Shuttle Discovery’s Flight Directors Available for Interviews

Michael Curie

Headquarters, Washington                                   

 

Josh Byerly

Johnson Space Center, Houston

HOUSTON -- NASA Flight Directors Bryan Lunney from Houston and Royce Renfrew from Marble Falls, Texas, are available for live satellite interviews from 6 to 7 a.m. CDT Thursday, Oct. 28.

Lunney and Renfrew will discuss space shuttle Discovery's STS-133 space shuttle mission to the International Space Station, targeted to launch Nov. 1. This will be the final flight for Discovery, NASA's oldest and most historic shuttle.

To participate in the interviews, reporters should contact Derek Sollosi at 281-792-7515 before 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 27.

Discovery and its crew are scheduled to lift off at 4:40 p.m. EDT on Nov. 1, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will deliver the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) to the space station as well as supplies for the crew. The PMM will provide additional storage for the station crew and experiments may be conducted inside it, such as fluid physics, materials science, biology and biotechnology. There will be two spacewalks during the flight.

Renfrew, the lead station flight director for the mission, will be available from 6 to 6:30 a.m. He has been a NASA flight director since 2008. He earned a bachelor's in computer science in 1985 and a bachelor's in history, as well as a secondary school teaching certification in 1989 from Trinity University. He spent seven years teaching high school mathematics. He also worked for several years as a robotics instructor for the station crews and a robotics flight controller inside the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Lunney, the lead shuttle flight director for the mission, will be available from 6:30 to 7 a.m. He has served as a flight director for both the station and the shuttle since 2001.

Lunney received a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M University in 1989. He joined NASA that same year and served in various roles inside mission control, including propulsion officer and attitude determination and control officer.

The NASA Television Live Interview Media Outlet (LIMO) channel will be used for the interviews. The channel is a digital satellite C-band downlink by uplink provider Americom. It is on satellite AMC 3, transponder 9C, located at 87 degrees west, downlink frequency 3865.5 Mhz based on a standard C-band, horizontal downlink polarity, FEC is 3/4, data rate is 6.0 Mbps, symbol rate is 4.3404 Msps, transmission DVB-S, 4:2:0.

B-roll footage of preparations for the STS-133 mission will begin airing at 5:30 a.m. on the NASA TV LIMO channel.

The interviews also will air live on the NASA TV public and media channels. For streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.

For more information about the STS-133 mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle.

For more information about the space station, visit http://www.nasa.gov/station.

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