Discovery’s Night Launch Sends STS-116 to Station.

Space Shuttle Discovery and a crew of seven astronauts lifted off Saturday from Kennedy Space Center at 8:47 p.m. EST. After reaching orbit, Discovery’s crew set to work to open the payload bay doors, set up computers and equipment and check out the shuttle’s robotic arm. Heat shield inspections will begin Sunday with a station docking scheduled for Monday at 5:05 p.m.

The STS-116 crew members will dock to the International Space Station, install the new P5 truss structure and perform three spacewalks to rewire the station for electricity generated by a solar array delivered in September.

STS-116 will also swap crew members when mission specialist Sunita Williams becomes a flight engineer for Expedition 14. Taking Williams' place aboard Discovery for the ride home is European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter who has lived aboard the station since July.

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STS-116 MCC Status Report #01

The Space Shuttle Discovery rocketed into a dark Florida sky at 7:47 p.m. CST today, the third shuttle launch in five months, but the first night launch in more than four years.

Discovery's seven-member crew will link up with the International Space Station on Monday to begin a complex, week-long stay that will rewire the outpost and increase its power supply. During three spacewalks and intricate choreography with ground controllers, the astronauts will bring electrical power on line generated by a giant solar array wing delivered to the station in September.

Aboard Discovery are Commander Mark Polansky, Pilot Bill Oefelein, and mission specialists Nicholas Patrick, Joan Higginbotham, Bob Curbeam, Sunita Williams and Christer Fuglesang, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut. Aboard the station awaiting Discovery's arrival are Expedition 14 Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria and flight engineers Mikhail Tyurin and Thomas Reiter, also an ESA astronaut.

Williams and Reiter will switch places when Discovery arrives. Williams will begin a six-month stay as a station crew member and Reiter will journey home on Discovery. Reiter has been on the station since July.

After reaching orbit tonight, Discovery's crew began procedures to open the shuttle’s payload bay doors and set up computers and other equipment. They also plan to power up the shuttle's robotic arm to check its operation. They will use the arm on Sunday to inspect Discovery's heat shield. On Monday, Discovery is planned to dock to the station at about 3:47 p.m. CST.

During the mission, Fuglesang and Curbeam will conduct two spacewalks. Williams and Curbeam will perform a third spacewalk. The mission will retract one solar array on the station and begin the rotation of a giant joint on the complex to allow the recently added arrays to track the sun. The astronauts will rearrange the power cabling to a more resilient permanent setup, and they will prepare for the startup of new cooling systems.

Mission Control will power down virtually the entire station at one point or another to prepare it for the crew's work. The results will ready the complex for more solar arrays and laboratories to be added next year.

As Discovery launched, the station was 220 miles above southern England near Southampton. Discovery's crew begins a sleep period at 1:47 a.m. CST Sunday and will awaken for their first full day in space at 9:47 a.m. CST Sunday.

The next STS-116 mission status report will be issued Sunday morning after crew wakeup, or earlier, if developments warrant.

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Discovery Shuttle's Night Launch 'Outstanding,' NASA Says.

The launch of NASA's shuttle Discovery late Saturday appeared to be an exceptionally clean space shot, NASA mission managers said today.

"It all just came together perfectly,” NASA launch director Mike Leinbach said in a post-launch briefing. “Once we got into the final count, we just executed. It was like a sim-run with no problems. It was outstanding."

Discovery lifted off at 8:47:35 p.m. EST (0147:35 Dec. 10 GMT) from Pad 39B here at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), bound for the International Space Station (ISS) on a 12-day construction mission [image].

The successful space shot marked the third shuttle launch of this year and the first to take off in darkness since 2002. Of NASA’s 117 shuttle flights to date, only 29 have taken off at launch [image].

"What you've seen today is the successful accomplishment of the most challenging, demanding, technically state of the art difficult thing that this nation or any nation can do," NASA chief Michael Griffin said.

