NASA's Launch Director Chuck Dovale is here to talk about getting the Delta II rocket ready for launch. Welcome, Chuck.
Thanks. It's great to be here. Being the launch director, I'm in charge of the launch campaign as well as the launch countdown.
And really, I'm representing a wide variety of individuals within the Launch Services Program that have integrated the
CALIPSO/CloudSat and the Delta II vehicle over years of work and I'm proud to say, at this point, we are ready to proceed.
We've concluded all of our rehearsals and launch readiness reviews and we're ready to enter into the countdown.
A little about the countdown, some highlights: It really starts about 14 hours out, when Boeing will open the procedure.
We will conduct a weather briefing at 3 p.m., which is about L-12 hours. That helps to set the stage for
the mobile service tower removal that will occur potentially tomorrow afternoon at 4 p.m. West Coast time.
The count contains three built-in holds, and this allows the team to make up for any lost time if we
were to have a problem and got a little but behind in the timeline.
CALIPSO/CloudSat basically has an instantaneous window,
so there's very little margin for missing any steps and the built-in holds let us catch up.
The majority of the management will come on console at 11 p.m. tomorrow evening at the L-4 hour point.
We will go into the first built-in hold of 60 minutes at T-150 minutes.
We'll go into another weather brief that precedes loading the first stage with liquid oxygen.
The second stage has already been loaded with hypergolic fuels a few days earlier and the
nature of those fuels allows you to load them into the vehicle sooner.
We do one final engine check at T-30 minutes before we have a built-in hold at T-20, and another built-in hold at T-4.
We uplink the launch configuration with the spacecraft as go at T-3 minutes,
and we're targeting a T-O at 3 a.m., 3:02:08 a.m. Pacific time Friday morning.
As far as how we got to this point, I have some processing video, if we could queue that tape.
Okay, this is the protective shroud of the Delta II vehicle, also known as the fairing. This video was taken last mid-last year,
about June last year, when it arrived at north Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 2.
You can see it's bagged. This fairing is actually going up for storage in the mobile service tower. Ironically,
it's the first thing that gets put up in the tower but it's the last that gets installed around the spacecraft on the vehicle.
This was built in Boeing's new plant in Decatur, Alabama. This is actually the first, the first fairing built to be launched.
This is a shot of the first stage showing the RS-27 Pratt-Whitney Rocketdyne engine that provides 200,000 pounds of thrust.
This stage is horizontally checked out in Florida, and then shipped out here,
where it's then brought out of its storage facility and put on the launch mount.
You saw in one shot the interstage -- there it is coming into view.
The interstage is obviously the hardware interface between the first and second stage of the Delta II.
This was erected the same day as the booster, and then the second stage follows the next day. Again, this was mid last year.
Here's a solid motor coming into view. There are four solid motors around the aft skirt of the Delta IV -- or Delta II -- to augment thrust.
This is the first four-configuration solid to fly from the West Coast. We have launched 12 from the East Coast.
And each solid provides about 100,000 pounds of thrust. This is the spacecraft stack arriving at the complex.
This is April 7 of this year. You see they're in a canister bag for cleanliness.
CALIPSO was actually on top in that can, weighing about 1,800 pounds and CloudSat was in the can weighing about 1,200 pounds.
Here are the technicians lowering the can down on the second stage and take note that they're wearing typical technician garb.
Now we're in a clean-room environment because -- you can't see in the picture, but the spacecraft are exposed to the clean room.
So we're very careful that the optics on each spacecraft are kept very clean.
So the protective shroud, the fairing, is shown here coming in, around.
And the spacecraft were exposed about 24 hours while the fairing was brought in and the two halves were mated to the vehicle.
And this occurred last Friday, April 14.
Chuck, let's go straight to our Internet Question Board.
Our first question comes from Pawan from Sharjah.
Can the dual payload fitting attachment be used on any launch vehicle or just in the Boeing Delta II?
Ok. The de-path, as we call it, dual payload attach fitting, was specifically designed and built for the Delta II.
Other launch vehicles, U.S. vehicles, do fly other multi spacecraft attach fittings, but they are different.
And this one in particular was specifically designed for the Delta II.
Our next question comes from John from New York.
How fast will both spacecraft go in low-Earth orbit? And how long will it take for CALIPSO and CloudSat to orbit Earth?
Okay, good question. They're traveling approximately 17,500 miles an hour, or 25,000 feet per second.
That's really about 5 miles a second, if that helps to really understand how fast these spacecrafts are really going.
And they're going to a similar height orbit as the shuttle, which is about a 365 nautical mile orbit.
And that's an orbit of about 90 minutes that it orbits the Earth.
Chuck, before you leave, can you give us a weather update for the launch?
Okay. Weather is very, looks very good. It's a 10 percent POV,
and what that means is there's a 10 percent chance of a violation of the weather criteria.
That number is very good, we actually don't want it too high.
The concerns are with winds as we roll the tower; we have constraints that we're concerned about,
and also thick clouds which could, if they were to come over the launch pad just prior to launch,
we couldn't fly through them for fear that we could trigger lightning. So weather looks very good.
Great to hear. Well, thanks for joining us and good luck on launch day.
Thank you.