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    NASA Delays Final Flight of Discovery Until February

    Written by

    Chris Preimesberger
    Published December 4, 2010
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      NASA is not taking any chances with the 26-year-old Space Shuttle Discovery, which has been in orbit 38 times and is the senior citizen of the U.S. space program.
      The agency on Dec. 3 postponed for the third time what was to be the final launch of Discovery until after the holidays. It originally was supposed to go Nov. 5 but was delayed until Nov. 30, again until Dec. 17, and now until next year.
      The craft is now scheduled to fly no earlier than Feb. 3, 2011, to enable more testing on repairs that were made to cracked supports on the shuttle’s fuel tank and to other mechanical problems that included a hydrogen leak.
      Discovery has flown 38 flights, completed 5,247 orbits, and has spent 322 days in orbit. The space agency has deemed it usable for one more flight but said it is possible it may never fly again if the nagging mechanical problems aren’t solved once and for all.
      If the cause of the cracks isn’t found and delays continue, Discovery may not make it into space before the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor, which is planned to go Feb. 27, 2011. That mission has been designated as the final one for the 35-year-old shuttle program, which has faced budgetary issues in Congress.
      NASA said Dec. 3 that it has repaired cracks on two 21-foot-long brackets that support one of Discovery’s large external fuel tanks. Flight engineers found that the brackets cracked during the first loading operations for Discovery’s final mission to the space station.
      More time needed to find cause of cracks
      More time is required for engineers to fully determine exactly why the cracks occurred, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told reporters during a press conference Dec. 3.
      All the shuttles have performed numerous missions that involve astrological, geophysical and other scientific research and repairs/assembly work on the International Space Station.
      Of the all the NASA shuttles, Atlantis and Endeavor are the newest and are currently available for duty. NASA lost Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in separate accidents that claimed the lives of their crew members.
      The original space shuttle, Enterprise, was a tester that flew suborbital flights for one year and was retired in 1977.

      Chris Preimesberger
      Chris Preimesberger
      https://www.eweek.com/author/cpreimesberger/
      Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor Emeritus of eWEEK. In his 16 years and more than 5,000 articles at eWEEK, he distinguished himself in reporting and analysis of the business use of new-gen IT in a variety of sectors, including cloud computing, data center systems, storage, edge systems, security and others. In February 2017 and September 2018, Chris was named among the 250 most influential business journalists in the world (https://richtopia.com/inspirational-people/top-250-business-journalists/) by Richtopia, a UK research firm that used analytics to compile the ranking. He has won several national and regional awards for his work, including a 2011 Folio Award for a profile (https://www.eweek.com/cloud/marc-benioff-trend-seer-and-business-socialist/) of Salesforce founder/CEO Marc Benioff--the only time he has entered the competition. Previously, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. He has been a stringer for the Associated Press since 1983 and resides in Silicon Valley.
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