Fifth time not a charm for Endeavour liftoff

Space shuttle Endeavour's blastoff was scrubbed once again on Monday, following a month of delays and four previous failed launch attempts. The shuttle's latest terra firma detainment was called just ten minutes before blastoff due to poor weather. Although a lighting storm several miles south of Kennedy Space Center cleared …

[Anonymous Coward]

The real irony here...

Is that Endeavour is the only shuttle in the fleet equipped with computer facilities to land on arbitrary runways of sufficient length (though doing so would pose some annoying but not insurmountable problems with getting it back onto the piggyback and back to Kennedy), rather than just the normal pre-selected ones. Too bad we haven't yet figured out how to allow the damned things to take off from an arbitrary location.

[elderlybloke]

Waiting for right conditions

is a life saver. NASA remembers the Challenger disaster, caused by launching in very hazardous conditions.

The schedule was a higher priority than the lives of the Astronauts at that time.

[jeffrey 1]

Ah yes but

Yes but kennedy needs to be clear for landing in case of a RTLS abort which can happen in roughly the first four minutes of flight.

[Vulch]

On the other hand...

SpaceX did the fifth flight of their Falcon 1 last night, putting an actual satellite in orbit for the first time. They've still not got around to mentioning it on their web site though...

[ElNumbre]

Tankers...

Other than having the ability to make the SRB's fall into the ocean, rather than on someone's house, is there any other reason why they don't launch shuttles from the drier Nevada desert rather than the tropical Florida coast?

[Ian R 1]

@ElNumbre

Latitude. The closer you are to the equator the cheaper it is to launch.

[Paul Schofield]

Errrrrr.

Why dont they just arrange to launch the shuttle 6 weeks late in the first place.....

[Anonymous Coward]

@ ElNumbre

'Other than having the ability to make the SRB's fall into the ocean, rather than on someone's house, is there any other reason why they don't launch shuttles from the drier Nevada desert rather than the tropical Florida coast?'

Not really. Canaveral had always been there so that missile tests could drop harmlessly into the Atlantic so it made sense to keep on using it. As Ian R 1 says above, you also get a small extra kick into orbit by moving the launchpad closer to the Equator.

The Shuttle was originally also going to fly out of Vandenberg AFB on the Californian coast to put military satellites into polar orbits - the SRBs dropping into the Pacific. Although the USAF had been the biggest influence on the Shuttle's final design, they dropped it like a hot potato after Challenger and went back to big expendable launchers.

Which in a way was a good thing. The Soviets were terrified the Shuttle could be used to lob a huge nuclear weapon over the North Pole as a first strike weapon. Scrapping polar flights solved that little Cold War nightmare. But not before the Soviets bankrupted themselves by building their Buran Shuttle capable of doing just the thing they were worried the Americans were planning.

Oh how we miss those days of bat-shit insane paranoia.