Pingie: HTTP:: Discovery 039 s Launch Pushed Back to This Evening

HTTP:: Discovery 039 s Launch Pushed Back to This Evening
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NASA officials and mission controllers decided yesterday to postpone the launch of space shuttle Discovery to this evening, at 11:59 pm EDT (0359 GMT, August 29th). They chose not to attempt liftoff early in the morning, as first planned, amidst fears that the fuel valve that prevented a Tuesday launch would not function. After a ten-minute meeting yesterday, the people in charge of Discovery's STS-128 assembly flight to the International Space Station (ISS) decided to give engineers a few extra hours to conduct their repairs. This is the third time NASA aborts plans of launching the shuttle this week. Previous problems with the valve, with the foam insulation on the craft's external tanks, and severe thunderstorms near Launch pad 39A, at the Kennedy Space Center, have all prevented the craft from blasting off on its 13-day mission. Today, the fueling procedure, which will add 526,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant to the shuttle's 15-s!
tory external tanks, will begin at 2:34 pm EDT (1834 GMT), NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel has told Space. “To make sure we [have] a truly bulletproof story, we decided to give them one more day,” the Head of the Discovery management team, Mike Moses, explained the official decision during a Thursday briefing. The main...
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