Source: Florida Today
Everything was just as the astronauts left it when Ron Delaney climbed into Discovery’s cockpit.
The shuttle’s crew of seven had boarded a convoy truck on Kennedy Space Center’s runway to begin medical exams, their 15-day spaceflight officially over.
Now, about an hour after Discovery’s touchdown, Delaney sat in mission commander Alan Poindexter’s seat and donned his headphones and began to monitor systems still humming for flight as teams prepared to tow Discovery back to a hangar.
“Once we’re in and we take control of that orbiter, it’s ours,” the 42-year-old United Space Alliance technician said. “And we’re like, OK, we’ve got the next mission to get ready for.”
For Delaney and roughly 1,000 KSC employees, Discovery’s roll to a stop more than two miles down Runway 33 on April 20 marked the end of one mission and the start of five months of work to get the ship ready for its next flight, work NASA calls a “processing flow.”
“It’s the flow of work to take us from the point where we land until where we’re ready to fly again on the next mission,” said Stephanie Stilson, the NASA manager who oversees Discovery’s launch preparations. Her official title is flow director.
With Discovery’s next flight expected to be its last, the orbiter and teams working on it are likely embarking on their final flow.
Over the coming months, some 13,000 different components and their sub-components will be scrutinized and over 600,000 man hours exhausted before Discovery is given a “go” for launch again.
More than 26,000 tiles and blankets lining the space ship’s belly and upper surfaces will be checked for dings, scratches or missing stitches.
Workers will service the orbiter’s three main engines and install a different set, remove a thruster pod to replace a failed valve, and prepare the payload bay to hold a refilled International Space Station cargo module.
At the same time, inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, twin solid rocket boosters will be stacked on a mobile launcher platform and attached to a 15-story external tank that was expected to arrive this weekend by barge from New Orleans.
To continue reading: http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20100509/NEWS02/5090320/The-voyage-of-shuttle-Discovery
