The shuttle will leave the station on Sunday for a Tuesday landing:
NASA worried the hurricane might veer toward Houston, the home of Mission Control, forcing an emergency relocation of flight controllers to Cape Canaveral. The makeshift control center there would not be nearly as good or big as the Houston operation, and that’s why managers wanted to bring Endeavour back to Earth early.
Hurricane Dean, a fierce Category 4 storm, was headed toward Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico. It was uncertain whether the storm might strike the Texas coastline late in the week; that uncertainty made NASA’s decision so many days in advance all the harder.
LeRoy Cain, who headed Saturday’s mission management team meeting, acknowledged that the hurricane’s predicted path was shifting southward and farther from Houston. But he said it would have been irresponsible for NASA not to cut the mission short, considering most everything had already been accomplished in orbit.
“I would defy just about anybody to tell me at this point that there’s zero or even extremely low probability or possibility that the storm is going to come here,” Cain said.
LeRoy is absolutely right. The models are moving Southward, which is a good sign for Houston, but Hurricanes often defy forecast models.
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