Faulty fuel gauge delays shuttle launch
(China Daily)
Updated: 2005-07-15 06:09

"We felt like we had a good system," he said.

"We became comfortable as a group, as a management team, that this was an acceptable posture to go fly in," he added, "and we also knew that if something were to happen during a launch countdown, we would do this test and we would find it. And guess what? We did the test, we found something and we stopped. We took no risk. We are not flying with this."

The seven astronauts had barely climbed aboard Discovery for their journey to the international space station when NASA halted the countdown with less than two-and-a-half hours to go. Until then, the only threat to NASA's first mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster was bad weather.

"Appreciate all we've been through together, but this one is not going to result in a launch attempt today," launch director Mike Leinbach informed his team.

NASA has until the end of July to launch Discovery; otherwise it must wait until September because of the position of the space station and NASA's desire to hold a daylight lift-off in order to photograph the spacecraft during its climb to orbit.

When the shuttle finally takes off, the astronauts will test new techniques for inspecting and repairing cracks and holes similar to the damage that doomed Columbia.

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