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National Aeronautics and Space Administration John F. Kennedy Space Center Kennedy Space Center, Florida 32899 FOR RELEASE: 04/01/2004 VIDEO NO: KSC-04-S-00079 |
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NASA or National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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| (Jeff Spaulding, a Shuttle test director, introduces the viewer to the process for preparing the Shuttle for launch and to the other members of the Space Shuttle launch team.) Hi, my name is Jeff Spaulding. I am a Shuttle Test Director for NASA here at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and am responsible for managing the Launch Countdown and leading the Space Shuttle team through launch. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how the Shuttle is prepared for launch. Now, the whole thing really begins immediately following landing.
On landing day, we have a team of engineers monitoring the orbiter in the firing room and a team of folks on the runway to take over responsibility for the orbiter once the astronauts liftoff. When we are ready, we tow the orbiter from the runway over to one of the three large hangars that make up the Orbiter Processing Facility. (There is one for each orbiter.) There we'll spend about two months or so preparing the vehicle for its next mission.
Now, if you were to walk into one of the Orbiter Processing Facility bays, you may not even notice there's an Orbiter there due to all the platforms and work stands around it. We use these to get people and equipment up to the orbiter to work on it.
After we safe the vehicle and take off the experiments and payloads, we start work preparing the orbiter for its next flight. Our engineers, both in the firing room and on the floor, check out all of the different systems like electrical, cooling, communications, computers, and many more systems that make the orbiter work. We even actually pull out the three main engines each launch and send them over to the engine shop for maintenance and inspections.
After everything is inspected and tested, we roll the orbiter over to the Vehicle Assembly Building or VAB. We are usually only in the VAB for a few days with the orbiter but, prior to that time, there has been another team of folks working for weeks or even months to get the solid rocket boosters and external tank ready for the orbiter to arrive. During the mate, we pick the orbiter up with big cranes, rotate it, and then attach it to the external tank. After we connect everything up, our firing room engineers power up the whole thing to make sure that it all works together. After some final closeouts, we are ready to move the whole stack out to the pad.
We have a huge machine with giant tracks, called the Crawler Transporter that actually picks up the whole stack with the boosters, the tank and the orbiter, along with the mobile launch platform they sit on, and then moves it very slowly to the launch pad. In fact, it takes about 6 hours to make the three-mile journey to the pad which is only 1/2 mph. We roll out to the pad about three or more weeks prior to launch. During those three weeks, engineers from the firing room perform any system servicing that still needs to be done as well as final checks of our flight and ground systems. If we have a payload to install, that would also be done during this time frame. All of this is done prior to getting to what I like to think is the most exciting and challenging part, launch countdown.
The launch countdown itself is about three days long and our test team works around the clock, day and night, preparing the vehicle and ground equipment for launch day. During that three day period, engineers do final checks on nearly every system both on the Shuttle and on the launch pad to ensure everything is ready prior to loading the external tank with about a half million gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. After that, the flight crew comes out to the pad, and we strap them into the vehicle and we continue counting down.
During the last nine minutes, most of the final configurations and systems checks are done by the computers, but our firing room engineers are still carefully looking at each and every thing that is going on to make sure we are still ready for launch.
The Space Shuttle main engines start at about 6.6 seconds prior to launch and then the boosters light right at T-0. At that point, the Shuttle jumps off the pad and the astronauts start their mission to orbit. In about a week and a half, the crew will be ready to land and the whole process starts over again.
Now, let me welcome you to enter the firing room. Here, you can learn about Shuttle systems that are tested and you can meet some system engineers that make this whole process come together to ensure a successful launch. | |
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