#The last nasa space shuttle launch windows#

#The last nasa space shuttle launch windows#

NASA scheduled the launch for Friday, July 8th at 11:26 am, with successive launch windows on Saturday and Sunday.

This makes attending a launch somewhat fraught: the weather doesn't care about anyone's plans, plane tickets, hotel reservations, or work schedule.įurther Reading The Greatest Leap, part 6: After Apollo, NASA still searching for an encoreĭriving to KSC, things did not look promising. If it's raining at the launch site, flight path, or at the various emergency landing sites in France and Spain during that time, no one's going to space that day. Getting something into a specific orbit is more complicated than just kicking the tires and lighting the fires each day only has a discrete launch window of a few minutes. Launching rockets over the ocean has quite a few advantages, but it's also subject to the capricious weather patterns of the Atlantic. Last week, Ars braved KSC's heat, rain, and crowds to watch Atlantis, and the 30-year Space Shuttle program, head into space for the final time. Covering the northern half of Merritt Island, its 219 square miles are studded with launch complexes surrounded by semitropical nature. Located on Florida's Atlantic coast, an hour's drive east of Orlando's tourist spots, KSC has been NASA's site of choice for sending people into space since the 1960s. MERRITT ISLAND, Florida-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes space as 'really big.' Kennedy Space Center (KSC) might be peanuts compared to space but, for human-sized visitors, it's pretty big. Ars was at Kennedy Space Center on this day eight years ago, so we're resurfacing our report on the experience from July 2011. Today, however, marks the anniversary of a different historic NASA occasion-the last launch of the modern Space Shuttle program. But right now it's happening more often than usual given the rapidly approaching 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Update: Around Ars, our minds tend to always gravitate towards space.