January 2 News Items

New Shuttle Launch Date Expected Soon (Source: Florida Today)
External tank specialists from Lockheed Martin and the United Space Alliance removed the suspect hydrogen feed-through connector, which was shipped to Marshall Space Flight Center for inspection during the weekend. NASA managers will meet Thursday to decide on actions that will allow them to set a new launch date for Atlantis, delayed nearly a month by faulty readings caused by a connector that runs through the external tank. It's unlikely a new launch date will be set on Thursday, but managers should create a plan for correcting the problem caused by faulty readings from a low-fuel sensor in the external tank. The suspect readings scrubbed launch attempts on Dec. 6 and 9.

Crews Prepare Atlantis for Freeze (Source: Florida Today)
At Launch Complex 39, technicians are preparing Atlantis and its external tank for temperatures near freezing Wednesday and Thursday. Heaters will be activated for the orbital maneuvering system and the solid rocket boosters. Additionally, systems that contain water will be protected by keeping that water flowing so it cannot freeze.

New Mexico Space Launch Facility on Hold (Source: Las Cruces Sun-News)
Groundbreaking for Spaceport America has been pushed back to November 2008 after the facility's environmental impact statement, or EIS, had to be scrapped, a spaceport official said. The time line for opening the facility, however, has not changed, a spaceport official said. Officials had said earlier in 2007 that a groundbreaking ceremony could have taken place in the first quarter of 2008. But New Mexico Spaceport Authority Chairwoman Kelly O'Donnell said the FAA expressed concerns about a potential conflict of interest with the environmental impact statement by another state agency: the New Mexico State University Physical Science Laboratory.

The EIS is a part of the FAA licensing process. Tetra Tech - a California-based engineering firm - has been contracted to perform the EIS. "In that transfer of data, there were some balls dropped, meaning that some of the work that had been done, had to be redone," O'Donnell said. O'Donnell said the facility is still on track to open in early 2010, which has been intended to match Virgin Galactic's time line for when their technology is ready to launch.