Endeavour Successfully Launches STS 108 to Space Station

The space shuttle Endeavour successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center, pad 39B at 2219:28 UTC (2:19 p.m. PST) on December 5. STS 108 is on an 11-day station crew rotation flight to the International Space Station (ISS). The shuttle is carrying the new station crew and 6.5 tons of supplies and equipment and will return with the station’s current crew. The fourth full-time crew will be aboard for five-and-a-half-months of work. The shuttle will rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station on December 7 at 23:04 UTC.

The Expedition Four crew will:

• Supervise the delivery and installation of the central segment of the station's truss that eventually will span 108 meters (356 ft).

• Conduct or support as many as eight EVAs, up to six of which might be needed to install the S-0 truss segment and also prepare the station for the arrival of two more trusses in late 2002. The other two spacewalks will include repositioning a Russian construction crane, installing protective deflector shields around station jet thrusters and setting up ham radio antennas outside the crew quarters.

• Reconfigure the prime Command and Control computers with new solid state memory units to replace failure prone hard drives.

• Host two visiting shuttle crews and a Russian Soyuz taxi crew, including a tourist, and prepare for the arrival of two supply-filled Russian Progress cargo spacecraft.

• The crew will devote almost 400 hours to conduct 65 U.S. and Russian experiments in a wide range of scientific disciplines, including biology, medicine, and physics research.

The Endeavour crew includes Commander Dom Gorie, Pilot Mark Kelly, Mission Specialist Linda Godwin, Mission Specialist Daniel Tani, Station Commander Yuri Onufrienko, Flight Engineer Daniel Bursch and Flight Engineer Carl Walz. The Expedition Four crew will staff the station until May 2002. The Expedition Three crew Frank Culbertson, Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Turin arrived at the station in August.

The Orbiter is carrying the Multipurpose Logistics Module (MPLM), Raffaello. Raffaello will be lifted out of Endeavour ’s payload bay and attached directly to the station ’s Unity node for the unloading of its cargo, which consists of he contents of eight resupply stowage racks and four resupply stowage platforms. At the end of the mission the MPLM will be placed back in the cargo bay and returned to Earth for refurbishment and reuse on a subsequent mission.

Godwin and Tani will undertake a spacewalk to install thermal blankets over the Beta Gimbal Assemblies (BGAs) at the bases of the station’s two large solar arrays. The BGAs, atop the P6 Truss, control the arrays so that they are at an optimal angle to obtain power from the sun. The blanket installation is a preventative maintenance measure. The BGAs to be covered continue to function; but elements of them have shown some unexplained spikes in power consumption.

The Endeavour’s middeck area contains the Avian Development Facility and the Commercial Biomedical Testing Module – Animal Enclosure Module. The Avian Development Facility is being flown to validate subsystems and will contain two experiments on development in space of Japanese quail eggs. The Animal Enclosure Module is a commercial experiment using mice and seeking information that could lead to better treatment of osteoporosis in humans.

The shuttle is carrying the Lightweight Multipurpose Experiment Support Structure Carrier (LMC), with four more GAS cans. One has three Penn State University experiments and another contains 10 student experiments. A third houses a Swedish Space Corp. experiment focusing on weak Marangoni flows and the fourth, from NASA’s Ames Research Center, is a test of a prototype instrument cooler for planetary missions.

Another cargo-bay payload is the Multiple Application Customized Hitchhiker-1 (MACH-1), situated between Endeavour’s airlock and the MPLM. Aboard the Hitchhiker is the Capillary Pumped Loop Experiment-3, the Prototype Synchrotron Radiation Detector, two Space Experiment Modules containing multiple small experiments and a GAS can containing seven experiments.

The shuttle is ferrying the Starshine 2 satellite. Starshine 2 is an 85-pound,19-inch-diameter ball with a surface covered with 845 aluminum mirrors and 31 laser retro reflectors.

The Endeavour, in tribute to those killed in the September 11 attacks, is carrying more than 6,000 American flags, including one that was flying at the World Trade Center when hijacked airliners slammed into it. That flag still smells of smoke, so much so that it will  not be unpacked during the flight out of concern it could trigger Endeavour's smoke alarms.

Endeavour had been scheduled for launch on November 30 but the flight was delayed after a Progress cargo spacecraft failed to dock properly with the space station. Cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Turin successfully removed the seal during a two-hour, 46-minute excursion spacewalk on December 3. U.S. and Russian engineers determined that a rubber O-ring seal jammed the station docking port when an older Progress freighter was jettisoned from the outpost November 22. The cosmonauts brought the pieces of seal inside to be returned to Earth for analysis. After the repair, the Progress was securely docked to its berthing port, with leak checks being successfully carried out indicating there was an airtight seal between the station and the supply spacecraft.

To protect the shuttle from a possible terrorist attack the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) established an expansive "no fly zone" around the Kennedy Space Center, to keep aircraft from flying within 55.2 km (34.5 statute miles) of the shuttle launch pad. Military fighter jets and helicopter gunships were in the air during the countdown. High-powered radar tracked air traffic and surface-to-air missile batteries reportedly were in place. The U.S. Coast Guard cleared a widespread Atlantic Ocean security zone off the coast of Cape Canaveral. The U.S. Air Force's 45th Space Wing is responsible for providing shuttle launch security. 

Copyright 2001 - Andrews Space & Technology
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