Anticipation building over return to space

Erika O’Shea could sense the anticipation.

O’Shea, a 14-year-old Bishop Seabury Academy student, recently visited Kennedy Space Center in Florida as part of the Future Astronaut Training Program at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.

She said the center was buzzing about the return of American manned space flight.

“Everyone was real excited about it,” she said. “There was a lot of talk about it.”

With today’s scheduled launch of the space shuttle Discovery, Lawrence residents with ties to the space program are hoping NASA can put another dark chapter behind it and erase the black eye caused by the Columbia disaster more than two years ago.

“I think it’s a great program that the U.S. is investing in,” said O’Shea, who caught a glimpse of the Discovery’s nose from 3 miles away – the closest she was allowed to get.

Trevor Sorensen, a Kansas University aerospace engineering professor, said he, too, can sense the anticipation. Sorensen worked in Houston with the space shuttle program from 1980 to 1987 and still has friends who work at the Johnson Space Center there.

Erika O'Shea, who will be a sophomore at Bishop Seabury Academy in the fall, has just returned from a camp at the space center in Florida where she learned about the upcoming shuttle launch. The space shuttle Discovery will launch at 2:51 p.m. Kansas time today on a 12-day mission to test new safety measures in the first shuttle flight since the Feb. 1, 2003, Columbia disaster.

“I think it’s very significant, especially for the manned space flight program and the morale of NASA,” Sorensen said. “I’ve talked to some of the astronauts and former astronauts, and they’ve been ready for a while to go back to space. When they joined the astronaut corps, they knew there was an element of risk involved.”

Sorensen said he saw many parallels between this hiatus in shuttle missions and the hiatus caused with the Challenger disaster in 1986. Both times, the gap in missions was a little more than two years, and in both cases, the shuttles returned safer than they were before.

“I believe NASA has done everything humanly possible, within a reasonable amount of time and resources, to make the shuttle safer,” Sorensen said.

Another blunder, he said, could spell the end of the space shuttle program. NASA has said it wants to phase out shuttles by the end of the decade.

Liftoff

What: Shuttle launch

When: 2:51 p.m. today

Where: Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Mission: To test new shuttle safety measures, including inspection and repair techniques.

“If something were to go seriously wrong with this flight, that would make a very deep hole for NASA to get out of,” he said. “It could possibly cancel the shuttle program and end it. Hopefully, we won’t find out.”

Rep. Dennis Moore, D-Kan., will be among those rooting for Discovery today. He’ll be at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

“NASA and the Discovery crew have worked diligently to make this return to space flight the safest shuttle flight in history,” Moore said in a prepared statement. “I am grateful for the dividends space exploration brings to society. The work of NASA inspires people and changes lives.”