Space station launch scheduled today, despite dead computer

By Marcia Dunn, Associated Press

Monday, April 14, 2014 | 9:46 a.m.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. The International Space Station is about to get some fresh groceries and material for an urgent repair job.

An unmanned SpaceX rocket was scheduled to blast off at 4:58 p.m. Monday with more than 2 tons of supplies.

NASA spent much of the weekend debating whether to proceed with the launch of the Dragon cargo ship, already a month late. A critical backup computer failed outside the space station Friday; flight controllers were trying to activate it for a routine software load.

Mission managers decided Sunday to stick with the launch plan after making sure everything would be safe. The prime computer has been working fine so far. The plan is to put the solar wings in the proper position for the capsule's arrival soon after the SpaceX launch, in case of additional failures in orbit.

It's the first breakdown ever of one of these so-called space station MDMs, or multiplexer-demultiplexers, used to route computer commands for a wide variety of systems. Forty-five MDMs are scattered around the orbiting lab. The failed one is located outside and therefore will require spacewalking repairs.

The Dragon capsule holds a gasket-like material for next week's computer replacement. This new material was rushed to the launch site over the weekend.

NASA astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Steven Swanson will perform the job next Tuesday. It will take several days to get the replacement computer ready for installing, thus the one-week wait before the spacewalk, NASA's Kenny Todd, a station operations manager, said Monday.

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of California is one of two American companies hired by NASA to fill the cargo gap left when the space shuttles retired in 2011. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virginia is the other.

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Space station launch scheduled today, despite dead computer