[X] My Assistant

[David]

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. local time, 20:30 Greenwich Mean Time. Chances for launch at that time are not good, with weather forecasts predicting thunderstorms and 50% chance of precipitation. The forecasts predict better weather by Tuesday, though it will still be cloudy.

[RNeuhaus]

I seems to silly on the way that the Space Shuttle is brought from the hangar to the launch ramp which is separated by 6.72 km at 8-10 hours. I tought it would have a better way to bring is by pulling the Space Shuttle with its wheels up to the launch ramp and from there with adecuate crane to lift and put it on the upside position.

The crane to lift would be smaller and fixed than a big truck that takes Space Shuttle plus others things that add up to close to 4 millions kilograms and also has to worry on the vertical stability of Space during the route.

On that way, it might take less time than the present: pull it : 15 minutes, lift it to upside. 3 hours.

Well, It is just a tought that there is ways to improve it.

Rodolfo

[dvandorn]

Rodolfo, it takes several *weeks* after they attach the orbiter to the external tank and SRBs to connect everything up and check out all of the connections. They do it in the VAB so that they can do all that work inside, without having to worry about the weather (and winds, which can get dangerous at 300 feet above the ground).

If they were to take the orbiter off the stack at the pad and roll it indoors on its wheels, it would take less time overall to get the orbiter indoors, true. But it would 1) leave the external tank and the SRBs exposed on the pad, and 2) would require a far longer launch delay, since it would take three to four weeks to re-connect all of the orbiter systems and check everything out when they re-attached it to the stack.

The concept of the mobile launcher was developed for Apollo, when they thought they might have to launch 20 or 30 Saturns a year in order to reach the Moon. The only way to support that kind of launch flow was to have a separate building where they assembled the rockets and their spacecraft, and then bring the whole thing out to the pad. In other cases, rockets and their payloads *are* assembled at the pad -- Delta II's were done that way, and I think the Delta IV's and Atlas V's are also assembled at the pad. But for vehicles that you want to launch on a fairly frequent basis, it makes a lot more sense to put them together indoors and then move the whole thing out to the pad.

-the other Doug