How do we prepare the orbiter for space flight? We do that at Kennedy Space Center in one of our three Orbiter Processing Facilities, or OPFs. The orbiter is just one of the components of the Space Shuttle vehicle, although sometimes people refer to the orbiter as the Space Shuttle itself. To us, the Space Shuttle vehicle is the twin Solid Rocket Boosters (the white things), the large, orange External Tank and then the white, winged orbiter that just hangs off of the External Tank. To prepare the orbiter for flight after it lands from a previous mission, we send it to one of our three hangars that we have here, known as the Orbiter Processing Facilities, or OPFs. We'll spend a lot of months inside the OPF doing all the preparation work for all the engineers, technicians and inspectors to get in and do all the things that we need to do, do those preps. Finally, usually about a month and a half before we go out to the launch pad, we roll the orbiter out of the Orbiter Processing Facility, take it over to the Vehicle Assembly Building where the stacked Solid Rocket Boosters and the External Tank have already been mated. We then lift the orbiter way up high, after we get it vertical, and then we attach it to the External Tank in three locations with explosive bolts. We spend about one week inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, do all the final prep work there, and then we finally roll out to the launch pad, where we'll spend about a month doing all the final preps there, getting ready for flight. At T-0, as you know, the main engines -- those are located on the back of the orbiter -- those will ignite and send the whole Space Shuttle vehicle up into space. And that's how we prepare the orbiter for flight.
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NASA ID
ksc_022805_htw_orbiterproc
Date Created
March 4, 2005
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KSC
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video
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NASA or National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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