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Shuttle crew comes to town for practice countdown BY JUSTIN RAY SPACEFLIGHT NOW Posted: October 12, 2010 
The six astronauts to fly Discovery's final orbital voyage have jetted into the Kennedy Space Center for this week's countdown dress rehearsal with the space shuttle launch team.
Traveling today from their training base in Houston, the astronauts arrived at the Cape in waves of T-38 jets between 3:30 and 4:40 p.m. EDT. "It's really an amazing thing to go through a training flow with the most incredible half-dozen shipmates that's possible to assemble," Barratt said. "And then fly one of these magnificent little airplanes down here and see your shuttle on the pad getting ready to go. It's an incredible honor and it's a breathtaking sight and we can't wait to get this training done and get ready to shoot." Every shuttle crew undergoes the Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test, or TCDT, in the final weeks before a planned launch. While in Florida, the astronauts will spend time learning how to evacuate pad 39A if an emergency arises, including procedures to operate the slide-wire baskets that would quickly whisk the crew from the launch tower to a bunker west of the pad, and test-drive an armored tank available for the astronauts to escape the area. On Friday, the crew will board Discovery for a full countdown simulation. The astronauts will follow a normal launch morning routine with breakfast, a weather briefing on conditions at the Cape and various abort landing sites, then don their suits and depart crew quarters at about 7:45 a.m. to board the Astrovan that will take them to pad 39A. After reach the pad shortly past 8 a.m., the astronauts will climb inside Discovery and strap into their assigned seats for the final three hours of the mock countdown. Clocks will halt in the final seconds to simulate a shutdown of the three main engines just prior to liftoff around 11 a.m. The crew will egress the shuttle and practice scurrying to the slide-wire baskets. After the countdown test concludes, the crew will visit the payload bay to perform a sharp-edge inspection of the mission payloads before the shuttle's doors are closed for flight on Saturday. "I always love coming here. This is the Disneyland for astronauts. Always something good happens when we show up here," Drew said told reporters at the runway today. Discovery's 12-day flight will install the Permanent Multipurpose Module and a spare parts pallet on the International Space Station. Also on the agenda, Drew and Kopra will conduct a pair of maintenance spacewalks outside the station.
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VIDEO:
PRE-LAUNCH INTERVIEW WITH STEVE LINDSEY 