Is landing a day early possible ?

Say weather forecasters were predicting rain on monday and a category 5
hurricane on tuesday. (reducing the chances of landing on wednesday to
almost nil).

Could NASA land a day early if they pushed through all the procedures at
a faster pace ? Or would they had had to undock a day early in order to
perform all the pre-landing stuff ?

I realise Edwards is there. But if reducing by one day the delay between
undocking and landing were possible, would NASA choose this over landing
at Edwards when you consider the added costs and more importantly, the
added delays of landing at Edwards in this race to complete the station
before the 2010 deadline ?

Neon Knight wrote in news:Xns9801A048D175919knightofneon20@
216.196.97.136:

John Doe wrote in :

Could NASA land a day early if they pushed through all the
procedures at a faster pace ?

Why does it take 2 days to come back down anyhow? What exactly are they
doing during that time?

Today, late inspections.
Tomorrow, FCS checkout and cabin stow.
Monday, deorbit prep and entry.


--
JRF

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check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 15:49:58 -0500, Jorge R. Frank wrote:

Neon Knight wrote in
news:Xns9801A048D175919knightofneon20@ 216.196.97.136:

John Doe wrote in :

Could NASA land a day early if they pushed through all the procedures
at a faster pace ?

Why does it take 2 days to come back down anyhow? What exactly are they
doing during that time?

Today, late inspections.
Tomorrow, FCS checkout and cabin stow.
Monday, deorbit prep and entry.
Tuesday, Pilot and Commander walk around, kick tires, remove debris...

I guess it's, "Better Late than .....?????"

During the MMT briefing, the Flight Director seemed to thing he was
getting some sort of bonus test wrt the gap fillers. Using the word
"free", he must have never read "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe."
TANSTAAFL, the cost of his "free", "bonus" test was quite possibly all the
structural heat load margin. Hopefully, he has the right sensors on board
to see what's going on. If not, wouldn't it have been better to remove the
debris on this mission, then do a proper DTO on some future mission. With
test debris, and an array of sensors on the tiles to see what happening?

--
Craig Fink
Courtesy E-Mail Welcome @

Lots of things are possible. If there were a problem with severe fuel
leakage or some other time dependent problem, you bet they would be back
Sunday, but if its purely weather, then I doubt it, as Edwards would always
win over rushing things to get down. Its simple risk management after all,
why do something you have not tried, when you can do something you have done
many times?

Brian

--
Brian Gaff -
Note:- In order to reduce spam, any email without 'Brian Gaff'
in the display name may be lost.
"John Doe" wrote in message ...
Say weather forecasters were predicting rain on monday and a category 5
hurricane on tuesday. (reducing the chances of landing on wednesday to
almost nil).

Could NASA land a day early if they pushed through all the procedures at
a faster pace ? Or would they had had to undock a day early in order to
perform all the pre-landing stuff ?

I realise Edwards is there. But if reducing by one day the delay between
undocking and landing were possible, would NASA choose this over landing
at Edwards when you consider the added costs and more importantly, the
added delays of landing at Edwards in this race to complete the station
before the 2010 deadline ?

John Doe wrote:
Say weather forecasters were predicting rain on monday and a category 5
hurricane on tuesday. (reducing the chances of landing on wednesday to
almost nil).

Could NASA land a day early if they pushed through all the procedures at
a faster pace ? Or would they had had to undock a day early in order to
perform all the pre-landing stuff ?

It was tried on the STS-76 mission. The weather forecast for the EOM
day at KSC was bad and the day before was good. So they tried to
compress all fo the EOM-1 checks into the same day as the undocking
from Mir.

As it turned out the weather at KSC continued to be bad and they ended
up landing the shuttle at Edwards anyway.

There's a theory that the _REAL_ reason they landed the shuttle at
Edwards was it was the first time a shuttle landed with one less person
than when it launched and they didn't want any confusing questions from
the press about why one of the crewmembers was missing (cue X-files
music ....)

Hmm, isn't there going to be one less person on this shuttle too? ;-)

I realise Edwards is there. But if reducing by one day the delay between
undocking and landing were possible, would NASA choose this over landing
at Edwards when you consider the added costs and more importantly, the
added delays of landing at Edwards in this race to complete the station
before the 2010 deadline ?

They can, as the STS-76 example shows. But the alternative is to keep
Discovery up additional days if the weather in Florida shows any
possibility it will improve. This requires several factors -

Decent weather at Edwards each day and the forecast so you always have
that available - just in case
Good systems on the shuttle without any hardware concerns
Some optimisim that the weather in Florida will improve
Enough supplies to stretch out the mission.

The STS-113 mission had a record three waveoffs to try to land in
Florida and it succeeded on the day where they had to pick a landing
site - if the weather hadn't cooperated it would have gone to Edwards
instead that day.


Rob Stevens