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Shuttle will have a rescue ship

When Discovery goes up, maybe in March 2005, Atlantis will be ready to launch in case of trouble.

HOUSTON - The next space shuttle mission, crammed with modifications and new procedures for resumption of flight, will have a backup in case a rescue is needed, NASA officials said Thursday.

NASA had been aiming for its first post-Columbia launch as early as next fall, but senior spaceflight officials have decided to bump the flight to no earlier than March 2005.

Michael Kostelnick, deputy associate administrator for the shuttle and space station programs at NASA, said the next mission will be so full of changes that extra precautions are needed in case something goes wrong. If the first shuttle gets into trouble, its crew could take refuge in the international space station until help arrives, he said.

"For the first flight, we're going to have the capability to do this," Kostelnick said. "The second vehicle would be able to launch and go to the international space station and pick up the first crew if we had a problem."

The shuttle Discovery will fly the first mission, with Atlantis on standby, officials said. The third remaining shuttle, Endeavour, is undergoing scheduled major modifications.

Kostelnick said the agency did not know how long it would continue having a rescue shuttle ready.

"Our experience for subsequent flights will be determined by our success and our problems with the first flight," he said.

NASA has not planned a contingency rescue mission since the 1970s, when the space agency modified an Apollo capsule to seat five astronauts instead of three in case a crew aboard its first space station, Skylab, could not return.

William Parsons, the shuttle program manager, said Atlantis would not have to be sitting on a launch pad. It would simply have to be ready to fly within 45 to 90 days, he said, the estimated time the space station could support seven extra astronauts with oxygen, food and other supplies.

Parsons said the rescue duties would be added to the training of the next scheduled astronaut crew.

"I don't believe that there's an awful lot of extra training or extra things that we have to do for a rescue mission," Parsons said. "It's not a huge amount of work. It's more about planning. It's more about contingency."

In the case of Columbia, such a rescue would have been impossible. The shuttle did not visit the space station. It was in an entirely different orbit than the station and lacked the fuel to get there.

Any shuttle sent to Columbia's aid would have had to fly in formation and spacewalks would have been needed to transfer Columbia's seven astronauts to the rescue ship.

Under the space initiative recently announced by President Bush, the shuttles are to keep flying until they complete building the space station in 2010, and then be retired. All remaining flights, up to 35, are to be to the station, where shuttles will be inspected for damage and, if necessary, docked for repairs.

NASA recently canceled one last servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope and consigned it to an early death because a shuttle could not fly from Hubble to the space station in an emergency. The space agency decided it was not worth risking astronauts' lives to service the telescope.

The timing of the next shuttle flight will depend upon completion and testing of hardware modifications suggested by the review board that examined the loss of Columbia and its crew a year ago, Parsons said.

Among the tasks holding up the mission are study of the shuttle's giant fuel tank and testing modifications that keep it from shedding insulating foam, a piece of which damaged Columbia's wing on liftoff and later doomed the craft on Feb. 1, 2003. Other sources of delay, he said, are tests on a sensor boom that a crew could use to inspect a shuttle in orbit, and deciding on a method that could be used for in-orbit repairs of the composite carbon heat-shield material along the leading edge of the wing.

Because of a new safety requirement for daylight launches to photograph the liftoff from multiple angles, the space agency is limited in the number of days it can send a shuttle to the station, and a long window runs from early March to mid April 2005.

"We said, "Stop. Let's go ahead and extend the (launch) schedule and let's figure out what the right way is to go about"' meeting the recommendations of the Columbia accident investigators, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said. "We're not going to be driven by the calendar. This is going to be a milestone-driven event."

- Information from the New York Times and Associated Press was used in this report.

For the next shuttle launch, Atlantis will be ready to launch if needed to rescue astronauts on the orbiting ship, Discovery. Atlantis, which won't necessarily be on the launch pad, will be able to be space-bound in 45 to 90 days, which is how long seven additional astronauts can remain aboard the international space station before food, oxygen and other supplies run out.