Endeavour Blasts Off On Mission To Build Canadian Robot

Shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven blasted into orbit Tuesday 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 2:28am, lighting up the sky for kilometres around as it took off.

“It’s a spectacular night launch,” said Minister of Industry 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.

“Good luck and Godspeed, and we’ll see you back here in 16 days,” launch director Mike Leinbach radioed to the astronauts right before liftoff.

“Banzai,” replied Endeavour’s commander, Dominic Gorie, using a Japanese exclamation of joy. “God truly has blessed us with a beautiful night here, Mike, to launch, so let’s light them up and give Him a show.”

They did. The shuttle took flight with a flash of light, giving a peach-yellow glow to the low clouds just offshore before disappearing into the darkness.

“We were 3.5 miles (about 5.6 kilometres) away in a modern Kennedy Space Centre building and the building itself was shaking,” said Prentice, adding that 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.

“To be here and see the Americans working together with the Canadians and the Japanese all associated with this launch and this payload is really something quite moving to see.”

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 backup.

A cursory look at the initial launch images — fewer than usual because of the nighttime 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.

Gorie and his crew face a daunting job once they reach the international space station late Wednesday 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.

“In effect Canada has been one of the leading nations in the development of the international space station and launching Dextre  successfully today is a milestone for Canada’s space agency and for what we’ve accomplished as a nation,” said Prentice.

The Japanese Space Agency sent up the first part of its massive Kibo lab, a storage compartment for experiments, tools and spare parts.

For the first time since space station construction began nearly 10 years ago, all five major partners were about to own a piece of the orbiting real estate.

Canada is a partner in the International Space Station with the United States, Russia, Japan, and the European Space Agency. Once complete, the Station will be the largest space science and engineering project ever undertaken, covering an area as large as a Canadian football field.

The launch of the first section of Kibo, or Hope, finally propelled Japan into the space station action.

“Our Japanese people have been waiting for a very long, long time,” said Yoshiyuki Hasegawa, the Japanese Space Agency’s station program manager.

Preliminary design work for Kibo began in 1990. Space station construction, however, was stalled over the years for various reasons, most recently the 2003 Columbia tragedy.

The main part of the Kibo lab will fly on the next shuttle mission in May, with the final instalment, a porch for outdoor experiments, going up next year.

Altogether, the Japanese Space Agency has invested about $6.7 billion in the space station program, including a Kibo control centre near Tokyo.

In addition to working with their international payloads, Endeavour’s astronauts will try out a caulking gun and high-tech goo on deliberately damaged shuttle thermal tile samples. The test — part of NASA’s ongoing post-Columbia safety effort — should have been performed last year, but was put off because of emergency space station repairs.

Astronaut Garrett Reisman will stay behind on the space station until June, swapping places with a Frenchman who accompanied Europe’s Columbus lab into orbit in February.

A Japanese astronaut is also part of Endeavour’s all-male crew.

It 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.

With files from The Canadian Press