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With no leaks found during the mass spec tests, engineers are fully confident the issue has been fixed \u2013 closing the Interim Problem Report (IPR53), and allowing Discovery to press forward towards the start of S0007 tasks, otherwise known as the launch countdown, with Call To Stations (CTS) beginning at 1:30pm local time on Sunday.<\/p>\n
A complex ballet of operations will be conducted through S0007 \u2013 which officially began at 2pm local time \u2013 with several major milestones including the retraction of the Rotating Service Structure (RSS) and a Mission Management Team (MMT) meeting for the \u201cgo\u201d to tank Discovery\u2019s External Tank.<\/p>\n
However, first up in the list of major milestones will be the \u201cpad clear\u201d operation of Power Reactant Storage and Distributation (PRSD) loading, scheduled for 6am local on Monday. Once completed, the pad is expected to reopen at 6pm late that day. NASA Test Director (NTD) Steve Payne also noted that the reactant O2 offload is planned for 180 lbs during Sunday\u2019s media briefing, in which he paid tribute to Discovery.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s been an incredible vehicle and she caps a long and distinguished career with this particular flight,\u201d Mr Payne said, via his opening remarks. \u201cShe\u2019s always amazed us with everything she can do and we expect this flight should be no different.\u201d<\/p>\n
STS-133 Specific Articles: http:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/tag\/sts-133\/<\/p>\n
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Discovery\u2019s Crew:<\/p>\n
As is usual ahead of a mission, the lead flight directors, mission controllers, and the flight crew met with the media at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) to discuss the upcoming mission in depth one last time before Discovery\u2019s last launch. After their traditional preflight news conference the crew met individually with representatives of several media organizations, including NASASpaceflight.com, to further discuss their assignments for the mission and training to get ready.<\/p>\n
When the flight crew for STS-133, also known as the ISS ULF-5, was officially announced in September, 2009, the mission was expected to close out the Space Shuttle Program (SSP), until STS-134\u2019s payload issues resulted in Endeavour\u2019s mission swapping places with Discovery, whilst Atlantis\u2019 notional STS-135 is likely to gain the final mission honor.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/A326.jpg\" "\\"A3\\"")
\u201cWhen we started out, we were going to be the final flight in the Space Shuttle Program, and the objective of that final flight was basically to leave (the) Space Station in the best possible configuration, which means get the maximum amount of upmass to station (of) the supplies they need, because it would be the last Shuttle flight, and leave it in the best condition possible,\u201d said commander Steve Lindsey, a veteran of four previous Shuttle missions.<\/p>\nCommander Lindsey will be joined by pilot Eric Boe \u2013 who has flown on a Shuttle mission once before \u2013 and four mission specialists; Alvin Drew, Tim Kopra, Mike Barratt, and Nicole Stott \u2013 all of whom have previous spaceflight experience.<\/p>\n
At the time of the crew announcement, Nicole Stott and Mike Barratt were serving on the International Space Station as members of the Expedition 20 crew.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/A82.jpg\" "\\"A8\\"")
\u201cIt actually was a pretty surprising thing for me, just in general, because I was only on station for three weeks when I got the word that I\u2019d be assigned to this flight,\u201d Stott recalled. \u201cI was really happy about it. My husband was definitely surprised by a call at I think two o\u2019clock in the morning his time, when I called down to say \u2018Are you willing to go for this kind of thing?\u2019 And he was very supportive, like he\u2019s been all along.\u201d<\/p>\nFor Barratt, it was also surprising. \u201cIt actually almost knocked me off the treadmill,\u201d he joked. \u201cNicole Stott was up there with me when that message came up, so she got the same message. I was in the Russian segment, running on the treadmill, and she made me stop, which I thought was kind of strange because she didn\u2019t look urgent at all, she was kind of smiling really big.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe told me \u2018hey you and I are both up for a Shuttle mission\u2019 and I thought she was joking, but she doesn\u2019t joke quite like that. So that was the way I first got inkling of that and then I went back and opened up my email and yeah, it was a bit of a shock. I had to make a phone call pretty quick \u2013 to my wife, to make sure she would let me do it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a huge honor to be asked to fly Shuttle, and knowing that the program was coming to an end, and how precious those seats were, that just raised the bar a lot. That was part of the shock and surprise of being named to that crew, and of course at the time we were asked, we were asked to be the last crew, and were chosen specifically for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like Barratt and Stott, Kopra also has long duration ISS experience, having been replaced by Stott on the Expedition 20 crew. One of the reasons for having three long duration station crew members with recent flight experience on the crew was due to the nature of the STS-133 mission at the time.<\/p>\n
As defined at the time of the crew announcement, the mission was expected to be an 8+1 day mission: nominally eight days in duration, with one mission extension day, typically to handle any unexpected issues or extra work that comes up while docked to the station.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/A3311.jpg\" "\\"A331\\"")
Launch was planned for mid-September, 2010, and no EVAs were planned, with only a few days allocated at the time to deliver ELC-4 and the PMM to the station, along with transferring additional cargo stored in lockers on Discovery\u2019s middeck to station and returning other cargo from the station there.<\/p>\n\u201cYou know originally we had four docked days and I think they chose us largely because of the skill set they could put together,\u201d Barratt noted. \u201cThe first iteration of our mission was kind of like a commando raid \u2013 we needed to hit the station, we needed to unload a bunch of stuff, we needed to take on a bunch of stuff, and we needed to get out of there as quickly as possible, because we weren\u2019t carrying a lot of fuel and oxygen. So it has relaxed a little bit, but we\u2019ve added a whole lot more to the activity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barratt launched for his six-month long increment on the station \u2013 and returned home on \u2013 a Soyuz spacecraft. When comparing his experiences training for that mission and the upcoming Shuttle mission, Barratt noted three positives when training to fly on the orbiter.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/A514.jpg\" "\\"A5\\"")
\u201cFirst of all, I had trained to fly left-seat (in the) Soyuz, which is kind of a flight engineer\/pilot position if you were going to make it analogous to the Shuttle,\u201d he explained. \u201cAnd so that requires extra time in Russia, an extra six plus months, and all of that training is done in Russian, and there were very little English materials when we started.<\/p>\n\u201cSo the two biggest factors to kind of framework that training are, number one, Shuttle training is all done at home. You\u2019re not traveling, you\u2019re not chronically jet-lagged, and you\u2019re not always trying to fix things at home quickly knowing that you\u2019re going to have to leave them for a while.<\/p>\n
\u201cNumber two, it\u2019s all in English \u2013 you\u2019re not working in a second language, or having to pop between the two. And number three, the Shuttle Program is so mature that any question you have can be immediately answered by the trainers \u2013 who probably knew you were going to ask, anyway.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhereas the Station is very much a work in progress, it\u2019s almost impossible to keep up with the Station because it\u2019s always changing. So training for Shuttle is quite is bit simpler \u2013 I don\u2019t mean to belittle it because there\u2019s a lot to know, but it\u2019s much more straightforward than training for a Station mission.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Lead Photograph: Larry Sullivan, NASASpaceflight.com and MaxQ Entertainment. Crew arrival picture: Jacques van Oene, Spacepatches.nl. Crew photos Philip Sloss. Payload diagram via L2)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Following the changeout of leaky couplings and successful repressurization of Discovery\u2019s Right OMS (Orbital Maneuvering System), STS-133 has entered the launch countdown for Wednesday\u2019s launch. Discovery will be launching on her final mission, with her crew excited and honored to be riding on the veteran orbiter. STS-133 IPR-53 Resolution: With the changeout of the Air […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9051],"class_list":["post-40617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-sts-133"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}