Journal from 4,7.10

On Monday, April 05, 2010, the space shuttle Discovery launched into space to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. The shuttle is carrying 7 people and 10 tons of supplies and equipment for a 12 day trip and departed the Kennedy Space Center around 6:30am (Harwood, NYTimes).

According to this article, the Discovery weighs a whopping 4.5 million pounds when filled with fuel. Even with this weight the spacecraft managed to reach 100mph in just seven seconds moving straight up. I'm curious about whether or not the Discovery weighed 4.5 million pounds before or after adding in the 10 tons of supplies, but the article wasn't specific. I suppose when factoring in the already gargantuan size that 10 tons doesn't really matter, though.

One particularly interesting piece of information I got from the article was that the launch was timed for the exact moment when "Earth's rotation moved the pad into the orbital plane of the space station" (Harwood). I don't have a lot of background knowledge of the subject, but I assume this means that the Kennedy Space Center waited for the moment that the International Space Station was in a position where the Discovery would have a straight trajectory towards it. While this makes sense, it's not really something I had ever considered.

The mission so far has already run into a problem, though it seems to be inconsequential overall. The shuttles Ku-band antenna, which apparently is necessary in order to "send data and video to the ground via satellites," had some technical problems (Harwood). This will prevent scheduled heat shield inspections and also prevent the captain and pilot from using the antenna in radar mode during docking. While I'm not entirely sure how this will affect the ease of the mission (the article didn't go any further into detail), NASA officials did say that this should not affect the mission itself.


Article: Discovery Launches for International Space Station by William Harwood.