THE LAST of 135 US space shuttle missions took off from the Kennedy Space Centre in central Florida at 11.29am yesterday, just 2½ minutes late. The launch had been given only a 30 per cent chance of going ahead after torrential rains on Thursday.
Since the first space shuttle, Columbia, blasted off in 1981, five space ships have collectively travelled 537,114,016 miles.
The 122ft-long Atlantisis carrying a crew of four astronauts on a 12-day mission to ferry 10,000 pounds of supplies to the International Space Station. It is scheduled to dock at the station, where six astronauts are living, tomorrow morning and return to Earth on July 20th, the 42nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that first landed men on the moon.
Irishman Gerard Newsham, a postgraduate student from Limerick Institute of Technology and a member of the space centre's flight research group, witnessed the take-off from the three-mile limit closest to the launch pad, while his colleagues back in Limerick gathered to watch at LIT. Mr Newsham's life science experiment to test hypergravity interactions between bacteria and plants is carried on board the Atlantis.
“It’s an incredible moment for me, for my postgraduate colleagues at LIT, for everyone concerned,” Mr Newsham said. “You see it happening and a few seconds later you hear it. Then, around 30 seconds later, you feel the vibrations rushing across the ground, up into your chest. It’s one of the greatest adrenalin rushes I have experienced and something I will never forget.”
Nasa said up to one million people would watch the launch from the beaches of central Florida. As Atlantislifted off, the crowd chanted "USA, USA" and cheered. Some of them cried.
“Good luck, Godspeed and have a little fun up there,” the launch director Michael Leinbach told the crew after the final countdown began.
The countdown was stopped 31 seconds before lift-off because a signal indicated that a “beanie cap” which vents oxygen from the external fuel tank had failed to retract. Within two minutes, controllers confirmed the arm had in fact retracted, and the launch resumed.
Sparks and flames flashed into the exhaust from the Atlantis's three engines. The spaceship lifted vertically, above an incandescent tail, amid a thunderous roar.
“There was a lot of suspense and expectation because of the weather,” said ambassador Joao Vale de Almeida, the envoy of the European Union to the US, who watched the launch from the VIP balcony along with 14 members of Congress, the US attorney general Eric Holder and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen.
“When it took off, what struck me most was the smoke, and then the sound, that comes slightly later, since we were three to four miles from the launch pad,” said Mr Vale de Almeida.
“The sound is quite impressive. There was a very powerful atmosphere – emotion about it being the last launch, and happiness that everything went well,” he said. “We were briefed before the launch that it is always a risky operation.”
Fourteen astronauts died in two space shuttle disasters, in 1986 and 2003.
There is unease at Nasa and among Congressmen who view themselves as co-architects of the space programme over the fact that the US is stopping manned space missions for the foreseeable future.
Mr Vale de Almeida said he hopes the transition in US space policy heralds greater co-operation between the US and the European Space Agency. “As we enter this new cycle where all of us have budgetary constraints, it’s even more crucial that we co-operate and share the burden of the cost of these programmes,” he said.