NASA administrator Mike Griffin has announced that July 13 will be the launch date for the long-awaited Return to Flight of the Space Shuttle fleet \u2013 beginning with Shuttle Discovery on STS-114. <\/p>\n
Late information, coming out of the Flight Readiness Review, had rumoured a date of July 18 \u2013 however, Griffin has officially set the date as the 13th as originally planned. While it was confirmed that several departments had completed their elements of the FRR, it was noted that some core managers were still meeting this morning \u2013 thus meaning the FRR was still in session today \u2013 contrary to earlier reports.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cBased on a very thorough and very successful flight readiness review we\u2019re currently \u2018go for launch\u2019 of Discovery on July 13,\u201d said Griffin at the press conference to announce the launch date.<\/p>\n The NASA head had already pre-empted his \u2018go for launch\u2019 comment to the US Senate on Tuesday, with a response to the Stafford-Covey Return to Flight Group \u2013 which had noted NASA had three safety recommendations outstanding from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report \u2013 yet gave a their go-ahead to proceed with the launch, even if it wasn\u2019t required from the Task Group.<\/p>\n Discovery will be the first Shuttle to launch since the Columbia accident in 2003 \u2013 Discovery was also the first Shuttle to fly following the Challenger accident in 1986.<\/p>\n United Space Alliance workers and NASA managers alike will be carefully watching the build-up of Ice \u2013 which can become a potential debris threat to the Orbiter on assent \u2013 when super-cold propellant is loaded into the External Tank prior to launch.<\/p>\n Also under the spotlight will be the pre-press over-cycling which was noted on the two tanking tests in the build-up to STS-114\u2019s launch. However, that occurred on a different External Tank and a different LH2 Diffuser to what Discovery will be using.<\/p>\n Discovery\u2019s window to the International Space Station extends to July 31.<\/p>\n <\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NASA administrator Mike Griffin has announced that July 13 will be the launch date for the long-awaited Return to Flight of the Space Shuttle fleet \u2013 beginning with Shuttle Discovery on STS-114. Late information, coming out of the Flight Readiness Review, had rumoured a date of July 18 \u2013 however, Griffin has officially set the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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":[],"class_list":["post-42359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42359"}],"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=42359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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