Feb 7, 2008 12:51 pm US/Pacific
Atlantis Lifts Off With Peninsula Man On Board
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (CBS 5 / AP) ―
After two months of delay, shuttle Atlantis blasted off Thursday with Europe's gift to the international space station, a $2 billion science lab named Columbus that spent years waiting to set sail.
Atlantis and its seven-man crew roared away from their seaside launch pad at 2:45 p.m., overcoming fuel gauge problems that thwarted back-to-back launch attempts in December.
One of the astronauts on board the space shuttle Atlantis may have been thinking about his Bay Area family on his trip into outer space.
Mission Specialist Rex Walheim has deep roots in the Bay Area - he was born in Redwood City.
Walheim grew up in San Carlos, where he graduated San Carlos High School. He later earned an engineering degree from U.C. Berkeley.
Besides Walheim's other Bay Area connections, he has a special connection with this church. On his 2002 flight, Walheim took a quilt to the International Space Station. It's now on display at the Peninsula Covenant Church, a place that Walheim thanks for its "loving instruction and support."
"Oh, he's a wonderful young man," said family friend Catherine Delfs. "He's the kindest, sweetest, most considerate person."
"He said his walk in space just solidified his faith in God's creation…and that, he knew, there was a master hand behind all this," Delfs said of Walheim's previous trip into space.
Walheim was expected to make at least three spacewalks as the station whirls around the earth during the current mission.
All week, bad weather had threatened to delay Thursday's flight, making liftoff all the sweeter for the shuttle team. The sky was cloudy at launch time, but rain and thunderstorms remained off to the west.
"All systems are go," launch director Doug Lyons told the astronauts. "I'd like to wish you a successful mission and safe return."
Replied shuttle commander Stephen Frick: "Looks like today's a good day, and we're ready to go fly."
Probably no one was happier than the 300 Europeans who gathered at the launch site to see Atlantis take off with their beloved Columbus lab.
Twenty-three years in the making, Columbus is the European Space Agency's primary contribution to the space station. The lab has endured space station redesigns and slowdowns, as well as a number of shuttle postponements and two shuttle accidents.
It will join the U.S. lab, Destiny, in orbit for seven years. The much bigger Japanese lab Kibo, or Hope, will require three shuttle flights to get off the ground, beginning in March.
Frick, and his U.S., German and French crew will reach the space station on Saturday and begin installing Columbus the very next day. Three spacewalks are planned during the flight, scheduled to last 11 or, more likely, 12 days.
Besides Columbus, Atlantis will drop off a new space station resident, French Air Force Gen. Leopold Eyharts, who will swap places with NASA astronaut Daniel Tani and get Columbus working. Tani will return to Earth aboard the shuttle, ending a mission of nearly four months.
To NASA's relief, all four fuel gauges in Atlantis' external fuel tank worked properly during the final stage of the countdown. The gauges failed back in December because of a faulty connector, and NASA redesigned the part to fix the problem, which had been plaguing the shuttles for three years.
NASA was anxious to get Atlantis flying as soon as possible to keep alive its hopes of achieving six launches this year. The space agency faces a 2010 deadline for finishing the station and retiring the shuttles. That equates to four or five shuttle flights a year between now and then.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin told CBS News space analyst Bill Harwood that he remains optimistic the agency can complete the international space station and retire the shuttle as planned by the end of fiscal 2010 despite recent delays to recover from hail damage and problems with critical fuel sensors.
"We're coming back, and I think we are back, from some pretty severe technical problems that led to the loss of Columbia. We understand the foam now," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said, referring to the chunks of insulating foam that kept breaking off the fuel tanks.
Barring any more major mechanical trouble or freak hailstorms like the one that battered Atlantis's fuel tank one year ago, "this should be like some of those earlier times when we had some fairly interrupted stretches with no technical problems where we could just fly," Griffin said in an interview with The Associated Press. "That's what I'm looking forward to."
(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
