NASA looks to finish space station

Topeka Capital-Journal, The, Sep 22, 2006 by Mike Schneider

By Mike Schneider

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - It was an emotional moment, Atlantis pilot Chris Ferguson said, when the space shuttle circled around the international space station this week, his crew admiring its enormous new solar panels and the rest of the 171/2-ton addition they had just installed.

"It was an awe-inspiring sight," Ferguson said Thursday after the space shuttle landed at the Kennedy Space Center.

Atlantis' 12-day mission was busy and at times exhausting but peppered with only minor complications. And now comes the reward for the shuttle program's astronauts - 14 more missions quite a bit like this one in the next four years.

The Atlantis mission marked the first construction work on the orbiting space lab since the Columbia disaster 31/2 years ago. Now the project is on a tight schedule for completion by 2010, when NASA's three shuttles - the only spaceships cavernous enough to haul the multiton space station sections - will be retired.

"We are rebuilding the kind of momentum that we had in the past and we're going to need if we're going to finish the space station," said NASA administrator Michael Griffin. "Because we have an awesome task ahead of us."

Space shuttle Discovery is set for liftoff in December on the next flight of a construction sequence that Griffin described as "a little simpler than building an aircraft while you fly it, but not a lot."

The shuttle landing was a day later than planned because NASA ordered up extra inspections after mysterious pieces of debris were spotted floating outside. Engineers had feared the spacecraft's heat shield had been damaged, but the inspections found nothing wrong, and the descent through the atmosphere was trouble-free.

"We were not very concerned," Commander Brent Jett said afterward. "We just assumed whatever objects we saw had come from the payload bay. What we were trying to do is make the folks on the ground comfortable."

NASA managers were impressed with how good Atlantis' heat shield looked after passing through the fiery heat and friction of Earth's atmosphere.

The success of Atlantis' flight may allow NASA to relax a requirement that shuttles be launched in daylight so that they can be photographed for any damage. The space agency may also reconsider the need for further design changes to the external fuel tank to prevent foam insulation from breaking off.

Atlantis' flight was bookended by delays. The launch was scrubbed four times in two weeks because of a lightning bolt that hit the launch pad, Tropical Storm Ernesto and problems with the electrical system and a fuel gauge.