Space Shuttle Discovery ready to do heavy lifting Saturday
— -- In a way, space shuttle Discovery is a delivery truck carrying one of the heaviest, and widest, loads yet to the International Space Station.
Getting the 37-foot by 15-foot, 32,500-pound Kibo module into orbit will require 8.5 minutes of heavy lifting. NASA hopes to start the job at 5:02 p.m. Saturday with the firing of the space shuttle main engines and solid rocket boosters to launch Discovery, Kibo and seven astronauts off the Earth. The weather and the spacecraft appeared near perfect heading into the final hours of the countdown today.
But the spectacle and excitement of the blast off from Kennedy Space Center only begins the work.
"If you look at it from the outside, we're just taking a large module up and attaching it to the outside of station and that seems simple," associate NASA administrator for space operations Bill Gerstenmaier said of the two-week construction mission. "When you get into the details of what's actually involved ... this is, again, a very complicated mission."
After the new high-tech Japanese science laboratory is attached to the space station, a smaller Japanese storage module delivered during the last shuttle mission must be moved atop the larger module. Hooking up connectors that provide power to the new lab, among other setup tasks, will take parts of three spacewalks.
The technology-minded Japanese have longed to be a major player in space science, and this module cements their position among the leaders in space exploration. Japan intents to launch an automated cargo module as early as next summer and a capsule for humans someday.
"Adding the Kibo module is a big deal for the Japaneese," said Gerstenmaier. "This really brings them up to speed."
The Kibo science module also increases the size of the space station to equivalent of a five-bedroom house, with nearly 11,000 cubic feet of habitable volume.
Kibo cost 200 billion yen. That's almost $2 billion in U.S. currency. It's the longest compartment added to the space station. Most other modules have been shortened during the design and development effort, cutting costs for budget-minded governments.
"It's bigger because everyone scaled back except Japan," said Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, 38, who will be the first to enter Kibo when it is on orbit. "We thought that the redesigning process would be more costly."
After the Kibo is installed, the space station will have a mass of 612,000 pounds and be 71% complete. Another seven construction missions are scheduled after this one to complete assembly of the station. Two more shuttle missions are set to deliver spare parts and supplies before the U.S. space trucks stop visiting ISS.
Discovery is flying the tenth mission since the 2003 Columbia accident, but it's the first to fly with an external tank that incorporates all the post-Columbia changes made to reduce the amount of falling foam, which can damage the delicate heat-shield tiles and panels protecting the orbiter's airframe. In addition, only ten missions are left on the schedule before the fleet is scheduled to be retired in 2010.
"So we're really hitting the halfway point here," shuttle program manager John Shannon said. "I expect this to be the best performing (external) tank that we have had to date."
The mission remains under a cloud of questions about the Russian spacecraft now parked at the station. Two previous Soyuz spacecraft have re-entered abnormally. NASA must wait for results from an investigation to eliminate doubts about the Soyuz parked at the station, which serves as a life boat for two cosmonauts and one American astronaut.
Despite the shadow of doubt, NASA manager calculate the risk of malfunction is small enough to trust the Soyuz as an escape vehicle for the space station crew should something go wrong during or after Discovery's visit. NASA officials said, with that issue resolved, they moved on to making sure they could pull off the Kibo installation and setup.
"We've got to be 100% ready to get the Kibo attached," said Gerstenmaier. "We need to work all that activity during the flight and that needs to be our focus."
Contact Peterson ppeterson@floridatoday.com