BRUCE BUCKINGHAM: Good afternoon, everybody. From the Kennedy Space Center
in Florida, this is Space Shuttle Discovery Launch Control.
The countdown for the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-116 continues today.
Launch is scheduled to occur at about 8:47 p.m. tonight Eastern time, and our
launch opportunity window extends for about five minutes.
At this time, work at Launch Pad 39B, as well as the operations here in the Firing Room,
in Firing Room 4 of the Launch Control Center, are continuing.
We got into our tanking operations a little bit late today.
Tanking activities began nearly two hours late due to a variety of operations as we fell behind in working this morning.
The delay is a direct result of our falling behind in actually offloading or
detanking the cryogenics that remained in the external tank from our first launch attempt on Thursday.
The cooler temperatures had the tendency to slow down our normal cryogenic boil-off activities,
and other operations that followed had to wait. Currently, our weather forecasters are indicating
that we are still troubled by some of the crosswinds that are moving across the state of Florida.
Of course, crosswinds are important because if we have to have a return-to-launch-site
abort at the Shuttle Landing Facility, the crosswinds cannot exceed a certain limit.
That limit for nighttime landing is 15 knots.
The other concerns are for a possible low-cloud ceiling, as well as some isolated showers at the time of launch.
So even though we aren't working any technical issues, we are continuing to
keep an eye on the weather as the afternoon progresses.
The earlier percentage for no-go from the Air Force weather forecasters today was at 70 percent.
However, we'll continue to monitor that in real time, and if our crosswind component is violated,
of course, that would be a launch-commit criteria issue and we would not be able to launch.
Again, with no technical issues being discussed for our launch opportunity tonight,
we are at T-3 hours and holding and this is Shuttle Launch Control.