With Hurricane Dean headed toward the Gulf of Mexico, the space shuttle Endeavour undocks from the International Space Station today, a day early, and is
scheduled to land Tuesday.
The worry is that the hurricane may threaten Houston, site of mission control, the Johnson Space Center. In that case, NASA would transfer flight operations to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the shuttle is scheduled to land. Moving the landing day forward to Tuesday should preclude that possibility.
Hurricane Dean was expected to pass south of Houston, with landfall in northern Mexico, but mission managers decided to take precautions in case the storm takes a right turn.
“It would be irresponsible for us to not pay attention to this storm,” LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team, said at a news conference yesterday.
For the shuttle to land Tuesday, astronauts had to finish packing up and close the hatches to the space station last night. This required shortening a fourth spacewalk by the Endeavour’s astronauts yesterday to five hours from the planned six and a half.
