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STS-326
Space Shuttle missions designated STS-3xx (officially called Launch On Need (LON) missions) were rescue missions which would have been mounted to rescue the crew of a Space Shuttle if their vehicle was damaged and deemed unable to make a successful reentry. Such a mission would have been flown if Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center, Mission Control determined that the heat shielding tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon panels of a currently flying orbiter were damaged beyond the repair capabilities of the available on-orbit repair methods. These missions were also referred to as Launch on Demand (LOD) and Contingency Shuttle Crew Support. The program was initiated following Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, loss of Space Shuttle ''Columbia'' in 2003. No mission of this type was launched during the Space Shuttle program. Procedure The orbiter and four of the crew which were due to fly the next planned mission would be retasked to the rescue mission. The planning and train ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
STS-400
STS-400 was the Space Shuttle contingency support (Launch On Need) flight that would have been launched using if a major problem occurred on during STS-125, the final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission (HST SM-4). Due to the much lower orbital inclination of the HST compared to the ISS, the shuttle crew would have been unable to use the International Space Station as a "safe haven", and NASA would not have been able to follow the usual plan of recovering the crew with another shuttle at a later date. Instead, NASA developed a plan to conduct a shuttle-to-shuttle rescue mission, similar to proposed rescue missions for pre-ISS flights. The rescue mission would have been launched only three days after call-up and as early as seven days after the launch of STS-125, since the crew of ''Atlantis'' would only have about three weeks of consumables after launch. The mission was first rolled out in September 2008 to Launch Complex 39B two weeks after the STS-125 shuttle was rol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
