![]() The airlocks and docking rings through which crews on Endeavour and Atlantis entered the International Space Station will be gathered and stored for possible later use. “You have some energy built up in that system, where you could potentially hurt someone” if the pole were left intact. “That’s a safety reason” for the collection, says Stephanie Stilson, orbiter transition and retirement flow director. The shuttle’s emergency crew escape system featured an extending pole these will be collected from all three orbiters. If Endeavour’s engines fly again, it will be on NASA’s new Space Launch System, a Saturn V lookalike now in the planning stages. It extracted them one at a time, hauling them away for storage in a NASA facility at White Sands, New Mexico. Mounted on a 20-foot-high forklift, the steel probe, its tip sheathed in black padding, had pressed into the nozzle of each engine. Technicians have plucked them with what looks like a Space Age version of a medieval battering ram. Held by a latticework of steel beams, the pod rotates out and into the free-hang position, ready for the next day’s crew to winch it into retirement. As the drone of ventilators fills the building, a technician wearing a “Lucky’s Bar” T-shirt thumbs a manual detailing the steps for excising the orbital maneuvering systems. Once inside today, the orbiter processing team will remove one of Endeavour’s two orbital maneuvering system pods, which bookend the vertical stabilizer. The blue metal door leading inside bears two against unauthorized entry, a third about electrical hazards, and a caution against unfastened objects. ![]() Orbiter Processing Facility 2 is all about warnings. On the aft end of Endeavour, the ports for purging nitrogen from the reaction control thrusters on the orbital maneuvering system pod are covered with cloth sporting a notice reminding workers to “remove before flight.” “You think you want to do something that you normally would do, and they say it’s not required for where this shuttle is going,” says Terry White, project lead for the orbiter thermal protection system and a 32-year shuttle program veteran. ![]() Crews, shrunk by layoffs, attended first to Discovery, then Endeavour, and finally Atlantis. The results could improve the understanding of shuttle failures and guide the design of future spacecraft.īefore the autopsies could begin, however, workers in the Orbiter Processing Facility had to “safe” each vehicle, removing toxic propellants and hydraulic fluids as they had done hundreds of times before. ![]() The orbiter autopsies can determine whether the best estimates and educated guesses NASA engineers relied on to keep the shuttle flying for three decades were trustworthy. Now we can actually tear some of this hardware down.” “We have been evaluating this hardware with nondestructive tests throughout their history. Seriale-Grush, orbiter chief engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “ ‘Autopsy’ is a sad way of putting it-these vehicles are almost like our friends-but it’s what we are doing,” says Joyce M. They removed and analyzed propellant tanks and valves and scrutinized electronics, looking for evidence of deterioration the way coroners look for signs of illness during autopsies. In late autumn of last year, more than six months after Discovery landed for the final time, NASA crews began peeling back the orbiter’s skin, clipping wires, and pulling hydraulics. And this harvesting of the orbiter’s components was only the beginning. Clear plastic stretched across the crater in the orbiter’s nose, where the forward reaction control system-small thrusters that maneuvered the spacecraft in orbit-had been removed. The three main engines had been removed from the shuttle’s aft end, which was now covered by a tightly fitted mask with three white discs the size of the engine bells. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia, where it will arrive in mid-April. No need to worry about contamination: Discovery would not be returning to space.Īfter flying 148 million miles and orbiting Earth 5,830 times, Discovery, first flown in August 1984, was being decommissioned and readied for its trip to the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. “Bunnysuits,” those white coveralls with floppy hoods and rubber-banded booties, were designed to keep dirt and debris from contaminating the orbiter interiors.īut on this summer day in one Orbiter Processing Facility, technicians working inside Discovery’s crew module wore street clothes. Technicians had worn them for decades as they prepared the space shuttles for their move from Kennedy Space Center’s three Orbiter Processing Facilities to the towering Vehicle Assembly Building, and eventually the launch pad.
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