NASA’s space shuttle program, and its provisioning and repair of the International Space Station, continue to fall farther behind schedule as the latest mission is delayed by lightning strikes on the pad.

The next space shuttle mission to the International Space Station was to have left yesterday, but has been delayed by at least 24 hours due to a severe thunderstorm which produced multiple lightning strikes on the vehicle assembly as it sat waiting for launch at pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The construction mission to the space station was already a month behind schedule.

NASA management decided they needed more time to check critical shuttle systems after 11 lightning strikes were recorded within 1800 feet of the pad on which the shuttle assembly sat, according to a CNET story, even though the shuttle is protected against electrical surges. Mike Moses, director of shuttle launch integration, said “We’ve seen nothing so far that indicates anything was actually affected by the lightning strikes. So I fully expect this to be a positive story, but we have a lot of equipment that has to be checked and that’s what takes time.”

Engineers at the space center are doing a thorough check of systems on the entire vehicle assembly. If no problems are found, the shuttle could get away at 7:15 this evening. The current weather forecast calls for a thirty percent chance of storms strong enough to delay the shuttle launch during that time period.

The weather yesterday was really quite bad. Moses said, “If you were here in town yesterday, you saw a pretty spectacular electrical storm here at the Cape yesterday afternoon. We have several different systems out there monitoring lightning and we have a bunch of different rules and regulations and guidelines. But the bottom line is, we took 11 strikes within the point-three nautical miles (1,800 feet) of the pad.”

The launch team hopes for better weather today, and hopes that they will be able to get the shuttle off the ground for the planned 16-day construction mission at the space station. The age of the shuttle equipment, and of course the two missing shuttles is beginning to show, with no sure replacement in sight.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 1:56 pm under Science and technology.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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