After scrubbing Endeavor’s planned Friday launch for 48 hours, NASA this weekend extended the delay indefinitely. The good news: the source of the previous electrical problem has been traced back to the avionics box in the shuttle’s engine compartment. The bad news: they won’t be able to replace it until at least May 8, and very probably later:
“I’m here to disappoint everybody by saying I’m not going to tell you what the new launch date is because I have no idea,” Mike Moses, chairman of NASA’s Mission Management Team, told reporters after engineers decided on a course of action. “We have a lot to evaluate, both the work to do, the R & R (removal and replacement), the retest that has to be done, how we work all that schedule in.
“But we can tell you pretty much it’s not going to be any earlier than the 8th. That doesn’t mean we’re going to go launch on the 8th; that just means we know right now the 8th is our next available opening.”
All I know is the more times I invite people to Endeavour launch parties with no launch, the fewer RSVPs I get. [CBS]