Discovery Shuttle Delayed Launch

March 11, 2009— Shuttle launch for Discovery that was scheduled for tonight has been delayed because of a fuel tank leak. NASA announced that they might be launching a rocket on Thursday night if the revamping of the shuttle is finished. There were already a bunch of delays, more than a month, not allowing the shuttle to be blasted off. This will be NASA’s 29^th shuttle mission into the space station. The launch date had be postpone for “additional analysis and particle impact testing associated with a flow-control valve in the shuttle’s main engines.” This shuttle’s, Discovery’s, mission was to deliver the final set of “solar array wings” to the space station. With the set of wings completed, the station will have enough electrical energy for the entire crew that double its size to six more people by May.

After reading this article, I was yet disappointed. I thought I would be hearing more good news from NASA about their exploration or constructions in space. I hope that this shuttle is fixed, so the construction of the space station will be completed. As these are completed, the space station will be fully operational as planned. The astronauts could expand their range of having more equipment in space, like developing more space stations, space exploration and space observatory. However, this news could be considered as mild good news. If the astronauts were inside this leaking shuttles, they could had been killed because of the leak. I was glad that the inspectors were able to check these problems out. If not, this would waste several human lives and all of the resources for this shuttle and research. I hope that the engineers will be more cautious, so they will not make anymore mistakes. Let’s hope that the launch will be on Thursday as expected. Good luck, NASA!

Hyperlink: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2009/03/11/sot.lkl.clinton.stem.cell.cnn