Heater glitch grounds shuttle for three days or more
Posted on behalf of Alexandra Witze KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida — The second-to-last space shuttle flight will have to wait a bit longer. Mission managers scrubbed the scheduled 29 April launch of Endeavour, its 25th and last planned journey into space. After the shuttle’s massive fuel tanks were filled and engineers were running through last-minute checks, NASA discovered a problem with a heater in an auxiliary power unit, or APU, which keeps the hydrazine fuel flowing through the orbiter. Endeavour has three APUs, with two heaters on each fuel line. “Had we not caught this pre-launch it would not have … Read more
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