Atlantis Blasts Off, Carrying Columbus Lab To Space Station

By MARCIA DUNN AP Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – After two months of delay, shuttle Atlantis blasted off Thursday with Europe’s gift to the international space station, a $2 billion science lab named Columbus that spent years waiting to set sail.

Atlantis and its seven-man crew roared away from their seaside launch pad at 2:45 p.m., overcoming fuel gauge problems that thwarted back-to-back launch attempts in December.

The same cold front that spawned killer tornadoes across the South earlier in the week stayed far enough away and, in the end, cut NASA a break. All week, bad weather had threatened to delay the flight, making liftoff all the sweeter for the shuttle team.

The sky was cloudy at launch time, but rain and thunderstorms remained off to the west. “All systems are go,” launch director Doug Lyons told the astronauts. “I’d like to wish you a successful mission and safe return.”

Replied shuttle commander Stephen Frick: “Looks like today’s a good day, and we’re ready to go fly.” Probably no one was happier than the 300 Europeans who gathered at the launch site to see Atlantis take off with their beloved Columbus lab.

Twenty-three years in the making, Columbus is the European Space Agency’s primary contribution to the space station. The lab has endured space station redesigns and slowdowns, as well as a number of shuttle postponements and two shuttle accidents.

It will join the U.S. lab, Destiny, in orbit for seven years. The much bigger Japanese lab Kibo, or Hope, will require three shuttle flights to get off the ground, beginning in March.

Frick, and his U.S., German and French crew will reach the space station on Saturday and begin installing Columbus the very next day.

Three spacewalks are planned during the flight, scheduled to last 11 or, more likely, 12 days. Besides Columbus, Atlantis will drop off a new space station resident, French Air Force Gen. Leopold Eyharts, who will swap places with NASA astronaut Daniel Tani and get Columbus working.

Tani will return to Earth aboard the shuttle, ending a mission of nearly four months. To NASA’s relief, all four fuel gauges in Atlantis’ external fuel tank worked properly during the final stage of the countdown.

The gauges failed back in December because of a faulty connector, and NASA redesigned the part to fix the problem, which had been plaguing the shuttles for three years. NASA was anxious to get Atlantis flying as soon as possible to keep alive its hopes of achieving six launches this year.

The space agency faces a 2010 deadline for finishing the station and retiring the shuttles. That equates to four or five shuttle flights a year between now and then, something NASA Administrator Michael Griffin considers achievable.

“We’re coming back, and I think we are back, from some pretty severe technical problems that led to the loss of Columbia. We understand the foam now,” NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said, referring to the chunks of insulating foam that kept breaking off the fuel tanks.

Barring any more major mechanical trouble or freak hailstorms like the one that battered Atlantis’s fuel tank one year ago, “this should be like some of those earlier times when we had some fairly interrupted stretches with no technical problems where we could just fly,” Griffin said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“That’s what I’m looking forward to.”

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)