January 14, 2008-- NASA engineers spent the weekend installing the new electrical plug on Space Shuttle Atlantis’ external fuel tank. The agency may also be testing the patience of the U.S. Space Program’s international partners. Europe’s ten-ton Columbus module is sitting snugly inside Atlantis’ cargo bay is waiting to be launched and attached to the International Space Station. The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, has an even bigger lab in the works called Kibo. Its ride to space, Shuttle Endeavour, isn’t even at the launch pad yet. The Japanese lab, pictured above, is made up of three sections to go up on three Shuttle flights. Up to now, these parts are arrayed like a museum exhibit inside the Space Station processing facility at the Kennedy Space Center. It makes for an interesting exhibit for visitors plodding through on paid tours of the facility, but these modules are designed to be in space.

Back to the plug, NASA is playing an "inside straight" to get the Shuttle launch schedule back on track. Low fuel sensors inside Atlantis’ external tank failed twice during two consecutive launch tries. The Agency thinks the cause is jiggling of the pins and sockets on a plug that connects the sensors to a computer on Atlantis. That’s the plug technicians are installing on the tank. That may be the cause, or maybe not. The plug that failed is currently being tested at the Marshall Space Flight Center. The plug going onto Atlantis is a modified part with all the components soldered together for a tight fit.

Even if the plug works right, the damage has already been done to the 2008 launch schedule. NASA likes five weeks between missions. Atlantis goes first with the Columbus lab, maybe on February 7^th. That means the February 14^th Kibo flight isn’t feasible, although NASA hasn’t officially re-jiggered the launch line-up.

On another subject, for any readers in the Boston area, I’ll see you in April for a talk I’ve been asked to give at Harvard about "Final Countdown". It’s for a fundraiser for the Mount Washington Observatory. Also, I appreciate all the interest in the video clip of my talk on C-SPAN, which can be found at…

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=203165-1

More to come---