The US space shuttle Endeavour and its crew of six astronauts were set to blast off early yesterday on a mission to deliver a module dubbed Tranquility to the International Space Station (ISS). Endeavour was scheduled to take off at 4:39am from the Kennedy Space Center here.
Countdown started on Thursday and by Friday the weather forecast had improved to an 80 percent “go” for launch. Fueling of the shuttle began on Saturday. Mike Leinbach, the shuttle launch director, reported that his team had not encountered any technical problems.
“The team is energized and excited about the countdown … looking forward to getting Endeavour off the ground Sunday morning,” he said.
The mission comes as NASA begins to re-evaluate its future after US President Barack Obama effectively abandoned the US space agency’s plan to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020.
The Constellation program was intended to develop a successor spacecraft to the shuttle, which could be used to carry astronauts to the moon where they would use a lunar base to launch manned missions to Mars.
Constrained by soaring budget deficits, Obama submitted a budget to Congress that encourages the agency to instead focus on developing commercial transport alternatives to ferry astronauts to the ISS after the shuttle program ends.
There are just five missions scheduled for NASA’s three shuttles before the program is scheduled to wind down later this year. The first shuttle launch was in 1981.
The Endeavour mission’s main goal is the delivery of the Tranquility module, also known as Node 3, which comes with a multi-window cupola attached.
The cupola, built for NASA by the European group Thales Alenia Space in their Turin factory, will allow for panoramic views of Earth, space objects and spacecraft arriving at the ISS, the US space agency said.
“Everything thus far is going exceeding well,” NASA test director Jeff Spauling told journalists during a press conference.
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