Atlantis awaits lift off on final flight. Photo CreditN/NASA photo
NASA on Tuesday officially set July 8 as the launch date for the 135th and final flight of the 30-year long space shuttle program.
Atlantis, carrying a crew of four and 12 tons of equipment, is scheduled to lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 11:26 a.m., EDT, for the International Space Station.
The final flight will span 12 days and include one high priority spacewalk for the retrieval of an external space station thermal control system pump that failed in late July 2010.
More than one million spectators are expected to gather around the Florida shuttle port to witness what will likely be the last NASA launch of a human crew for several years. The agency has contracted with the Russians for the launching of astronauts aboard Soyuz rockets until U. S. commercial companies are prepared to take over, possibly in the 2015-16 timeframe.
During Tuesday’s Flight Readiness Review on Tuesday, top space agency officials assessed weeks of preparations for the final voyage, including a test of the external fuel tank for cracks and the replacement of a leaky fuel valve on the No. 3 main engine. None of the minor issues that arose with the final flight of Endeavour in May was deemed a launch constraint.
Veteran shuttle commander Chris Ferguson will command the unusually small shuttle crew, including pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Rex Walheim and Sandra Magnus. The small crew would facilitate a crew rescue strategy – if Atlantis was damaged and could not descend to Earth. The strategy relies a succession of four Soyuz spacecraft that would pickup the Atlantis astronauts at the space station over a year since there is no more shuttle hardware.
“This flight is incredibly important to space station,” Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Operations, told a Kennedy news briefing.
Magnus will supervise efforts to off load a cargo that includes food, research gear and spare parts – all the stuff needed to sustain a crew of six aboard the orbiting research laboratory through 2012. The goal is to provide NASA’s future commercial cargo providers with a year long margin in case they are confronted by development issues.
The two companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp., plan to launch their first supply missions before the end of 2011.
Most of the supplies will be carried inside Raffaello, a cargo module fitted into the shuttle’s payload bay.
The mission’s only spacewalk will be carried out by Mike Fossum and Ron Garan, the two Americans currently living and working aboard the station. They plan to haul the coolant pump from a storage rack outside the station’s airlock to the cargo bay of Atlantis.
Once back on Earth, the pump will be disassembled by engineers to determine why it experienced a sudden electrical failure. Although the pump was replaced with a spare, the breakdown forced a rapid power down of the station that the station’s mission managers would not like to repeat.
Fossum and Garan will also move a robotic experiment from the shuttle to DEXTRE, one of the station’s two Canadian-built robot arms.
The equipment will be used later to demonstrate a satellite refueling capability. The hardware was developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to provide a future robotic capability to refuel orbiting satellites that would otherwise be forced to shutdown.
After last month’s mission, Endeavour joined Discovery in retirement. Discovery finished her career in March.
Atlantis will be launching for the 33rd time.
The fourth of five shuttle orbiters produced by Rockwell International in Palmdale, Calif., lifted off for the first time on Oct. 3, 1985.
Atlantis was named for the primary research ship that sailed for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute between 1930 and 1966.
After her final flight, Atlantis will be de-serviced and transferred to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex near Titusville, Fla., for public display.