Interviews With NASA Flight Directors For Final Endeavour Mission

Stephanie L. Schierholz

Headquarters, Washington

 

Kylie Clem

Johnson Space Center, Houston

HOUSTON -- NASA Flight Directors Gary Horlacher of Chesterton, Ind., and Derek Hassmann of San Antonio are available for live satellite interviews from 6 to 7 a.m. CDT on Friday, April 22.

Horlacher and Hassmann will discuss the upcoming space shuttle Endeavour mission to the International Space Station, STS-134, and their roles as flight directors. The interviews will be conducted on the NASA Television live interview media outlet channel, but also will be broadcast live on NASA TV.

The shuttle and its crew are targeted to lift off Friday, April 29, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission is the last flight for Endeavour and the second to last flight of the Space Shuttle Program.

To participate in the interviews, reporters should contact Jeremiah Maddix at 281-483-8631 or at jmaddix@nasa.gov before 1 p.m. on Thursday, April 21.

Horlacher was selected as a NASA flight director in 2008. He will be available from 6 to 6:30 a.m. He is the lead shuttle flight director for the mission and a graduate of Purdue University.

Hassmann, a NASA flight director since 2000, will be available from 6:30 to 7 a.m. He is the mission's lead space station flight director and a graduate of the University of Texas in Austin.

B-roll footage of preparations for the STS-134 mission will air beginning on NASA TV at 5:30 a.m.

Endeavour's 14-day mission will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 and a platform that carries spare parts to sustain station operations once shuttles are retired from service. Crew members will conduct four spacewalks to perform maintenance work and install new components. These are the last scheduled spacewalks by shuttle crew members.

The NASA TV live interview media outlet channel that will be used for the interviews and preceding b-roll 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.

For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit  http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.

For more information about the STS-134 mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle.

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

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