KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - Faced with a Tuesday deadline to get off the ground, space shuttle Discovery blasted into space today on a crucial space station assembly mission. Delayed by a month by technical difficulties with the orbiter and then ground support equipment, program managers opted to shorten the shuttle's mission rather than stand down for a Russian Soyuz crew rotation flight and wait until early April for the next launch opportunity.
ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: Discovery lifted off into twilight skies right on time at 7:43:44 p.m. EDT, creating a manmade sunrise from the cascade of flame and smoke pouring from its twin solid rocket boosters. The shuttle rose out of the early evening darkness and into the sunlight still shining miles above the Florida coastline, coloring its exhaust with a rainbow of red and orange hues. The shuttle's ascent was visible far longer than most launches, with cameras keeping sight of the rapidly accelerating dot of light from Discovery's main engines almost all the way to main engine cutoff shortly after the vehicle arced over the horizon over 1,000 miles away. "I've seen a lot of launches, either as Test Director or Launch Director, and this was the most visually beautiful launch I've ever seen," an ebullient Mike Leinbach, NASA Launch Director, said shortly after Discovery safely reached orbit. "We could see the orbiter from the firing room seven minutes into flight and, at that point in time, the orbiter was somewhere off New Jersey, the New York coast. It was just spectacular." Discovery entered a preliminary orbit eight and a half minutes after launch when the three main engines shutdown and the giant external tank was jettisoned to fall back to Earth. Discovery fired its twin Orbital Maneuvering System engines 37 minutes after launch to circularize the shuttle's orbit and place it on a course for rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station on Tuesday. At the helm commanding NASA's oldest orbiter was veteran astronaut Lee Archambault, with pilot tony Antonelli making his first spaceflight in the shuttle's righthand seat. Joining them on the flight deck was Flight Engineer and lead spacewalker Steve Swanson Joining them on Discovery's mid-deck were Mission Specialists John Phillips, Koichi Wakata, Joseph Acaba and Richard Arnold. Wakata will become Japan's first long-duration resident astronaut and will remain on ISS after Discovery departs, beoming a member of the Expedition 18 and 19 station crews for the next five months. Both Acaba and Arnold are former educators, following in the footsteps of the first teacher to fly in space, Barbara Morgan and "Teacher In Space" Christa McAuliffe, who perished in the 1986 Challenger accident. Acaba and Phillips are the first official Educator Astronauts to fly a shuttle mission, having applied to be astronauts after the space agency opened up the application process to those with degrees in the field of education, along with engineering and sciences. Although they are teachers by profession originally, the two men have become fully-qualified astronauts, trained in all aspects of spaceflight as any other mission specialist. Both Acaba and Arnold are scheduled to team up with Swanson on Discovery's three spacewalks to install the 31,000 pound S6 Integrated Truss Segment and the station final set of power-generating solar arrays. The truss installation is the primary task for STS-119. With the final set of arrays installed, the station will finally be able to generate full power and support the multitude of science experiments and six-person crew size that will be standard for the remaining life of the station. "We're flying the last power truss to the ISS," ISS Program Manager Mike Suffredini said before launch. "In fact, this is the last major U.S. element, built by (ISS prime contractor) Boeing Corporation and flown by the Boeing/NASA team, and I couldn't be more proud of the performance to date." On flight day 5, from inside, Phillips and Wakata will use the station's robotic arm to put the S6 truss segment into position. Spacewalkers Swanson and Arnold will assist with the installation of the S6 and unstow the solar array blanket boxes on the array structure. The arrays will be deployed on flight day 8. The astronauts also will deploy a heat dissipating radiator on the S6 truss. On flight day 7, Swanson and Acaba will begin work to prepare a set of batteries for removal on the P6 truss. The batteries will be replaced on the STS-127 mission. They will deploy attachment fixtures on the P3 and S3 trusses and hook up new fluid connections between the P1 and P3 truss segments. Like the three solar array segments already on orbit, the S6 truss has two array wings each of which have two 115-foot-long arrays, for a total wing span of 240 feet, including the equipment that connects the two wings and allows them to twist as they track the sun. After S6 installation, the 11-segment integrated truss structure will span 335 feet, longer than a football field. Altogether, the station's arrays can generate as much as 120 kilowatts of usable electricity – enough to provide about forty-two 2,800-square-foot homes with power. The addition of the S6 will nearly double the amount of power for station science — from 15 kilowatts to 30 kilowatts. Discovery is scheduled to return to Earth the afternoon of the 28th with a landing back at Kennedy Space Center. (The Spacearium / Space Media Corporation)
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