably not too high, but controllers told Chamitoff and spacewalking partner Drew Feustel not to finish installing an antenna on the space station because it would take too much time.

In the end, the spacewalk was 11 minutes shorter than planned. Feustel and Chamitoff installed a light fixture and swapped out some experiments parked outside the space station.

This was the first spacewalk for Chamitoff. He called it "a dream come true for me."

Endeavour's astronauts will make four spacewalks while docked at the space station.

NASA approved a first-of-its-kind maneuver on Monday for a photo op when a Russian Soyuz capsule undocks from the space station with three astronauts aboard. The capsule will back away to about 600 feet and stop. Then the station will slowly rotate so the Soyuz can get rare photos of the shuttle docked to the station from different angles and from another spaceship.

Delivered by Endeavour and added to the space station on Thursday was a $2 billion physics experiment that looks for antimatter and dark matter. Saturday, the two crews will get an unprecedented VIP call -- Pope Benedict XVI will make the first papal call to space.

Endeavour fueled for next-to-last shuttle launch

NASA fueled Endeavour for a Monday morning liftoff on the next-to-last flight of the space shuttle era, confident an electrical problem that grounded the mission more than two weeks ago had been fixed.

The mission commander is Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of wounded Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who's back for the second launch attempt.

Kelly and his five crewmates waved, gave a thumbs-up and shook their fists in the air as they headed to the launch pad in the pre-dawn hours. Liftoff was slated for 8:56 a.m.

The mood was upbeat this time around. An electrical problem halted the countdown on April 29; NASA said that trouble is behind. Meteorologists also were optimistic.

The astronauts never made it to the launch pad last time.

"Took my last shower for a few weeks," reported astronaut Mike Fincke in a tweet. "The flight docs gave a good look-over. My only issue: too much boyish enthusiasm. (no known cure)."

Added pilot Gregory Johnson in his own Twitter update: "I am really excited and charged up for this mission! Slept great."

Endeavour is bound for the International Space Station one last time before heading to retirement at a Los Angeles museum. The shuttle's experienced, all-male crew will deliver and install a $2 billion particle physics experiment during the 16-day flight, as well as spare station parts.

NASA anticipated a launch day crowd in the hundreds of thousands. Besides the Kennedy Space Center work force, as many as 45,000 guests were expected to jam the launch site. On top of that, law enforcement agencies told NASA to expect up to 500,000 spectators to jam area roads and towns.

Even more people were expected for the first launch attempt, on a convenient Friday afternoon. President Barack Obama and his family even showed up, but had to settle for a tour and a meet-and-greet with the astronauts as well as Giffords.

NASA spent the past two weeks replacing a switch box with a blown fuse as well as a suspect thermostat, and installing new wiring.

Giffords flew in Sunday from Houston, where she's undergoing rehab for a gunshot wound to the head. Her recovery has been so remarkable that doctors approved both trips to Cape Canaveral.

She was shot at a political event in Tucson, Ariz., her hometown., and nearly died.

By Sunday night, recreational vehicles and cars already were lined up along the Banana and Indian rivers. And signs outside area businesses cheered Endeavour on with messages of "godspeed" and "go."

Endeavour is the baby of NASA's shuttle fleet. It was built to replace the Challenger, lost in a 1986 launch accident. Endeavour first flew in 1992 — it ended its first mission 19 years ago Monday.

NASA is retiring its three remaining space shuttles after 30 years to concentrate on interplanetary travel. The space agency wants to hand over the business of getting crews and cargo to the space station, to private companies. At least one company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said it can get astronauts to the space station within three years of getting NASA approval.

One final mission remains, by Atlantis in July.

Shuttle trip reflects 2 journeys of resolve

The eyes of the world are beginning to focus here, on the windswept coast of eastern Florida, for Friday's launch of the space shuttle Endeavour.

For decades, the rockets of NASA have given this place its name and its identity: the Space Coast.

Here, Alan Shepard launched in 1961 and became the first American in space.

Here, Apollo 11 departed for the moon.

Here, the shuttle Challenger fell back to Earth. And after it, shuttles flew again.

Successes, tragedies and recoveries at Cape Canaveral happen on a grand scale.

So, it is the perfect setting for this launch, because on Jan. 8, this launch became an Arizona story.

On that day, a gunman walked into a political gathering outside Tucson and started shooting.

The first person shot was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords: a bullet through her head at point-blank range.

Her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, is commander of the Endeavour's final mission.

Giffords became among the most recognized members of Congress; Kelly, talking about his wife at news briefings and standing next to the president at a memorial service for other victims, quickly became the most visible astronaut on duty.

The question in the days after the shooting: Would she survive?

The question in the weeks after: Would he fly?

And months later, the question became: Would she recover enough to see the launch?

The answers, one by one, were yes.

So, on Tuesday, Kelly arrived here aboard his NASA jet, ready for final launch preparations, and Giffords was soon to arrive, their shared tragedy becoming another Canaveral success story.

The dream

History already has started claiming the pieces of the shuttle program.

This mission is the Endeavour's last and will be the next-to-last mission of the 30-year shuttle program.

The Endeavour is now promised to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

The program began under President Richard Nixon, who signed the Space Transport System into reality in January 1972, while the Apollo flights were still captivating the nation.

The shuttle program, as an idea, would change spaceflight. The orbiter would launch like a rocket and return like a glider. The trips - as frequent as once every two weeks - would be affordable, reliable and safe.

