Peters and his colleagues finished the changeout
That required some extensive and exhaustive responses on the part of Meadville-area native Peters and his teammates. For the next three weeks, he said, they spent “many, many long hours” making sure all the orbiter’s affected components were properly replaced, retested and completed in time for Discovery’s late-August launch to the International Space Station.
The last time any “changeout” procedure of that magnitude had taken place, Peters said, was 15 years ago, when he was an 11-year-old kid going to school and watching the night skies from the back yard at his family’s dairy farm a few miles south of Meadville.
But Peters and his colleagues finished the changeout, allowing Discovery’s STS-128 mission
Fehling to launch on schedule. And for their time, efforts and engineering excellence, they were recently presented that mission’s NASA Launch Director Award.
