Tracking Glitch, Weather Would Have Forced Scrub

All was not peaches and cream during this week's launch exercise in preparation for the shuttle Discovery's vaunted Return To Flight.

Commander Eileen Collins and her six crew members piled into the shuttle Wednesday to rehearse the space plane's first flight since its sister ship, Columbia, disintegrated on re-entry February 1st, 2003. The practice countdown was to end with a main engine shutdown just prior to launch.

But there were problems. Specifically, with the USAF Safety and Tracking system. It prevented Mission Control from talking to the three astronauts on Discovery's mid-deck, behind and below the flight crew. That issue was later traced to an improperly thrown switch.

"Problem resolved," Launch Commentator George Diller said. "This is one of the reasons why we do the Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test -- to flush out these kinds of issues."

Weather was another problem, as storms rolled across the Florida peninsula -- and the Cape -- from the Gulf of Mexico. Observers said both the comm glitch and the weather would have probably forced controllers to scrub the mission.

But in all, shuttle commander Collins touted it as a successful pre-launch test.

"It felt like a real launch day, the way people handled issues when they came up," she said.

And, as the exercise began Wednesday, she found the seven astronauts who were lost aboard Columbia very much on her mind.

"The thought did go through my mind -- the last crew that strapped in at the pad was the [Columbia] crew," Collins said. "It was very motivational."

FMI: www.nasa.gov