Outside the control center, rows of fruit trees edge up within a mile of the building. NASA asks its shuttle contractors to assemble any pertinent data for what looks to be the coldest launch ever. And this is to be NASA’s most ambitious year: 15 shuttle missions are planned.Īs the crowd leaves the viewing stands, NASA’s mission management team convenes inside the launch control building to plan tomorrow’s try. It follows seven launch postponements in December and January for Columbia. It is the sixth launch postponement for Challenger. They’ll try again tomorrow - Tuesday morning.ĭrained from almost five hours of waiting inside the shuttle, stiff from sitting on the hard seats with their legs up, crew members drag themselves out of the orbiter. Shortly before 1 p.m., Mission Control tells the crew to climb down. They whip to 30 mph - too dangerous in case the shuttle has to make an emergency landing before entering orbit. Just as it comes off, though, the winds start up. With a hacksaw, they finally cut the bolt off. Then a second drill can’t complete the job. Then the drill they manage to find fails. Then a bolt sticks on the shuttle’s hatch. And, back at Concord High, where McAuliffe teaches social studies, the 1,200 students are ready with party hats and noisemakers. The students visiting from the Concord, N.H., high school are bursting with tension. The third-graders from young Scott McAuliffe’s class are fidgety while they wait outside at KSC. They believe in her mission to humanize space.īut everyone grows a little tired from sustaining the thrill through so many delays. They are confident, and they are proud of Christa, who was picked from among 11,400 teacher applicants. A third freeze will strike the deathblow to thousands of citrus acres. They flood their groves with warm groundwater. ”Īcross the state, citrus workers scramble, hauling out fuel-oil heaters and preparing to move them into the fields. All possible precautions should be taken. This could be a major freeze on a par with the Christmas 1983 freeze and January freeze of last year. ”Temperatures may approach all-time record lows. Citrus growers on the Space Coast, who often pause in their groves to watch the shuttle roar above their treetops, are stopping now to hear the National Weather Service bulletin: Just hours away from Florida, though, glacial winds are coating the country with ice. It is a brisk and clear Monday, in the 50s, and the sun is shining on friends and relatives of the space shuttle Challenger’s seven crew members. The new addition to the California Science Center will be 200,000-square-foot, and will nearly double the center’s current educational exhibition space.In the grandstands at Kennedy Space Center, the crowd waits for the countdown to tick along. The future home of Endeavour, the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, will “serve as a launchpad for creativity and innovation to inspire future generations of scientists, engineers, and explorers". The process of fitting Endeavour to the full stack began in July of last year, with forward assemblies beginning in early December. The largest component of the stack is the 154-foot external tank. Part of the full stack also includes two solid rocket boosters, each comprising an aft skirt at their base, a 116-foot solid rocket motor, and a forward assembly on top. According to NASA, each shuttle had a gross liftoff weight (system stack) of 4.5 million pounds, and could travel at an estimated 17,500mph. The 122-foot-long spacecraft has a wingspan of 78 feet, and was only one of 6 space shuttles built, with only 5 of them being deemed space worthy. It flew a total of 25 missions in space during its lifetime. Endeavour’s first launch was on the STS-49 mission to repair the Intelsat IV satellite, and carried a crew of seven astronauts.
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