Spaceflight Now: STS-92 Mission Report

Astronauts fly to the Cape for Thursday's shuttle launch
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
SPACEFLIGHT NOW

Posted: October 1, 2000

  Crew
The seven-member astronaut crew gather to speak with reporters after arriving at Kennedy Space Center. Photo: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now
 
The shuttle Discovery's international crew, clearly eager to take off on a critical space station construction mission, flew to the Kennedy Space Center Sunday evening to prepare for blastoff Thursday on the 100th shuttle flight.

"It's an absolute thrill to be here," said spacewalker William McArthur. "This is where the rubber meets the road. Whether we're building the international space station, whether we're doing research on orbit, repairing Hubble, deploying satellites, this is where it all starts at, this is where people light the fuse.

"What a symbol of the future," McArthur told reporters at the Shuttle Landing Facility a few miles from pad 39A. "This is a spaceport and by golly, what a wonderful group of folks that are here. We thank you for all your hard work."

McArthur and his crewmates - commander Brian Duffy, pilot Pamela Melroy, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata and spacewalkers Leroy Chiao, Peter "Jeff" Wisoff and Michael Lopez-Alegria - arrived at the space center around 7 p.m. after a flight from Houston.

Discovery's countdown is scheduled to begin at 12 a.m. Tuesday for a launch attempt at 9:38 p.m. Thursday. it will be the 24th night launch in shuttle history and the 14th from pad 39A.

"We hope to put on a good show for you and light up the night sky," Duffy said this evening before the astronauts departed for crew quarters.

The goal of the 100th shuttle mission - the fourth of five flights planned this year and the 75th since the 1986 Challenger mishap - is to deliver an equipment-packed truss and a pressurized docking port to the international space station.

  Z1
Animation shows the Z1 truss being attached to the Unity node of the international space station. Photo: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now
 
The Z1 truss houses four stabilizing control moment gyroscopes along with S-band and KU-band communications gear and antennas.

The truss also will support a huge solar array section scheduled for attachment in early December. It will serve as an electrical junction box, directing power to U.S. and Russian modules, and provide coolant lines for the U.S. laboratory module Destiny, scheduled for launch in late January.

Four back-to-back spacewalks will be required to attach and hook up the Z1 truss and pressurized mating adaptor No. 3. As such, shuttle mission STS-92 is easily the most complex station assembly flight to date, setting the tone for an ambitious series of assembly launches over the next few years.

"We're on the doorstep of something truly special," said Lopez-Alegria. "We're going to start putting these missions together, one after the other, and I think over the next couple of years, you're going to see some pretty amazing things unfold."

The astronauts plan to visit pad 39A early Monday for a payload bay walkdown. Duffy and Melroy will spend the evening practicing landing procedures in a NASA business jet modified to handle like a space shuttle on final approach.

The countdown is scheduled to begin at 12 a.m. Tuesday and if all goes well, engineers will begin pumping liquid hydrogen and oxygen into Discovery's internal tanks around 8 p.m. to power the ship's three electricity producing fuel cells.

Fuel cell reactant loading should be complete by 4 a.m. Wednesday when a four-hour "hold" in the countdown will begin at 4 a.m. at the T-minus 19-hour mark. The countdown will pick up at 8 a.m. with main engine launch preparations.

  Rollout
Discovery makes its slow crawl to the launch pad last month. Photo: NASA-KSC
 
At 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, the astronauts will receive orbiter, payload and weather briefings. At 4 p.m. that afternoon, the countdown is scheduled to enter a 13-hour 43-minute hold at the T-minus 11-hour mark. The astronauts will visit the pad around 9 p.m. to view the spacecraft at night.

A protective gantry called the Rotating Service Structure will be retracted around 1:30 a.m. Thursday, exposing Discovery to view. The countdown will resume at 5:43 a.m. with the start of final fueling preparations.

The astronauts will be awakened at 9:30 a.m. and engineers will begin pumping a half-million gallons of supercold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen rocket fuel into Discovery's external tank at 12:43 p.m. Fueling should take about three hours to complete.

After a final weather briefing at 5:08 p.m., Duffy and company will begin donning their bright orange pressure suits at 5:18 p.m. before heading to the launch pad at 5:48 p.m. All seven astronauts should be strapped in and Discovery's cockpit hatch closed for flight by 7:33 p.m.

A final planned hold in the countdown will begin at 8:44 p.m. at the T-minus nine-minute mark. The countdown is timed to hit zero at the moment Earth's rotation carries pad 39A into the plane of the space station's orbit.

As of this writing, that works out to be 9:38:25 p.m. But the time likely will change slightly based on last-minute radar tracking. The difference between the predicted and actual launch times will be made up during the final hold at T-minus nine minutes.

"We're just about at game day and we're ready to do it," Wisoff said at the landing facility. "On Thursday, we hope to be leaving town."

Video vault
Take a guided tour through Discovery's payload bay and see the space station cargo being carried aloft in this NASA animation. Lead Flight Director Chuck Shaw narrates.
  PLAY (476k, 1min 14sec QuickTime file)
NASA animation shows Discovery approaching and docking to the international space station during the STS-92 mission.
  PLAY (285k, 41sec QuickTime file)
Animation shows how the Z1 truss structure will be maneuvered out of Discovery's payload bay and attached to the space station.
  PLAY (311k, 44sec QuickTime file)
The Pressurized Mating Adapter 3 docking port is lifted from Discovery's payload bay and attached to the space station in this animation.
  PLAY (283k, 40sec QuickTime file)
   FULL VIDEO LISTING

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