KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - The countdown for space shuttle Discovery's March 11 launch is underway this morning as NASA prepares the shuttle for its two week mission to the International Space Station. Countdown clocks began ticking back from the T-43 hour mark at 6:30 p.m. EDT Sunday night. Earlier in the afternoon, Discovery's seven astronauts arrived at Kennedy Space Center for final preparations before launch Wednesday night.
VIDEO: LAUNCH MINUS 2 DAYS LAUNCH READINESS BRIEFING "Right now we're not tracking any major issues in the firing room that would prevent any major milestones," said shuttle Launch Director Mike Leinbach at a press briefing following this morning's Mission Management Team meeting. "A couple IPR's over the weekend, but no big deal. So, the team is anxious to go, we're fully trained, ready to execute this mission." Despite the compressed nature of this week's launch activities, the countdown has been extremely smooth so far. "As a management team, we really didn't have that many issues to discuss," said NASA's Chairman of the Mission Management Team, Mike Moses "We talked briefly... checked with every agency, every center, every project. No-one had any issues." The only issue of any concern related to controller cards in the Orbital Manuevering System engine pods. "We did talk a little bit on the vehicle," said Moses. We had an issue back on STS-124 where one of the OMS engine controllers, a gimbal controller, basically controls where that engine nozzle points to steer that OMS engine, had a hiccup on the secondary controller during launch. We've gone off and done the failure analysis so that team came back to report their status of what they found. Bascially, when they took the lid off the electronics box, there's a piece of foam that helps keep those cards seated in their slots and they saw that that foam had some compression memory in it and one of the cards was loose. They've looked at some other boxes, pulled those apart, found that same compression in the foam, but none of those cards were loose. Looking at the history, it looks like this card might have been loose from the beginning. "If this part fails, it's one of two controllers on a single OMS engine. We have two OMS engines and we only need one of those, and of those systems we also have the RCS (Reaction Control System) for de-orbit... We have the potential, if this failure shows back up, of losing one of two systems on one of two systems on one of three systems, so, redundancy-wise, we're in really great shape there. As far as weather is concerned, weather forecasters are preedicting nearly ideal conditions for launch and only a 10% probability of a violation of the weather constraints to launch. "Weather looks very good for launch, I'm very happy to say," Launch Weather Officer Kathy Winters remarked. "Right now we're just looking at a really nice upper-level ridge that's been holding off the weather." "The only slight concern we have is a ceiling can sometimes come in when we get a southeast flow situation, but really the chances of that are low, and so, with that, we're only going with a 10% chance of KSC weather prohibiting launch. So a 90% chance of 'go' weather." At about 3 o'clock this afternoon, technicians will begin loading Discovery's cryogenic tanks with liquid hydrogen and oxygen to power the fuel cells after the ship reaches orbit. Early Wednesday morning, the Rotating Service Structure will be rotated away from Discovery, followed by fueling of the giant external tank with liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants. The flight crew will board Discovery shortly after 6 p.m. EST, leading up to launch at 9:20. (The Spacearium / SpaceflightNews.net / Space Media Corporation)
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