The reality, like all things in space, would be far away and far more complicated.

"With respect to its original goals, the shuttle program fell well short of cost schedule and capabilities," said Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado-Boulder's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. "That is not controversial."

By anyone's count, the shuttle's costs have been far greater than expected.

NASA puts the cost per launch at about $450 million, the amount of money required for each new mission scheduled.

Another way to calculate the costs is to take all the money spent on the program since inception and divide it by the total number of launches. That, Pielke said, puts the launch costs at more than $1 billion.

The orbiter once billed as simple and reliable became so complex that its launch schedule bogged down almost immediately.

The shuttle program was designed for frequent flying, as many as 24 launches per year. But, since the first launch in 1981, there have been 133 trips into space, a rate of just over four per year.

From engine maintenance to replacing the thermal-protection tiles, preparing a shuttle for launch after landing was slower and more costly than ever anticipated.

Three decades later, NASA closes the book on the shuttle, after the Endeavour and another, final flight. The agency will return its focus to moon missions and the possibility of sending people to Mars.

At its end, the shuttle program could not accurately be called a failure.

The country's greatest achievements in space over the past 30 years have been carried into orbit in the cargo bay of a space shuttle. Without the shuttles, there would be no:

- International Space Station. It was assembled module by module as the shuttles brought new pieces.

- Hubble Space Telescope. It rode into orbit aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1990 and was repaired by another shuttle crew in 1993. Since then, it has shown scientists things previously unimaginable, peering so far into the darkness of space that scientists can now determine the rate of expansion of the universe.

"It's our 18-wheeler in the sky," astronaut Gregory Johnson said affectionately. He will pilot the Endeavour in this week's mission.

"You know, we've got that big cargo bay, we take all big stuff up with us, and we've got the cab where all the people live and operate the vehicle," he said. "It's a one-of-a-kind spacecraft."

The tragedies

Despite its achievements, the shuttle program was bound by the physics of space travel.

Escaping the bonds of gravity requires a staggering amount of fuel and a violent amount of thrust. Returning to Earth requires a harrowing trip through the atmosphere; the craft becomes blindingly hot as air molecules create friction against its skin.

Each shuttle flight brings a chance for epic failure.

And so, in time, the shuttle program came to be synonymous with tragedy.

Five shuttles were built to go into space; two have flown missions and not returned.

In 1986, the shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, in plumes of white smoke across the Florida sky.

Shuttle launches were still new at the time, and the public fascination was fresh. Aboard the Challenger was schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, who was to become the first teacher in space. A nation of schoolchildren watched as a lesson in science became a national horror.

In 2003, shuttle launches had become routine, relegated to the news briefs. Then, in the predawn hours, the Columbia streaked through the atmosphere on its return trip. Above the western U.S., something went wrong, and by the time the craft passed over Texas, it had exploded into a hail of debris.

In the face of tragedy, the shuttle program never gave up.

Congress authorized a new shuttle in 1987, one year after the Challenger disaster.

It was built at a facility in Palmdale, Calif., like all shuttles. But it was built for an express purpose: to replace the Challenger. NASA named the shuttle Endeavour.

A shooting

The shooting in January was a tragedy for Arizona on a similar scale to the shuttle disasters.

Nineteen people were shot; six of them died.

Quickly, the tragedy of the shooting became bound together with the shuttle mission. Giffords, the ranking Democrat on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, flew to Houston for intensive recovery - Houston, where her husband, the mission commander, would continue his training.

Finally, this week, the word was official. Giffords, still in seclusion for her rehabilitation, would travel to see the launch.

A measure of how much this launch will be an Arizona story: Giffords is sure to be the most notable guest in the gallery - despite the presence of Barack Obama, the third seated president ever to attend a space launch.

For nearly four months, Kelly has balanced the demands of leading his crew with his wife's recovery.

His job as an astronaut - that is, maintain precise control, fix what breaks, preserve the mission and the life of the crew - contrasted with the realities of his wife's injury.

"I think people have a lot of control over their own destiny," he said, "but there are certain things that are outside your control, like what happened to Gabby. But I have also started to believe that maybe certain things are fated to happen, possibly. Maybe this happened for a reason. Maybe nobody knows why yet. Maybe in the years to come we'll realize that maybe, possibly, there could be some good things that could come out of this."

A mission

Such open questions will be put aside when the countdown clock on the green fields of the space center reaches 00:00:00.

"My whole thing is get the job done, make no mistakes, make sure my crew's working well. I have very little time to think about anything else," Kelly said last week as he prepared to leave Houston for Florida. A trip to space "is a sprint from the morning we wake up on launch morning until we climb out of the orbiter 16 days later."

If everything goes as planned on Friday and beyond, the Endeavour will push into the sky and out of sight within minutes. The rocket boosters will fall away, and the orbiter will soar toward the space station.

The mission will again burn a staggering amount of fuel. At every step, the crew will face the inherent chance of danger.

The Endeavour will rendezvous with the International Space Station to deploy its payload, a scientific device that could help detect the origins of the universe.

Giffords will be back in Houston by then, back to work on her own recovery. She will be waiting for her husband.

And then, the shuttle will descend, no longer as a rocket but as a glider.

The Endeavour will circle the Earth, losing speed and altitude, and touch down again on the Space Coast for the last time.