NOAA-N will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at about 3:30 a.m. Pacific time on May 11th.
But dozens of engineers and staff at Kennedy
Space Center in Florida have played a huge part in preparing NOAA-N for launch.
Next, we'd like you to meet Omar Baez, NASA's launch manager for this mission. Thanks for joining our webcast today, Omar.
Thank you, Tiffany. It is a pleasure being here, getting ready for this NOAA-N launch tomorrow.
And I'd like to take a moment and talk to you about the
preparations that went into work to get this mission ready. We've flown this mission, this type of satellite
identical ones on Titan II rockets the
last three times, the K, L and M series of the satellite. And we've come to run out of Titan II's and we're now
flying them on a commercial Delta II 7300 rocket booster.
And so a regular type mission that would be a plain Jane repeat mission all of a sudden got difficult for us.
And so the team of engineers had to make
sure that the new accommodations on the Delta II are just pristine to be able to fly this type of mission
and make sure this satellite gets into orbit safely and in good shape, that it performs its years of service to us.
So this work happens about four years out. We have all our analytical folks looking at the environment that the spacecraft will see for the very first
time when it rides on this type of rocket. And a lot of work had to go into that to try to accommodate the spacecraft into that new environment.
Luckily, the Delta II provides an excellent ride and a great match for this type of space vehicle and we didn't have to change much.
But a lot of the things that are good and contained in the Delta II are that we made the satellite much simpler.
The satellite doesn't have to fly a third stage, solid rocket motor, and they can,
which they used to have to fly before, due to the ballistic nature of the Titan II launch.
And so a lot of things have been simplified and had to do a lot of work to make all that happen.
But it just makes things -- you move forward into a new
era. And, yeah, we were flying a repeat mission, but now it's a little bit different.
And, hopefully, for this one and the next one, it'll be a smooth ride.
I'd like to talk to you about some of the things that happened in the last strokes of the game as far as putting the rocket together
And if you could roll the tape for me, I'll speak to that.
Okay. This is the Delta II booster, first stage going up. This is done in early January in anticipation of a March launch.
This particular booster carries three solid rocket motors with it.
The capacity on the Delta II is -- it can carry six more on top of these three, but we don't need it as far as
performance for these missions, so we're only flying three. These are ground lit, in other words,
we light these, we'll jettison them and that's it for the solid rocket motor ride. The rest is a liquid ride.
This is the second stage going up in the tower; it uses hypergolic fuels. And we're going to be mating that onto the first stage
and the satellite will mate directly on top of that.
And you should be seeing a shot of that coming up shortly here
The satellite's going to sit inside of where these two fairing halves are going up into it the tower now
the fairing halves are what -- they come together as a clam shell that protects the spacecraft on
ascent through the atmosphere at the proper time of jettison.
Here comes the satellite in its spacecraft can. We use this can to protect it during the transport and we actually lift
the spacecraft through this can, up into the tower. This is the inside of the payload fairing.
And now we're encapsulating the spacecraft within the fairing. And, again, it's two fairing
halves and this is composite material that this is made out of.
And I'd like to talk to you now about the countdown tomorrow. We'll start at 2:30 p.m. with a weather
brief and that'll decide what our tower roll time will be.
We are expecting some winds tomorrow, so it's going to be crucial. At 5:00, we will be loading RP1, that's our first stage propellant.
We'll be connecting ordnance, and if everything's all right, we should be rolling the tower back by 7:30 p.m.
By eleven o'clock at night, we'll be clearing the pad. And we'll have call to stations. We'll then enter terminal count,
pressurize the first and second stage helium and nitrogen bottles, turn on the guidance system. And approximately 1:30 in the morning,
we will start to load the cryogenic liquid oxygen into the first stage of the Delta rocket.
That's going to take us about 50 minutes to perform that.
After that, we will do our engine slews, which is a check on how the engine gimbals are working,
in other words, the way it steers the rocket nozzles.
We'll do the destruct checks on the booster. And at four minutes, we will turn the spacecraft power
to internal and I will give the final go for launch at T-3 minutes, or 3:22 in the morning launch.
And that concludes my brief.
Thanks so much for joining us today NASA Direct, Omar. Best of luck for a successful launch.
Thank you very much.