Atlantis lifts off on previous mission Photo Credit/NASA
NASA has laid more groundwork for a fair well mission by the shuttle Atlantis in late June 2011 by naming a three-man, one-woman veteran crew of astronauts.
Lift-off of what would be the final, “final” mission of NASA’s three decade long space shuttle program would be June. 28.
Chris Ferguson would command a crew including pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim, NASA announced late on Tuesday, Sept. 14.
Assigned to Atlantis in what NASA is calling STS 335, they would serve as the rescue crew for the STS 134 mission, which is tentatively set for a lift off for the International Space Station on Feb. 26 with a crew of six astronauts and the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an external astronomical observatory.
STS 134, aboard shuttle Endeavour, is currently the final scheduled mission of the shuttle program.
Though it has prepared for an astronaut rescue for every shuttle mission launched since the 2003 Columbia tragedy, NASA has never flown an actual rescue.
So, top agency managers – once they know Endeavour’s crew has successfully completed its mission in March – would like to re-designate STS 335 as STS 135 and prepare Atlantis for an operational mission.
The Atlantis crew would deliver supplies and spare parts to the station to support activities in the post-shuttle era through at least 2020, a goal both the White House and Congress support.
The Atlantis crew would also return to Earth with a bulky cooling system pump that experienced a mysterious breakdown on July 31. The breakdown crippled half of the station’s external cooling and cut the electrical power available for life support systems and scientific research.
The pump was replaced with a spare by spacewalking astronauts.
However, engineers would like to disassemble the pump motor in order to pinpoint the cause in case the failure mode would jeopardize the two operational pumps and three additional spares currently on the space station.
Though supportive of a final mission for Atlantis, Congress has yet to approve the funding.
NASA’s rescue plan for the STS 135 crew would rely on a series of Russian Soyuz capsules launched to the space station to gradually retrieve the four Atlantis astronauts.
Currently, two more shuttle flights remain, STS 133, which is nearing a Nov. 1 lift off to the station with supplies and Robonaut 2 and STS 134.