In high bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building, the orbiter Atlantis has been lowered onto the mobile launcher platform below for mating. Poor weather has prevented the shuttle’s rollout to the launch pad. Credit: NASA.

Mother Nature is not cooperating with NASA’s plans to haul the space shuttle Atlantis to its Kennedy Space Center (KSC) launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

For the second day in a row, poor weather has again thwarted the shuttle’s 4.2-mile trek to KSC’s Launch Pad 39B, where the orbiter is slated to rocket toward the International Space Station (ISS) with its six-astronaut STS-115 crew. One of NASA’s massive crawler carriers was scheduled to haul Atlantis and its external tank-solid rocket booster launch stack to Pad 39B at 10:00 p.m. EDT (0200 Aug. 1 GMT).

KSC spokesperson Tracy Young said in a recorded update - yes, NASA has those - that the move will now take place no earlier than 2:00 a.m. EDT (0600 GMT) on Wednesday.

Commanded by veteran shuttle astronaut Brent Jett, Atlantis’ STS-115 mission will deliver a new set of solar arrays and truss segments to the ISS in the first major construction flight to the orbital lab since late 2002. The spaceflight’s launch window stretches from Aug. 27 through Sept. 13, though NASA hopes to launch Atlantis by Sept. 7 to allow a Russian Soyuz to ferry a new ISS crew to the station on Sept. 14.

Blistering heat, oppressive humidity, and frequent power outages… summer really is here, and it’s going full bore with most of the United States blanketed in 100 degree temperatures.

With so much heat and humidity, is it surprising that we haven’t seen more activity from Atlantic hurricanes this year? And wasn’t last year at least a little milder in terms of temperatures? What should we believe?

According to data from the Tropical Prediction Center, we had already experienced 7 Atlantic storms, 3 of which were named hurricanes, the other 4 being tropical storms by the end of July 2005. By comparison, this year, we’ve narey had a rumble, with Alberto and Beryl being the only 2 named Tropical Storms this year and no named hurricanes to-date.

So what’s normal? Looking back at stats for the last 10 years, 5 out of the last 10 years had exactly zero named Hurricanes by the end of July and only 3 of the last 10 years had more than one tropical storm or hurricane occur by that same time.

While hurricanes certainly feel like a summer-time activity, they are more commonly found to be late summer to early fall activities. The kids are back to school in some areas of the country in another week - and not a whisper from the Atlantic.

History shows us that as quiet as June and July have commonly been for major hurricane activity, August and September tell a completely different story. Stay tuned.

Quake prediction has proved notoriously difficult. But a special type of jolt, triggered by underground water pressure, has been successfully predicted by scientists in India, according to a story posted online by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The prediction was made on May 12, based on a swarm of small temblors. The scientists said a magnitude 4.0 quake would occur with 15 days. A magnitude 4.2 quake struck May 21.

The work was led by seismologist Harsh Gupta at the National Geophysical Research Institute in India and is detailed this month in the Journal of the Geological Society of India, according to the AAAS story.

Prediction of other types of earthquake remains a rough science at best. One recent advancement in California is predicting the worst part of a quake—with warnings of a few seconds—just after the shaking begins.

NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis will have to wait one more day before heading to its launch pad as poor weather prevented a midnight rollout Monday, press reports say.

Severe storms over and around NASA’s Kennedy Space Center spaceport apparently prevented Atlantis from taking the long, slow trip to Launch Pad 39B at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT) as previously planned, according to Florida Today and Spaceflight Now.

Now mated to the external tank and twin solid rocket boosters that will help carry it spaceward, Atlantis is currently scheduled to launch its STS-115 astronaut crew toward the International Space Station (ISS) on Aug. 28. The shuttle’s payload – a set of new trusses and solar panel wings – have already been delivered to the orbiter’s launch site, though Atlantis itself remains safely inside NASA’s massive Vehicle Assembly Building.

Atlantis is now set to ride its massive crawler carrier vehicle across the 4.2-mile track to Pad 39B Monday night at 10:00 p.m. EDT (0200 Aug 1 GMT), according to Florida Today.

Remember that tossing out the airlock from the International Space Station (ISS) of a Russian space suit? Also, there was that idea of hitting a golf ball from the space station — a decision that was blocked.

Now there’s a new “jettison policy” for the ISS, according to Nicholas Johnson, Program Manager and Chief Scientist of the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

In the July issue of NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly News, Johnson reports that during more than seven years of operations by the ISS, approximately three dozen pieces of debris were released and subsequently cataloged by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN).

The individual mass of these objects ranged from less than 2 pounds to some 155 pounds (1 kilogram to 70 kilograms). Although some of these debris were separated from the ISS accidentally, some were intentionally cast-off, especially the larger items.

Recently an official ISS Jettison Policy was developed to ensure that decisions to deliberately release objects in the future were based upon a complete evaluation of the benefits and risks to the ISS, other resident space objects, and people on the Earth.

