Discovery has been cleared for landing. Previously this week, Shuttle managers had determined that both the tiles and the reinforced carbon-carbon components of the thermal protection system were fit for re-entry. Yesterday afternoon they finished the analyses of the issue with a thermal blanket near one of the Orbiter windows and determined that on-orbit repair was not necessary. This one thermal blanket had incurred some damage during the launch. This decision came after wind-tunnel testing in facilities at NASA’s Ames Research Center, located in the Bay Area of northern California. In an earlier stage of my life when I was an officer in the Air Force, I did wind tunnel testing at Ames on supercritical wings. It’s a great place.
Raffaello has been re-stowed in Discovery’s payload bay, and Discovery will undock from the Space Station early tomorrow morning. On Jim Kelly’s previous mission on STS-102 in 2001, after undocking he was on the Shuttle control stick to perform a fly-around of the Station prior to departing and beginning the re-entry phase of the mission. I believe that will take place again and Vegas will be at the controls at that time once again.
Landing is scheduled for early Monday morning, August 8, with the first opportunity to land at Kennedy Space Center scheduled for 3:46 a.m. CDT. I plan to be up to watch on TV. I am not able to go back to Florida on Sunday to be able to be on-site at KSC for the landing. Rats!! A second opportunity to land at KSC is available at 5:12 a.m. CDT. If they are unable to land at KSC on either of those opportunities, there are two opportunities to land in the desert at Edwards AFB in southern California at 6:42 a.m. CDT and again at 8:17 a.m. CDT. The first choice is obviously to land at KSC. If Discovery lands in California, then it has to be transported to KSC on the back of a special Boeing 747 aircraft.
Since several people indicated that they enjoyed my story about Vegas on the previous update, I’ll be bold and tell another one that involves Vegas and one of my daughter’s male friends (she might get mad at me if I call him a boyfriend!).
In the late 1990s, probably in 1998, Vegas came to visit us here in Tuscaloosa, staying at our home. It was during the summer and I was working during the week at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Jessica’s friend lived in the Huntsville area and the two of them had worked it out that I would pick him up on Friday afternoon so that he could spend the weekend visiting with us in Tuscaloosa. Jessica hadn’t told him and I didn’t tell him that we would also have an astronaut there as a houseguest. So, we get to the house and he gets the experience of meeting and having dinner with an astronaut. Now that’s a pretty good experience for a 17 year old (or anyone else for that matter). He was impressed, needless to say. Unfortunately, we learned later that he somehow got the idea that we often had astronauts in our home. Jessica had to break the reality to him that it was the first time that had taken place, and he just happened to get lucky to be there at the same time.
Later…
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Michael Freeman is an Associate Professor of aerospace engineering and mechanics at The University of Alabama. He is attending this week’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery, and will publish daily accounts of the events surrounding the shuttle’s “return to flight” launch. UA graduate James Kelly is the pilot of STS-114, NASA’s first space flight in over two years. Dr. Freeman may be reached by e-mail at michael.freeman@ua.edu.