Launch Part III February 18, 2006
Posted by spacemom in : She Blinded me with Science , trackback
After a day of sun, fun, rain (it was July in Orlando) and drinks at
Pleasure Island (a rip off, BTW), we got ready for another launch
attempt. It was July 21, 1999. Again, the launch would be early the
next morning. Dr. Jay and I spent a while hanging around Cocoa Beach,
had some time with my parents and just enjoyed the beautiful Florida
weather. This day, it did not rain. It was just simply beautiful.
We did a repeat of the 19th, except without so much food! The party
that we had the first night was not there. But we were all pretty darn
excited again. We got our launch passes again and our white buses to
take us to the Cape. A few of us noticed lightning in the
distance. This is not a good thing. The weather requirments for launch
are very strict about lightning.
My boss at the time, K, said he had called the weather line for launch
and it had claimed 100% chance of launch that night. We all smiled and
said good, good, but it nagged at the back of our minds.
We did discoved that the hydrogen senor had spiked for mysterious
reasons. There was no reason to assume that there would be a repeat. A
test of the system found no problems 8 seconds after the launch was
aborted. We were lucky. The launch had been stopped just before the
main engines ignited. If they had, we would have had a massive delay
in launch. It is just not possible to ready the shuttle for another
launch that quickly.
With T-20 on the countdown clock, the lightning got worse and it was
reported that there was a storm cell within 10 nautical miles of Pad
39B. This was not good. Check out that link above. It is not safe for
the shuttle to launch with lightning that close.
The clock went down through the normal holds and then there was a
decision to place a hold at T-5 minutes. We would try to wait out the
storm. We could hear our co-workers over the loud speakers. KSC
controlers were trying to evaluate how large was our launch window,
really. It was 46 minutes and we could extend it only to 50 minutes.
If we launched at the wrong time, then the shuttle would be in the
wrong orbit to deploy our telescope. This is very precise stuff.
We waited. And waited. And we heard our people back at the Operations
Control Center in Cambridge,MA trying to determine just how long we
could wait. We were able to extend the window by another 6 minutes
when our guys back home were frantically doing the math. It was
determined yet another 4 minutes could be added. 1:24am would be the
drop dead time. We could not launch later than that.
At 1:19am, there was a lightning strike 8 nautical miles from the
shuttle. The launch was scrubbed at that point because we would need
to wait 30 minutes from that point, and we would have passed the
launch window.
We got back on the busses, a lot more of us feeling ill. We needed to
launch and soon. We only had a few more days of this launch window. If
we could not launch within the next 48 hours, we would be delayed for
several months.
The guys back in Cambridge started to work on how long we could make
the launch window (on both ends) for the next day.
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