Johnson says the policy identifies four categories of items which might be considered for release: (1) items that pose a safety issue for return on-board a visiting vehicle, (2) items that negatively impact ISS utilization, return, or on-orbit stowage manifests, (3) items that represent a space walk timeline savings, and (4) items that are designed for jettison.

Some of the principal issues to be addressed during this evaluation process, Johnson adds, are the potential for the object to recontact the ISS within the first two days after jettison; the potential of the object to breakup prior to reentry; the ability of the SSN to track the object; and the risk to people on Earth from components which might survive reentry.

Science has always been funded by money. Researchers need to eat, and they often have to pay their assistants (although grad students typically make less than bloggers) and buy equipment and all that.

But sometimes the source of funding determines what a researcher will conclude in his work. Often, it’s hard or impossible to know. Such is the case with today’s AP story about Virginia’s state climatologist, Pat Michaels, who happens to disagree with mainstream scientists on global warming and who happens to be funded by an industry that appreciates his dissenting voice.

Maybe Michaels is totally on the up-and-up, but the industry would certainly be better served by seeking out and promoting the work of researchers funded by more neutral sources.

In the world of medical research, studies funded by drug companies that reflect favorably on their own products are often similarly suspect, and good journalist are thoughtful about deciding whether to even write about such studies. When they do, the funding source gets, ideally, prominent mention in the story.

Look for Michaels’ work to be marginalized simply because of the clear conflict of interest, whether or not that conflict has anything to do with the validity of his findings. What would be really cool is for supporters of environmental causes to fund Michaels, then his work might be received and judged by scientists and journalists just like any other research—on its merits.

In 2003, Mars was closer to Earth than it had been in nearly 60,000 years. We got excited about it, as did many readers. Each year since, information has circulated that made people think it was happening again.

This year’s round of bogus emails has begun. So today one reader asked: “A recent e-mail going around says this August 2006 Mars will be the closest to Earth. However, your information says it happened in 2003. Which is correct?”

It was 2003. So if you want to go outside and look up, check out our Night Sky section for what’s really up there tonight. (You can re-live the 2003 event here.)

An official Kosmotras Update has been issued regarding today’s Dnepr launch failure.

“The State Launch Committee continues their work to investigate what happened. We have some preliminary information of the cause [of the failure]. They have an idea of what might have happened. They know the location of where the rocket fell. They are performing the debris recovery plan. [They] always have that plan for such cases. As soon as tomorrow morning, the rescue team will be in the debris area… We will have more feedback from [them], but I’m not sure that it will be at exactly 10 o’clock [Thursday morning] when they’ll tell us something. We’ll do our best to keep you updated as much as possible as soon as possible. As soon as we have any specific information of when the debriefing will take place, we will inform you immediately. All we can say right now is that it’s a pity, and we’re really sorry.”

Update: The word from Russia is that the Dnepr booster launch today of cubesats was unsuccessful. It was reported that there was a first stage separation, followed by a simulated deployment of all satellites, with those on the ground awaiting confirmation of deployment of the cubesats. 

Ground teams are awaiting more information on the launch failure. 

Actors rehearse on trapezes for Bill Pullman’s play about the ISS Expedition 6 mission. Credit: Bill Pullman.org.

The three astronauts who served aboard the International Space Station (ISS) during the sixth mission to the orbital laboratory – and a particularly trying time for NASA and the U.S. – may not be in space anymore, but their story lives on in a Baltimore play this weekend.

Expedition 6, a play written and directed by actor Bill Pullman, chronicles the experience of American astronauts Ken Bowersox, Don Pettit and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin in 2003 as the three men watched Earth from space while NASA faced its Columbia disaster and the U.S. invaded of Iraq. Full-length rehearsals of the play – which features trapezes and toy tanks – are open to the public on July 28-29 at the Theatre Project in Baltimore, Maryland. [Click here for more info. A trailer for the play can be found here.]

“2003 was unlike any year that came before,” Pullman told the Baltimore Sun’s Mary Carole McCauley. “It changed everything that will come after for at least a decade. When the Columbia space shuttle exploded, there were 600,000 people cheering in the streets of the Middle East. They saw it as a sign, an omen, that we [the United States] were not invincible.”

The space station astronauts’ story, Pullman tells the Sun, never quite got the attention they deserved.

The Expedition 6 crew launched toward the ISS in November 2002 aboard NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour and were expected to return aboard the Atlantis orbiter in March 2003.

But NASA’s loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven-astronaut crew on Feb. 1, 2003 grounded the U.S. space agency’s orbiter fleet and forced a two-month mission extension for the Expedition 6 team, during which time U.S. armed forces surged into Iraq in a conflict that continues still.

Bowersox, who commanded the mission, and his fellow crewmates later rode a Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft back to Earth on May 3, 2003, but a computer glitch sent the astronauts hundreds of miles off course after a rough landing that subjected them to more than twice the G-forces typically experienced during reentry.

So, a dramatic reentry after a dramatic orbital mission to be sure.

The melding of spaceflight and exploration with art and culture here on Earth seems to be on the upswing in recent months.

In September, NASA plans to highlight that synergy with the Societal Impact of Spaceflight Conference.