Space shuttle launch faces more delay, questions

Yesterday, workers rolled to the launch pad a gigantic crane that could be used to move generators and other heavy gear in case the shuttle is moved back to the protection of the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building. The huge crawler-transporter vehicle that would carry the shuttle was being run through tests, and crews prepared to make room inside the assembly building to accommodate the shuttle.

``With the current storm predictions, it would take a relatively significant change from the current forecasts . . . to prevent us from going into rollback preparation," LeRoy Cain, launch integration manager, said late yesterday. ``If we see a change like that, then we'll press on."

Moving Atlantis back to the Vehicle Assembly building would challenge NASA's ability to launch Atlantis before a Sept. 7 deadline. The space agency wants to launch before then so the shuttle's visit to the international space station doesn't interfere with the trip of a Russian Soyuz in mid-September.

But NASA doesn't want the shuttle on the launch pad if winds are greater than 45 miles per hour. Crews need two days to safely move the shuttle, and weather forecasters predicted the storm could be anywhere from the eastern Gulf near the Florida panhandle to the western Bahamas by Wednesday.

It would take at least nine or 10 days to move Atlantis from the launch pad to Vehicle Assembly Building and back to the pad and then launch, even though the fastest time NASA has done something like that is 11 days, in 1999.

``We have two competing objectives. One, we want to get the vehicle ready to fly. The other objective is we want to get the vehicle ready to roll back," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator. ``At some point in the sequence you have to give up one or the other."

Liftoff originally had been set for yesterday afternoon, but it was delayed until tomorrow in order to give engineers more time to figure out if a lightning strike Friday damaged the spacecraft's solid fuel rocket boosters and other systems.

NASA cleared the solid rocket booster system for launch late yesterday.