Nasa moved the Atlantis shuttle off its Florida launch pad on Tuesday to protect it from Tropical Storm Ernesto, a change that threatens plans to lift off this month.
No new date was set to launch Atlantis on the first International Space Station (ISS) construction mission since the 2003 Columbia shuttle tragedy.
The United States space agency had already cancelled Tuesday’s launch but delayed its decision to move Atlantis back to its massive hangar until the last minute on the off chance that dramatic changes to the storm’s path would occur.
Atlantis‘s massive mobile platform started crawling on a 10-hour trip back to the vehicle assembly building at the Kennedy Space Centre on Florida’s east coast. The storm is forecast to hit southern Florida by late Wednesday.
”The rollback essentially is a decision to slip launch by a couple of weeks,” said Nasa spokesperson Bruce Buckingham.
It takes about eight days to prepare the shuttle for lift-off once it is back on its launch pad, and Nasa will not be able to return Atlantis to the site until the end of the week at the earliest, Buckingham said. The move reduces the shuttle’s opportunities to lift off this month as its launch window closes on September 13.
The rollback also ended Nasa’s hopes of launching Atlantis on its crucial ISS mission by September 7 to avoid interfering with a Russian Soyuz mission to the orbiting laboratory. Nasa officials have started negotiations with their Russian counterparts to negotiate a solution.
Before Ernesto’s threat, Nasa was forced to cancel attempts to lift off on Sunday and Monday to give engineers more time to determine whether a strong lightning strike on Friday had caused any damage, none of which was found.
Once it launches, Atlantis will carry six astronauts and a new, 16-tonne segment with two huge solar panels for the half-finished space station.
The 11-day Atlantis mission is a critical first step in completing the ISS assembly. It will be the first of 16 flights planned to complete assembly of the space station by 2010, when the three-shuttle fleet is set to retire.
The Columbia explosion forced a halt in the orbiting laboratory’s construction and shifted the focus on improving shuttle safety.
After two Discovery shuttle flights in the past two years focused on safety, Nasa declared it was ready to resume construction of the station, which is key to the US drive to send humans to Mars.
If Nasa fails to fly Atlantis before its launch window closes on September 13, the next opportunity to lift off during daylight is in late October. A daytime launch allows the space agency to take pictures of the shuttle to check for debris from the external fuel tank that could damage the orbiter.
The Atlantis flight will be the third shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster, which was caused by debris that struck its heat shield during lift-off, dooming its return home with seven astronauts aboard.
Storm
Tropical Storm Ernesto began intensifying on Tuesday as it left Cuba and headed over open water toward south Florida where forecasters said there was a chance it could come ashore at hurricane strength.
On the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a state of emergency was in effect in Florida. Residents stocked up on supplies, tourists were ordered out of the Florida Keys and courts and schools were closed.
At 8am local time, Ernesto’s maximum sustained winds, which strengthened earlier in the morning, were 72kph over the warm waters of the Florida Straits and were expected to gain strength over the next 24 hours, the Miami-based National Hurricane Centre said.
The storm was centred 322km south-east of Key West, Florida, and about 346km from Miami. Ernesto was moving north-west at 22kph. The storm centre was expected to approach the Florida Keys or heavily populated south-east Florida by evening, with rain bands from Ernesto moving onshore by afternoon.
”Now that Ernesto has moved back over water at least some steady intensification is expected,” the hurricane centre said, adding there was a chance the storm ”could become a hurricane before reaching Florida”.
Ernesto could later re-emerge over the Atlantic off north-east Florida and make a second landfall in the Carolinas in 60 to 72 hours, also near hurricane intensity.
The National Weather Service said the main concern was potential flooding, with up to 31cm of rain possible in some areas of mainland South Florida and a possible storm tide of 0,9m to 1,5m above mean sea level along the Biscayne Bay shore of Miami-Dade county.
Ernesto was briefly the year’s first hurricane in the region on Sunday when its top winds reached 121kph before it weakened over the mountains of Haiti. The storm killed two people in Haiti before striking Cuba, where it dropped up to 18cm of rain before fading into showers and thunderstorms.
In Cuba, many of the 600 000 people who were evacuated returned home and there were no initial reports of deaths or serious damage.
Oil prices edged up on Tuesday after falling more than $2 on Monday as Ernesto seemed less likely to threaten oil facilities in the Gulf of Mexico, where a quarter of US oil and gas is pumped. — Reuters, Sapa-AFP