Shuttle Delayed Due to Cloudy Skies

PunkOfLinux writes "The shuttle won't be coming down until Tuesday, due to a decision by NASA that the weather was not good enough for re-entry. After the first two attempts, at around 4:45 and 6:25 this morning, NASA called off today's landing."

And

[PunkOfLinux]

I woke up at 4 in the morning to watch this...
Well, let's just hope nothing goes wrong with this.

I really wanted to see it land...

Better safe than sorry

[Crixus]

It's certainly better to be safe than sorry. And NASA is certainly going to be extra careful on this, the first launch after the accident, but I wonder if they would have landed in these conditions before?

Level of care

[Henry V .009]

Are they being ultra-careful with this, or is this just normal-careful? I imagine that it's the second, but this mission has been weird so far. One of the hazards of being ultra-careful with the weather would be that you reject all the okay opportunities to land and have to take the worst at the end. Or land in Texas.

So what do they do now?

[jasohill]

Do they haul out the experiments and try and get some work done, or do they surf space porn for the next few hours while they wait? It's a mystery to me.

Why the mission has been so eventuful

[psyklopz]

Most would likely agree that this mission has been more 'eventful' than many in the past. And I'm sure most would agree that the general public (if they care at all) are getting more and more of a feeling that the shuttle 'just isn't doing it for me anymore'.

And that may be exactly the point.

Now, granted, NASA wants a safe mission. But several of these problems may have simply been overlooked in the past because space exploration is inherently dangerous anyway, so some risks are accepable.

There is actual politcal value in a mission that seems plagued with problems. I'm getting the general feeling from the media that it's almost all NASA can do to get this thing up in the air one more time.

If enough people get the same feeling, NASA could seem very justifiable to request mroe money for a shuttle replacement. And maybe that's the real goal of this mission.

that's my conspiracy theory for the day :)

Rain can damage the tiles.

[Shivetya]

NASA did some testing with a P3 Orion to study the effect.

http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/P-3/HTML/EC 87-0035-001.html [nasa.gov]

What to do?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Can anyone point me to a link that describes what the astronauts do with this extra day in orbit? Considering the expense of getting them there, I find it hard to believe that they just sit around for this extra day picking their nose and farting, but it would seem like all of the experiments would have already been stowed.

Can they make use of this extra day?

On a related note, I'm well aware that the astronauts have plenty of air+power+water+food for this extra day, but how long could they actually stay in orbit before one of those things ran out? Just curious; mostly to know how conservatively these things are planned.

Lemme make sure I've got this right...

[Loligo]

Our tanks have targetting systems that can see through smoke and lock onto targets miles away, our troops have glasses that can see at night, and I can go down to the local sporting goods store and buy a laser rangefinder that will accurately measure distances out to a mile or so with a margin of error of an inch or less ... but a SPACESHIP can't land because of a few clouds?

The cynic in me agrees: This is a publicity stunt. There's no reason to keep the shuttle up there except that clear skies make better photo-ops.

Re:NASA?

[wasted time]

I know you were joking, but it surprised me to learn that they use Outlook for email services onboard. Watching NASA TV, I lost track of the number of times Capcom instructed the crew to reboot one of their machines in order to fix sync problems with Outlook.

Re:Rain can damage the tiles.

[pixelpusher220]

and most airplanes can 'go around again' if something happens that doesn't look/feel right.

The Shuttle is a single shot landing...you don't want to try risky weather when you only get one chance...

Re:Shoulda gone Canadian

[Smidge204]

pff Survivors in Toronto's crash last week 100% survivors in NASA's last crash 0%...

Not to downplay the survival rate of that particular crash, but let's put things into persepctive:

Flight 358 had just touched down and failed to stop before running off the runway and into a ditch at less than 90 MPH.

Columbia was travelling at roughtly 18,000 MPH when the heat basically melted the craft, causing it to disintegrate.

That's a pretty rough comparison. Having said that, how many commercial aircraft have exploded mid-flight and had any survivors? And none of them were going 18,000 MPH!
=Smidge=

Re:Lemme make sure I've got this right...

[HD Webdev]

Our tanks have targetting systems that can see through smoke and lock onto targets miles away, our troops have glasses that can see at night, and I can go down to the local sporting goods store and buy a laser rangefinder that will accurately measure distances out to a mile or so with a margin of error of an inch or less ... but a SPACESHIP can't land because of a few clouds?

The shuttle can trigger lightning on a cloudy day.

This could easily disable electronic devices on-board.

Protecting Space Systems from Lightning [aero.org] article.