The main limitation is a slight overlap between the possibility of launching in full daylight simultaneously in Florida and Europe and the orbit of the International Space Station
The safety rules established by NASA dictate that shuttle launches will only take place during daylight hours. The fear now is that it could cause more flight delays unless the agency is strong enough to deal with schedule pressures like those that contributed to the Columbia disaster, officials said. Over half of each calendar year will be off limits to launches under the new guidelines, sometimes for a month or more.
The new rules dictated by the Columbia disaster are guided by the need to photograph each shuttle at launch to document any possible damage from flying debris, and to check the external fuel tank for missing insulating foam.
John Shannon, director of shuttle operations and integration, says everyone at the space agency will have to resist the pressure to be on time because the number of possible deadlines before each launch will shrink.
"We have to save every now and then," said Shannon. "Everyone who has worked here for a long time knows the blackout diagram and says "Wow, we need to do something here and here and here" and you say, "No we won't do that. This is not the way we are going to operate."
During the next launch dozens of additional cameras will focus on every possible point in the launch area. In addition, additional cameras will be installed on the shuttle to record the entire eight minutes of the ascent to orbit, and the astronauts will use digital cameras to photograph the empty fuel tank as it falls and moves away.
Daylight will be required not only at Kennedy Space Center, but also across the Atlantic so that the fuel tank can be seen as it moves away.
At the Return to Flight seminar at the Johnson Space Center, Greg Oliver, the director of launch and landing dynamics at NASA, said that these daylight restrictions will reduce launch windows by more than half, and this without taking into account normal delays caused by weather, meteor showers and other factors.
On any given day, NASA will have about five minutes to move the shuttle to the space station, the astronauts' primary destination. Such a short window represents the time that the imaginary tangent of the space station passes over the launch area and the amounts of fuel needed to reach the orbit are taken into account given the weight of the shuttle and cargo.
With these daylight limitations, NASA will need a month - from mid-May to mid-June 2004 to launch Atlantis for the next flight - assuming the space agency can fulfill all the exact requirements proposed by the Columbia Disaster Commission of Inquiry. After that, NASA will have to wait a month, before trying again in mid-July. This window will last until mid-August, then again there will be a one-month delay.
If Atlantis does not lift off by mid-October, NASA will have only three to six days in November to launch the shuttle. In December there will be no days available and in January again only a few days. Then it will be necessary to shut down the shuttle completely for about two and a half months.
This step will have a significant impact on the construction of the International Space Station, which is on hold indefinitely due to the grounding of the shuttle fleet. Of the 16 shuttle flights to the space station so far, six of the launches have been in the dark. Of all 113 shuttle flights so far, 28 have been at night.
