U.S. space shuttle to get post-launch safety check
12 Mar 2008 00:02:25 GMT Source: Reuters
(Recasts with post-launch safety check, edits) By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL. Fla., March 11 (Reuters) - The crew aboard U.S. space shuttle Endeavour prepared to check the ship for damage on Tuesday after a predawn liftoff to deliver part of a long-awaited Japanese space laboratory to the International Space Station. The inspection of the shuttle's heat shield is among the safety upgrades NASA imposed after losing shuttle Columbia and its crew in 2003 due to undetected damage from a debris impact during launch. Endeavour lifted off with a brilliant flash of white-hot flame and a thunderous boom at 2:28 a.m. EDT (0628 GMT) from its seaside launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Punching through clouds, the ship vanished into the night sky on a path leading to the space station on Wednesday night. The crew was awakened on Tuesday afternoon to begin the first full day of a planned 16-day mission -- NASA's longest since resuming flights after the Columbia accident. "We're having a great time up here," Endeavour commander Dominic Gorie radioed to Mission Control in Houston. "It's going to get busy here pretty quick, but everybody feels great." Before powering up the shuttle's robot arm to begin scanning the wings and nosecap for damage, the Endeavour astronauts were seen on NASA TV floating on the shuttle's flight deck and looking out the windows at the view of Earth about 180 miles (290 km) below. Four of the seven men, including Garrett Reisman, who will be joining the space station crew, are making their first trips to space. FACILITIES FOR ART Endeavour carries the first part of an elaborate Japanese space laboratory called Kibo, meaning "hope." About the size of a double-decker bus, it will be the station's largest laboratory and the only one with facilities for art along with experiment racks for biomedical studies, fluid physics research and life science. The main part of the laboratory is scheduled for launch in May and the final part -- an external porch for experiments in a vacuum -- next year. Much of its equipment and computers are inside the storage chamber riding aboard Endeavour. "We finally became a real partner of the ISS project, not just one of the members on the list," said Keiji Tachikawa, president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. With the arrival of Japan's lab, all 15 partner countries in the space station venture -- the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and 11 members of the European Space Agency -- are represented in orbit. Europe's first permanent space lab, Columbus, was delivered to the station last month. Its first station cargo ship was launched on Saturday and will loiter in orbit and dock after Endeavour departs the space station. The $100 billion space station is 60 percent complete after a decade of construction and must be finished by the time the three remaining U.S. space shuttles are retired in 2010. Delivering the first part of Kibo is only the beginning of a complicated 12-day shuttle mission at the station, which includes five spacewalks by the Endeavour crew. Two outings are reserved for the assembly of a Canadian-built robotic system named Dextre, which adds manual dexterity and another 30 feet (9 metres) of reach to the station's mobile crane. Spacewalking astronauts will also test a heat shield repair technique developed after the Columbia disaster so damaged shuttles have a better chance of surviving re-entry. NASA wants to have the heat shield repair kit before dispatching a shuttle to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope later this year. In case of an emergency, the Hubble mission crew would not be able to reach the space station for shelter. (Editing by Tom Brown and Mohammad Zargham)
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