The US space shuttle Endeavour and its crew of six astronauts blasted off Monday and headed for the International Space Station to deliver a module dubbed Tranquility. The picture-perfect night-time lift-off came at 4:14 am (0914 GMT), after a 24-hour delay caused by heavy cloud cover over Cape Canaveral early Sunday. The spacecraft successfully reached orbit about eight and a half minutes later.
"We wish you good luck and Godspeed, and see you in about two weeks," launch director Mike Leinbach told the crew shortly before lift-off. Endeavour Commander George Zamka thanked the teams who worked to make the shuttle mission possible. "See you in a couple of weeks. It's time to go to fly," he responded. The mission comes as NASA begins to re-evaluate its future after President Barack Obama effectively abandoned the US space agency's plan to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020.
The Constellation programme was intended to develop a successor spacecraft to the shuttle, which could be used to carry astronauts to the moon where they would use a lunar base to launch manned missions to Mars. Constrained by soaring budget deficits, Obama submitted a budget to Congress that encourages the agency to instead focus on developing commercial transport alternatives to ferry astronauts to the ISS after the shuttle program ends.
There are just five missions scheduled for NASA's three shuttles before the program is scheduled to wind down later this year. The firsst shuttle launch was in 1981. The Endeavour mission's main goal is the delivery of the Tranquility module, also known as Node 3, which comes with a multi-window cupola attached.
The cupola, built for NASA by the European group Thales Alenia Space in their Turin factory, will allow for panoramic views of Earth, space objects and spacecraft arriving at the ISS, the US space agency said. With Endeavour's delivery of Tranquility and its attached cupola, the International Space Station will be 90 percent complete, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.
Tranquility, which weighs 18 tonnes, is seven meters long and has a 4.5-meter (15-foot) diameter, while the cupola dome weighs 1.9 tonnes, and measures 1.5 meters with a 2.9 meter diameter. Installing the module is expected to require a team of two astronauts to undertake three spacewalks lasting 6.5 hours each. Tranquility, named after the lunar sea where Apollo 11 landed, has the most sophisticated life support system ever flown into space.
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