Weight of space shuttle endeavour full#

Judging from the information at that time, it was foreseeable that the Space Shuttle wouldn’t fly again for another two years or so. In February 2003, when the Columbia accident happened, we had already finished Kibo’s Pressurized Module in Japan, and were about to ship it to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The Space Station Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center, where tests were conducted to make sure the Pressurized Module would properly connect to the ISS How far had development work on Kibo proceeded when the Columbia accident occurred? We managed to solve the power issues on the ISS, got the Pressurized Module running, and conducted the first experiments without a hitch.

Weight of space shuttle endeavour full#

Since Kibo is the largest laboratory on the ISS, and consumes a lot of electricity, they were concerned that starting it up before the space station had full power would cause power shortage.īut because we didn’t want any more delays, we persistently negotiated for an earlier launch date, and we ended up getting Kibo’s Pressurized Module launched before the last solar panel. NASA had proposed that we delay the assembly even further and wait until all four of the space station’s solar panels were installed. That was the earliest possible dates after the Columbia accident. So the three Kibo assembly flights took place in 2008-09, three years behind schedule. As it turned out, construction of the ISS couldn’t resume until September 2006. Although the shuttle flight returned to flight in 2005, it took time to solve problems such as the insulation foam loss off the external fuel tank. When I was appointed to the director of JAXA Houston office in 2001, the plan was to launch Kibo in 2005 or 2006, but the accident caused a long delay. The second was the 2003 Columbia accident. It took nearly three years for shuttle flights to resume, and NASA never went back to its earlier plans to have ten or more flights a year. The first was the Challenger accident in 1986. No, because there were two Space Shuttle accidents. Did the Kibo assembly mission go as planned? That decision dictated the module’s size and weight to fit into its cargo bay. Later, when Japan began planning its contribution to the ISS program in 1985, it was naturally assumed that its elements would be launched on the Space Shuttle’s cargo bay. One of original objectives of the Space Shuttle was to build a permanent space station at low earth orbit. Space Shuttle Discovery launching in May 2008, with Kibo’s Pressurized Module on board (courtesy: NASA) Space Shuttle Endeavour carrying Kibo’s Exposed Facility and ELM Exposed Section (courtesy: NASA) Why was the Kibo Japanese Experiment Module launched on the Space Shuttle?