CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - With no major technical snags and a fair weather forecast, NASA cruised through the countdown Monday for its first space shuttle flight in 2 1/2 years. One manager described the excitement by saying, "It's like Christmas is coming."
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Discovery and its crew of seven are set to blast off Wednesday in front of a multitude of NASA cameras watching for the kind of flying debris that doomed Columbia in 2003. The shuttle's destination: the international space station.
Shuttle program manager Bill Parsons had this message for the two space station astronauts awaiting the shuttle's arrival: "It's probably time for them to get ready. I think we're on our way."
Typical summer-afternoon thunderstorms were in the forecast, but shuttle meteorologists put the chances of an on-time launch at 70 percent.
Monday's two-days-before launch readiness meeting lasted 3 1/2 hours, considerably longer than was customary before Columbia took off on its final, fatally flawed mission. Deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said there was "spirited" discussion, and dissenting opinions were heard over a few technical issues.
But he said the vigorous discussion was "just a new symbol of the openness" at NASA since the Columbia disaster. Investigators blamed the tragedy in part on the space agency's "broken safety culture," or a tendency to downplay risks and discourage engineers from speaking up.
Hale — who likened the anticipation to waiting for Christmas — said that spaceflight is inherently risky. But he said: "There comes a point in time when you decide that we have reached an acceptable level of risk to go carry out the mission that we have, and I think that we are at that point."
He added: "Now's the time to go fly."
Discovery is outfitted with a redesigned external fuel tank, and has dozens of motion and temperature sensors embedded in the wings to detect any blows from fuel-tank foam insulation or other debris. The spaceship also holds a brand-new laser-tipped 50-foot boom that will be used by the astronauts to survey the wings and nose cap for any cracks or holes.
More than 100 cameras on the ground and aboard two planes will focus on Discovery as it climbs toward orbit, and spy satellites as well as astronauts on both the shuttle and the international space station will take their own pictures. The shuttle will spend more than a week at the space station, replenishing its cupboards and repairing broken equipment both inside and out.
NASA failed to request spy satellite pictures of Columbia in orbit, and dismissed the foam that hit the shuttle at liftoff as trivial. The resulting hole in the left wing caused the spacecraft to break apart during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven astronauts.
The Columbia accident investigators insisted that NASA rely on spy satellite pictures on all future shuttle flights, and that the space agency have at least three good, useful views of the shuttle on its way to space.
Stephanie Stilson, a NASA manager who oversaw Discovery's safety modifications, said that after numerous setbacks and delays, the countdown "leaves me with goose bumps every time I think about it."
"Along the way so many times, we had our hopes up just to find out that we would have to delay for numerous reasons," she said. "We had, of course, hardware problems. We had new modifications that had to be installed that we weren't aware of at the beginning of the flow. We had hurricanes. So a lot of things had been discouraging along the way."
