9 December 2007

The Atlantis launch is postponed again, this time into January. They still have no idea what is causing the fuel guage problems. This morning one guage failed and they scrubbed the mission. The portion of the news briefing I heard said they were running out of launch window so decided to push the launch into next month (no earlier than 2Jan08). I think part of that is that they are afraid that the computerw will not be able to cope with the rollover to the new year, which doesn't make much sense since the computers on the ISS seem to handle if just fine. They say that they can get at anything on the stack while it sits on the launch pad, which seems incredible given the clear room procedures they implement in the VAB, and are hoping they don't have to roll it back to the VAB to acomplish the repair. That would probably mean an ET swap and a much longer delay.