(AP)
Tuesday, March 11, 2008

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—Shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven blasted into orbit today on what was to be the longest space station mission ever—a 16-day voyage to build a gangly Canadian robot and add a new room that will serve as a closet for a future lab.
The space shuttle roared from its seaside pad at 2:28 a.m. (EDT), lighting up the sky for kilometres around as it took off.

“It’s a spectacular night launch,” said federal Industry minister Jim Prentice, who attended the launch at the Kennedy Space Centre.
“The Endeavour just explodes off the launch pad and into the atmosphere, and it illuminates not just the night sky but really the entire Kennedy Space Centre for dozens of miles around,” Prentice told The Canadian Press by telephone just minutes after the launch.
Canada’s latest contribution to the International Space Station, named Dextre, is a two-armed specialized robot that will play a critical role in operations and maintenance outside the station.
It can remove and replace components that require precise handling, reducing the amount of time that astronauts must spend outside the station and leaving them more time to perform scientific experiments aboard the space laboratory.
The night-time launch was a rare treat: The last time NASA launched a shuttle at night-time was in 2006. Only about a quarter of shuttle flights have begun in darkness.
“We were 3.5 miles [about 5.6 kilometres] away in a modern Kennedy Space Centre building and the building itself was shaking,” noted Prentice, adding he was “struck” by the close co-operation between the scientists from different countries.
“You’re really struck by not just the scientific and technical energy but also the human energy associated with the launch,” he said.
Endeavour’s countdown was the smoothest in years, officials said. Shortly after liftoff, however, the astronauts had to deal with a couple of problems that ended up being minor.
They got alert messages for some of their ship’s steering thrusters, but it turned out to be a bad electronics card. Then the primary cooling system failed and they had to switch to the back-up.
A cursory look at the initial launch images—fewer than usual because of the night-time launch—showed only one significant loss of debris from the external fuel tank 83 seconds into the flight.
But it appeared to miss the right wing.
The crew faces a daunting job once they reach the international space station late tomorrow night. The astronauts will perform five spacewalks—the most ever planned during a shuttle visit.
Dextre, built at the cost of about $207 million, will join the space station’s Canadian-built robot arm—already in orbit for seven years.
The overall cost of Canada’s participation in the International Space Station so far is about $1.4 billion.
This is the second of six planned shuttle missions this year—all but one to the space station.
NASA faces a 2010 deadline for finishing the station and retiring its shuttles.