CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — President Barack Obama met with wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) Friday in Cape Canaveral, Fla., despite the scuttling of the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour.
The President and First Lady Michelle Obama met with Giffords and her husband Capt. Mark Kelly, who was to lead the Endeavour mission, a White House official told FOX News Channel.
“I bet you were hoping to see a rocket launch today,” Kelly told the President away from the view of television news cameras.
“We were hoping to see you,” Obama replied with a warm embrace.
The two men then went to sit down with Giffords for 10 minutes. Giffords was shot in the head in a January attack in Tucson, Ariz., that left six people dead and thirteen wounded. She was able to travel to Cape Canaveral after intense rehabilitation at a Houston hospital.
The Obamas also greeted the rest of the astronauts who were supposed to go on the mission, and took a tour of Cape Canaveral accompanied by daughters Malia and Sasha and Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson.
NASA had postponed the planned launch earlier Friday because of two failed heaters in an auxiliary power unit. Lift-off will be pushed back for at least 72 hours, to 2:33pm ET on Monday at the earliest, the space agency said.
“Today she just wasn’t ready to go,” Shuttle Launch Director Mike Leinbach said, adding that the launch team was still assessing what exactly went wrong with the heaters. Early speculation, he said, was that a short-circuit in a switch box or on the line to the box caused the heaters to fail.
NASA engineers needed to drain an external tank to continue with their troubleshooting, according to Leinbach. Once they determine the extent of the problem officials will have a better idea when exactly they will be able to get Endeavour off the ground.
As of Thursday afternoon, the launch team had reported there were no technical problems with the shuttle. Stormy weather was the only hitch they anticipated with 24 hours to go before it was set to blast-off.
The clouds and winds appeared calm on in the morning and the crew fueled the orbiter in anticipation of a mid-afternoon launch.
NASA said it would give a further update on the shuttle problems later Friday afternoon.