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Shuttle starts journey after successful liftoff
By John Schwartz and Warren E. Leary The New York TimesWEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2005
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida With a stuttering roar that shook the ground for miles around, the shuttle Discovery lifted off Tuesday morning after NASA struggled for two and a half years to find and fix the problems that caused the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts in February 2003.
In the moments before the final countdown began, each group with responsibility for the shuttle within NASA gave its recommendation to go forward, ending with N. Wayne Hale, the deputy manager of the shuttle program, who said, "We are go for launch."
The launching director, Micheal Leinbach, then addressed the crew: "Good luck, Godspeed - and have a little fun up there." Minutes later, the shuttle rose into the morning sky on a column of fire and smoke that flushed birds out of the surrounding Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and set off car alarms in parking lots across the space center.
NASA officials said experts were studying images of objects falling away during the ascent but that it was too early to know whether or not it was a serious matter. An astronaut who watched the launching, David Wolf, admitted to having choked up at the sight.
"There's nothing like it in the world," he said. "This launch hit me harder" than most," he added. "Coming off the accident, the extra anticipation and tension. We've had all our technical minds on avoiding the emotion all this time, and nobody's been able to hold that back now that we're successfully through the launch sequence."
The 12-day mission will be a busy one for the crew. As the shuttle approaches the International Space Station, it will be examined closely by the station crew of Sergei Krikalev, the Russian commander, and John Phillips, the American flight engineer, in a new and somewhat risky maneuver. The shuttle's crew members are the commander, Eileen Collins; the pilot, James Kelly; Stephen Robinson; Captain Wendy Lawrence of the navy; Charles Camarda; Andrew Thomas; and Soichi Noguchi.
Discovery is carrying tons of supplies that will have to be transferred from the shuttle to the station; two and a half years' worth of broken equipment and trash will be carried back in the shuttle's payload bay.
About 600 feet, or 180 meters, from the station, Collins will stop the shuttle and execute a tricky pirouette maneuver that rotates the 100-ton orbiter nose up 360 degrees. While the bottom of the orbiter is facing the station, the station crew will take detailed pictures. After the maneuver, which should take about eight minutes, the shuttle will dock with the station, on the third day of the mission.
The shuttle crew will also take part in an additional inspection of the shuttle's thermal protection system using the shuttle's robotic arm; on the ground, mission controllers will be going over the vast amount of data from launching cameras and the on-orbit inspections to see if the shuttle sustained damage during launching, and whether the efforts NASA has made to reduce launching debris have been effective.
Spacewalks will begin on the fifth day of the mission. Robinson and Noguchi will take three spacewalks, each planned to take six and a half hours, in which they will test new techniques for repairing the shuttle's protective panels. They will install a control gyroscope in the space station to replace one that failed in June 2002, and restore power to another one that has not worked since the failure of a circuitbreaker in March. They will also install a large tool cabinet on the outside of the station.
During the overnight preparations for launching, there was no sign of the sensor troubles that bedeviled NASA's last attempt to launch.
A malfunction in the fuel level sensor system caused NASA to scrub its first launching attempt on July 13. The sensors are important because they keep the shuttle's main engines from running on empty - a situation that could cause them to tear apart, with potentially disastrous results. If two of the sensors indicate the shuttle's tank is nearly empty, they will set off an engine shutdown.
Only two of the sensors need to be functioning in order to properly monitor the fuel levels, but NASA launching rules require that all four sensors be operating. After studying the malfunction for nearly two weeks, NASA officials had decided that if the fuel system failed again in the same way, they would be able to approve a launching with only three sensors working. But they did not need to have that discussion, because all four sensors worked perfectly.