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A final orbital test to close out 25-flight career BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: April 28, 2011 
With Johnson at the controls, the shuttle is scheduled to undock four hours after crew wakeup on flight day 13. After pulling straight away in front of the station, Johnson will kick off a one-lap fly-around, loop up over, behind, below and back in front of the lab complex.
The Sensor Test for Orion Relative Navigation Risk Mitigation experiment -- STORRM -- will operate in the background during Endeavour's approach to the station on flight day three, collecting data that will allow engineers to calibrate the system. After Endeavour's one-lap fly around after undocking, Johnson and Kelly will guide the shuttle through another looping rendezvous sequence to put the new equipment to the test. "The orbiter will undock and back away and do a full one lap fly-around like we normally do," said shuttle flight director Gary Horlacher. "We'll do the nominal sep 1 burn and the sep 2 burn will put us on the STORRM re-rendezvous trajectory. So we're going to phase out above station and behind it and STORRM will be taking data all the way out until the sensors drop lock outside 20,000 feet. "Then we'll go ahead and do an orbit lowering burn, which is going to bring us down below the space station and get us set up for the trajectory to mimic the Orion approach to the space station. This approach is called a co-elliptic approach, so this burn down here is going to put us in a co-elliptic trajectory under the space station and then we'll be catching back up to it and do the terminal phase initiation burn, which will bring us back up towards station. "It's designed to have us stall out about 1,000 feet below and 300 feet behind the space station," he said. "And then orbital mechanics will pull us down and away. STORRM sensors will continue to take data until the sensors drop lock. And when we get outside that range, we'll go ahead and call the docked mission complete and then we'll get our nominal water dumps accomplished and get the ship prepared to come back home." The astronauts will pack up and test the shuttle's re-entry systems the next day, stowing gear and breaking down their computer network. Kelly and Johnson will take turns flying a shuttle flight simulator to practice landing procedures, and the crew will handle a final round of media interviews. Landing currently is planned for flight day 15 -- Friday, May 13, assuming an April 29 liftoff. But NASA managers likely will extend the flight at least one and possibly two days to give the shuttle crew more time to help their station colleagues carry out maintenance on the station's life support system. "We're going to lift off with a 14-day planned mission," said Mike Moses, the shuttle integration manager at the Kennedy Space Center. "We have two extension days in addition to the two weather and systems wave-off days that we keep for deorbit and landing contingencies. So we have two mission extension days this time. "After we get docked to station, probably around flight day five or so, the mission management team ... will take a look at where we're at. The mission ops team has a really good plan where those two extra days will go in. We'll probably add those two days, taking it to a 16-day mission. But we won't do that until we get in orbit and see what we've got. If two extension days are added, landing would slip to flight day 17, or May 15 for an April 29 launch. And that will be the end of the line for Endeavour. "Three out of six of us have flown on Endeavour," Kelly told reporters. "It's pretty close to my heart because it's the first space shuttle I flew on in 2001. I'm glad it's the one I'm going to fly on last, it's the baby of the fleet, it's coming up on 19 years in service, the 25th flight. Twenty five's a good round number to end on." On April 12 -- the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle flight -- NASA Administrator Charles Bolden ended months of speculation by announcing the museums that had been chosen to display the shuttles after the final mission. "We want to display the vehicles as realistically as possible, but the thought that it's going to be a flyable orbiter is just not true," Shannon said. "There's a lot of safety issues where you have toxic chemicals and things, and we've got to take that plumbing off and we're not going to replace it. We'll either safe it in place, if we can't safe it in place, you just remove it. "The main engines are an extremely valuable asset, and I want to save all of our block 2 SSMEs. We have a plan to store them in a purged, safe environment along with all of the ground systems required to maintain them until we decide what to do with the next program. So what we did is, we went and really searched the facilities for excess hardware that we could build up into some main engines. So we'll have nine engines we'll put into each of the vehicles that are older technology engines, but they're real nozzles that flew, they're real combustion chambers, real pumps. And so we'll take out the really good engines we'd like to save for the next program, we'll put in rebuilt engines that we kind of scrapped together, and that is what will be displayed." Shannon said NASA also hopes to cobble together enough spare parts to build a few stand-alone engines that can be put on display by the orbiters "so people can see how big and how complex they really are. I'm also trying to save the OMS engines, the smaller orbital maneuvering system engines on the back. Same reason, if we can use them in a future program, I think they are very valuable assets. We don't have a lot of spares on those, so those are probably going to be mocked up." During the decommissioning phase, engineers are going to take the opportunity to inspect or remove components that are buried in the shuttle and have not been inspected since construction began decades ago. The hydraulic actuators that move the shuttle's elevons, for example, are prime candidates for removal. "I had some pretty good debates with the ground operations team about the difficulty in going to get some of these things," Shannon said. "But from an engineering standpoint, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go see how a reusable vehicle actually weathered this many cycles, this many times on orbit, this much time in ground processing. So we'll go get representative actuators, we're going to get main engine flow liners, things that basically you started with it, then you built the orbiter around it. "It's very invasive to go in and get them, but I've asked the team to go in there and do that. We'll send those out to our labs. That's kind of the next legacy of the shuttle program is to give you a lot of material knowledge, a lot of design knowledge in how things work over a long period of time." The shuttle will look the same to the public, but "we're going to put on some hardware so we can save some of the higher value hardware, we're going to safe it so that the public's not exposed to anything dangerous, and we'll remove some things the public would never see." "To me, it's more important to get that engineering knowledge out of these vehicles than it is to have total accuracy in a museum."
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