"Somebody that you'd want to go camping with," Kelly says. Unlike the space station, where the crew has a little more room to spread out, the shuttle is not exactly a large ship.
They will install a glacial freezing module, conduct space walks and experiments and launch a $1.5-billion dark matter detector into space.Īs commander, Kelly will sleep on the deck in a sleeping bag - with heavy duty blinds since the sun sets and rises every 45 minutes while the shuttle's in orbit. They will deliver supplies to the International Space Station where Kelly's twin brother, Scott Kelly will be aboard. The crew of the last Endeavor mission expects to be busy during their 10 days in space. When that does happen, Kelly adds, it can be a good thing, because the crew won't be likely to make that mistake in space. That's something you don't like to happen." We lost control, and if it happened in flight, we would have died. "I did have a couple of weeks ago an incident where it was unrecoverable. Mark Kelly, who will command Endeavor's final mission, says sometimes mistakes happen. The run-through lasts for almost two hours and ends with a successful landing, despite the onslaught of problems.īut not every practice is perfect. The simulation is an exact mock-up of the flight deck that never leaves the ground - but shakes, rattles and rolls with some of the sensations of space flight. That's not good," one crew member groans, before the team coolly proceeds into a sequence of actions to conserve power and bring the simulation home safely. In this simulation, they kill one fuel cell and then another.
He says the team's role is to come up with a script of possible malfunctions and deliver those malfunctions to the crew in the simulator with the tap of a button on a touch-screen computer. "We go in the office, and we'll say, 'OK, what do we want to do today?'" says Steven Messersmith, who directs the flight simulation team. Before then, members will go through hundreds of practice runs in a flight simulator at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The command crew of Endeavor STS-134 is scheduled for lift-off in February 2011. What's next in human space flight for America is unclear.
After 30 years, two tragedies and 130 successful missions that seemed to make space flight almost routine, the shuttle program is coming to a close.