spacetoday.net: Shuttle launch pushed to Friday night

Posted: Thu, Aug 27, 2009, 9:38 PM ET (0138 GMT)

NASA officials decided Thursday to wait another nearly 24 hours before making another attempt to launch the shuttle to further study a faulty valve. Discovery, which NASA had hoped to launch on mission STS-128 at 12:22 am EDT (0422 GMT) Friday, is now tentatively planned for 11:59 pm EDT Friday (0359 GMT Saturday). The launch, which already slipped from early Tuesday to Wednesday because of weather, was further delayed because of a problem with a fuel valve that. While shuttle managers believe the problem is with instrumentation, rather than the valve itself, they needed additional time to come up with alternative ways of measuring that the valve is indeed closed should the instrumentation again fail to signal that. NASA has until August 30 to launch the shuttle before having to wait until October.