Initial weather forecasts for Saturday's night launch were bleak, with high crosswinds and low clouds giving only a 30 percent chance of favorable launch conditions. But weather conditions improved dramatically as the day wore on and the forecast improved to 70 percent ‘Go’ in the hours leading up to launch.

"Weather is very difficult to predict, and you hate to give up any chance of a good day," Griffin said. "Weather started getting better instead of worse and so it made our bet pay off and you saw that tonight."

NASA also had to race to get launch preparations back on track after a challenging 48-hour shuttle turnaround following Thursday evening's launch scrub caused a two-hour delay in external tank refueling. However, shuttle engineers and pad workers were able to make up for the lost time during final inspections of Discovery and the launch pad.

"The best we'd ever done before was an hour and 45 minutes late…all records are made to be broken, and we broke one today by tanking the latest ever in the program," Leinbach said. "From the astronaut's perspective, we didn't have any problem at all. They were ready to go, and once they got on the pad, it just clicked. Everything was just clicking today."

The orbiter's on-board cameras, designed to spot debris shed from the shuttle's external tank during ascent, performed as expected, but it is still too early to determine if any problems were detected. Monitoring fuel tank debris has been a prime concern for NASA since it led to the 2003 Columbia accident.

"When the orbiter separates and the thrusters fire, it illuminated the bottom of the orbiter very well," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations.

"The lighting was probably better in that region from what we thought or would've guessed from the preflight stuff,” he added. “Again, no results in terms of anything we saw from a damage standpoint, but just from a quality of the video, there will be some good video available around the external tank separation."

Led by commander Mark Polansky, the seven-astronaut STS-116 crew is tasked with delivering a new $11 million Port 5 (P5) spacer segment to the ISS and the rewiring of the orbital laboratory's electrical grid so it can draw power from a new set of solar panels arrays installed last month.

"We're off to a great start," Gerstenmaier said, adding that the real challenges still lie ahead. “It won’t be easy. It'll be a lot of fun for the next 12 days. The teams are ready, and we'll do as good on those other days as we did today."

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Mission’s First Spacewalk Ends for Shuttle Astronauts.

The International Space Station (ISS) grew a bit larger Tuesday after two spacewalking astronauts helped install a new piece of the orbital laboratory’s metallic backbone.

Discovery astronauts Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang, aided by their robotic arm wielding crewmates, successfully attached the two-ton Port 5 (P5) spacer segment to the portside end of the outpost’s main truss during a six-hour, 36-minute spacewalk.

That is beautiful, Curbeam said as the P5 spacer moved into place.

Tuesday’s spacewalk began at 3:31 p.m. EST (2031 GMT) with Beamer and Fuglesang stepping out of the space station’s Quest airlock as the outpost and their docked shuttle Discovery passed 220 miles (354 kilometers) over central Europe.

It feels good, let me tell you, Curbeam said just after stepping into space to start the fourth spacewalk of his astronaut career.

Fuglesang, a European Space Agency astronaut and Sweden’s first spaceflyer, made his first spacewalk during the extravehicular activity (EVA).

Inside the space station, Curbeam’s fellow STS-116 mission specialists Joan Higginbotham and Sunita Williams, now an ISS crewmember, wielded the ISS robotic arm to maneuver the $11 million P5 truss into position. Discovery pilot William Oefelein choreographed the spacewalk from the shuttle’s flight deck.

About the only hitch was a lost extension for Fuglesang’s pistol grip tool, which apparently slipped free of its mooring on his spacesuit work bench.

I was looking around, I didn’t see it, Fuglesang told flight controllers. But, of course, it’s dark here.

STS-116 commander Mark Polansky replayed video from Fuglesang’s spacesuit helmet camera after the spacewalk to help flight controllers try to track the lost tool.

During the spacewalk, mission controllers told Polansky that a focused inspection of Discovery’s heat shield will not be required Wednesday to help engineers determine the spacecraft’s health.

Well, that’s outstanding, Polansky said.

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