Hubble Space Telescope be kept in a clean room, powered up and purged with nitrogen, until a launch could be rescheduled. This costly situation (about per month) pushed the overall costs of the project even higher. This delay did allow time for engineers to perform extensive tests, swap out a possibly failure-prone battery, and make other improvements. Furthermore, the ground software needed to control Hubble was not ready in 1986, and was barely ready by the 1990 launch. Eventually, following the resumption of shuttle flights in 1988, the launch of the telescope was scheduled for 1990. On April 24, 1990, successfully launched the
Space Shuttle at Kennedy Space Center in the year after the "Columbia" disaster that had taken the life of Indian-American astronaut KC Chawla. On television, the 1996 drama "The Cape" portrays the lives of a group of NASA astronauts as they prepare for and fly Shuttle missions. "Odyssey 5" was a short-lived sci-fi series that features the crew of a Space Shuttle as the last survivors of a disaster that destroys Earth. The 1997–2007 sci-fi series "Stargate SG-1" has a shuttle rescue written into an episode. The 2013 film "Gravity" features the fictional Space Shuttle "Explorer" during STS-157, whose crew are killed