Shuttle Discovery Readied for November Flight

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. —  The space shuttle Atlantis came through its five-day space odyssey in near-perfect condition, setting the stage for the shuttle Discovery’s blastoff next month on a secret military mission.

“It seems like to me that we’re finally back on track,” Conrad Nagel, Atlantis’ processing director, said at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. “We’ve had a minimum amount of problems.”

Back at the Kennedy Space Center, Discovery, bolted to a giant mobile launching platform, stood ready for an eight-hour trip to launch pad 39B, the same pad used for Atlantis’ blastoff last Wednesday. Rollout had been scheduled to begin just after midnight, but the move was delayed when thunderstorms rolled through the area.

If all goes well, the shuttle’s four-man, one-woman crew will blast off on a secret military mission around Nov. 20.

After Discovery is mounted on the pad, technicians will hook up fuel lines, electrical cables and hydraulic systems to ready it for a two-day dress-rehearsal countdown planned for early next week.

At Edwards Air Force Base, technicians Tuesday continued readying Atlantis for a cross-country trip back to Florida on Saturday or Sunday for work to prepare it for its next flight in February.

Atlantis made a flawless touchdown Monday on a dry lake bed runway at Edwards to close out the sixth post-Challenger mission, a successful flight highlighted by the launching of the $1.4-billion Galileo probe to Jupiter last week.

Nagel said that the $2-billion Atlantis sailed through its 79-orbit mission in remarkably good condition with no apparent brake damage or other problems and that, overall, the ship came through launching and landing in better shape than any previous post-Challenger flight.

“We had a real (good) landing,” Nagel said. “Some people say it’s one of the best we’ve had.”

Cindy Lodge, who oversees work on the shuttle’s heat-shield tile system, said less than 25 “dings” were noticed after landing and that only a half-dozen tiles will have to be replaced--the best record in the post-Challenger era.

The space agency plans to close out 1989 with the launching of the shuttle Columbia around Dec. 18 on a 10-day flight to dispatch a military communications satellite and retrieve a science package left in orbit in 1984.