Glitch Scrubs Endeavour Launch Until At Least Sunday
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER - (CBS4) Friday's planned launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour was scrubbed early Friday afternoon, just hours after it was set to launch with President Barack Obama as one of the spectators.
NASA blamed a technical problem, and said the next chance for launch would be Sunday, at the earliest. The Six astronauts, who had their goodbyes to their families and headed to Endeavor were told to stand down.
Other conditions had looked good, and the launch team began loading more than a half-million gallons of fuel into Endeavour at dawn. Three hours later, the tank was full and NASA was keeping a close watch on a nearby storm that dropped hail on a neighboring town and delayed late launch operations. However, it was not weather which halted the launch that was not expected at 3:47 p.m.
Forecasters had put the odds of acceptable weather at 70 percent.
VIPs who had planned to watch Endeavour included President Barack Obama and his family — only the third time a president has witnessed a space launch and the first time a first family has attended one — and so many members of Congress that it's practically a quorum.
But the unseen star is one member of Congress: Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the wife of Endeavour's commander, Mark Kelly. Giffords was shot in the head three months ago in an assassination attempt in her hometown of Tucson. A 22-year-old suspect is in custody. Giffords' condition has improved enough that she was able to leave her Houston rehabilitation center to attend her husband's launch — the fourth time she's traveled to Kennedy Space Center to watch a shuttle flight.
"Gabrielle is just as excited as all of you!" her staff said in a Twitter update late Thursday. She's being accompanied by her husband's identical twin, Scott, also a space shuttle commander. "Ready if replacement is required," Scott joked in a tweet.
NASA and central Florida officials had expected between 500,000 and 750,000 people to crowd around the coastal communities. Delays of several hours were expected on the roads. Now, they will have to find places to stay or return Sunday.
This is the last flight of Endeavour and the next to last flight for the 30-year-old space shuttle fleet, after more than 530 million miles of circling the Earth. NASA started the long retirement process for the shuttle fleet in 2004 as part of cost-cutting in order to spend money on new space missions and ships.
Endeavour's launch has a $2 billion international science project, one of the most expensive payloads in NASA's 30-year shuttle history. Somewhat overlooked amid the attention on Giffords and Kelly and the president's visit is Endeavour's main mission: It will place a 15,000-pound particle physics detector on the International Space Station. The experiment, which will look for elusive antimatter and the origins of mysterious dark matter, could change man's understanding of the cosmos.
(©2011 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
