Decommissioning work starts for shuttle Discovery

BY JUSTIN RAY

SPACEFLIGHT NOW

Posted: March 28, 2011

And so it begins. Technicians at the Kennedy Space Center have begun taking apart the shuttle Discovery, the ship now a laboratory specimen for engineering forensics before her future date with a museum.

Inside orbiter hangar No. 2 last week, the shuttle's nose piece containing the control thrusters used to maneuver the spacecraft was removed and taken to the hypergolic maintenance facility for decommissioning.

It's the first visible sign of critical post-flight safing work now underway on the three-decade-old Discovery as she goes into retirement.



Discovery's forward reaction control system (FRCS) is lowered onto a trailer after being removed from the shuttle. Credit: NASA

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The so-called "transition and retirement" phase for Discovery should last several months, eventually getting the shuttle into a safe state for public display. Schedules say the orbiter will be ready to ferry atop a 747 carrier jet to her final home early next year.

But between now and then the space shuttle program wants to delve inside the venerable ship and explore engineering questions about hardware that's not been accessible for examination since construction in the early 1980s.

"There's some things on the vehicles, especially Discovery, that we haven't looked at since it was built out in California. Things like actuators. It's very invasive to go in. I had some pretty good debates with the ground operations team about the difficulty of going to get some of these things. But from an engineering standpoint, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go see how a reusable vehicle actually weathered this many cycles, this many times on orbit, this much time in ground processing," said John Shannon, the shuttle program manager.







Discovery's nose after the FRCS was removed. Credit: NASA





Discovery's rich history included 39 flights, 148,221,675 miles traveled, 5,830 orbits of Earth and a full year of cumulative time spent in space.

Construction began in August 1979 and the spacecraft was rolled out of the Palmdale factory in October 1983. She became NASA's third operational space shuttle with a maiden voyage in August 1984.

The information gained by the various pieces and parts removed for laboratory study, Shannon says, far outweighs leaving the shuttles in exact flight configuration for their museum resting places.

"That's the next legacy of the shuttle program is to give you a lot of material knowledge, of design knowledge, of how things worked over a long period of time," Shannon said. "To me, it's more important to get that engineering knowledge out of these vehicles than it is to have total accuracy in a museum."

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will announce April 12 -- the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle launch -- which museums get Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis, plus the prototype Enterprise. It's presumed that Discovery's destination is the Smithsonian.

"The vehicles are going to look very much like the vehicles that operated in space. We're going to put on some (different) hardware so that we can save some of the higher value hardware. We're going to safe it so the public isn't exposed to anything dangerous. And we'll remove some things that the public would never see -- whether there's a left inboard elevon actuator or not, we'll put something else in there that will keep the elevons at the right position. And then we'll go off and learn about it," Shannon said.

The shuttle program plans the same sort of lab testing on parts from sisterships Endeavour and Atlantis after their final spaceflights this spring and summer.

"We will do it on all three. Discovery, since it has more flight time, it's a little bit more of interest to us. You know, whenever you get engineering data like that, the bigger the pool of information you can get the better your data is. So we'll do that on all three," Shannon said.



Discovery is towed off the runway after final landing. Credit: NASA TV





"The main engines are an extremely valuable asset and I want to save all of our Block 2 SSMEs that we have. We have a plan to store them in a purged, safe environment along with all the ground systems required to maintain them until we decide what to do with the next program," Shannon said.

"So what we did is we really searched facilities for excess hardware we could build up into some main engines. We've been doing that recently. We'll have 9 engines we'll put into each of the vehicles that are older technology engines, but they're real nozzles that flew, they're real combustion chambers, real pumps. So we'll take out the really good engines that we'd like to save for the next program and put in re-built engines that we kinda scrapped together. That is what will be displayed.

"I'm also trying to find enough funds and enough parts to build some static engines that we can display with those vehicles as well, so people can see how big and how complex they really are.

"I'm also trying to save the OMS engines, the small orbital maneuvering system engines on the back. Same reason. If we can use them in a future program, I think they're very valuable assets. We don't have a lot of spares on those, so those probably are going to be mocked up (for the museum). At least a nozzle, but probably nothing behind it in the OMS pod."



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