The “Discovery” shuttle is prepared for its launch on Thursday, officials from NASA announced on Friday. It will be in space for an 11 day mission carrying equipments and six crew members to the international station.
It was originally scheduled for this shuttle to leave in November, but due to some repairs which were needed in the tank area, the launch was re-programmed in February. It is known that NASA will close down the shuttle program soon. This voyage of the “Discovery” shuttle is going to be the 39th one of them. They announced at start the launch is going to take place on February 24, and they confirmed this to the press, after the meeting they had on Friday.
The shuttle will leave from the well-known Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 4.50 pm. Tim Kopra was one of the astronauts who were supposed to leave on this trip, but due to a bycicle accident, he will be replaced by another astronaut, named Steve Bowen.
Other shuttles will head to space in the nearest future, one of them being Endeavour, on April 19 and the other one is Atlantis, during this summer, announced CNN. There are only three shuttles left in the fleet of NASA, because they slowly by slowly are retiring them to make room for another step in the human’s attempt to explore the skies.
The problem that the engineers had to solve came from the fuel tank, as I said before, this one allowing the hydrogen gas to leak. Until they understood from where the problem actually came, they had to re-schedule the launch date of this shuttle. The tank was an external one and the issues were observed during a launch attempt.
The time picked by the NASA officials is immediately after a European shuttle will land in Florida. They usually prefer to take some time between the arriving anf the launching of a new space shuttle, but taking into consideration the already large delay (from November until February), we can understand why they are in a hurry.
NASA will retire the three shuttle that they still have and they will leave the trips towards our orbit to private companies, while they will focus more and more on the interplanetary travel. More information you can find at the official page of NASA, which is nasa.gov.
