Visit for complete coverage of Endeavour's final mission STS-134 or follow us and on Facebook. You can follow senior writer Clara Moskowitz on Twitter ClaraMoskowitz. Endeavour will deliver a $2 billion astrophysics experiment to search for antimatter and dark matter, and a platform full of spare supplies for the station. She had traveled from her Houston hospital to Kennedy Space Center for the launch.Įndeavour is due to carry six astronauts on one final visit to the International Space Station. Officials at the California Science Center in Exposition Park were close to completing a dream launched 30 years ago as they worked to lift the space shuttle Endeavour from its current horizontal position into a vertical ready-for-launch position Monday night. Giffords was shot in the head during an assassination attempt in January, but has reportedly made great strides in recovery.
"I think it was great that he came down today."Īlso hoping to view the launch was Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was here to watch her husband Mark Kelly fly aboard Endeavour as its commander. "Even though we scrubbed, the president elected to continue with his visit to the Kennedy Space Center with his family, and I think he really enjoyed it," said Bob Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center. The Obamas visited the Kennedy Space Center anyway, and took a tour of the facility where the shuttle Atlantis is being prepped for its last launch on June 28.
Two heaters that are supposed to keep the power unit from freezing on orbit failed, which would have rendered the APU useless once Endeavour reached space.Įngineers have yet to isolate the root cause of the problem, but inspections conducted Saturday point toward a failed avionics box, which powers the heaters that protect the critical unit.įixing the problem will likely take some time, partly because the broken element is in a hard-to-reach area of the shuttle's aft section.įriday's attempted launch was to be witnessed by a crowd that had swelled up to 750,000, as well as President Barack Obama and his family. "We don't like lifting off without redundancy especially in a critical system." "This was a pretty straightforward scrub," said launch director Mike Leinbach during a press conference Friday afternoon.