Shuttle Carries Garn Into Space : Discovery Starts Mission After Series of Delays

The shuttle Discovery, carrying the first elected official into space, thundered into orbit Friday, then launched a commercial satellite on its way toward a permanent station above the Earth.

The shuttle blasted off more than a month late and less than a minute before its launch window would have closed for the day.

Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate panel that oversees the budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was aboard, wired for experiments concerning space sickness. Garn, 52, had argued for about four years that it would be in the best interest of the space agency for him to get a flight aboard a shuttle, and NASA finally saw it his way.

Garn’s wife, Kathleen, watched the launching at the space center with her children. “I’m sure he had butterflies,” she said, “but I’m sure he was exuberant and excited. The kids screamed, I cried. I think this will be a humbling experience for him.”

Once in orbit, the Discovery crew--six men and a woman--sent a Canadian communications satellite spinning out of its cargo bay. Astronaut Jeffrey A. Hoffman, 40, told Mission Control: “It was a good deploy.”

Despite a threatened delay when a cargo ship temporarily intruded into a restricted zone offshore, and the constant threat of rain that would have prevented the blastoff, the launch went off without a flaw, giving NASA a badly needed boost.

Garn was originally scheduled to fly aboard the Challenger last February. Troubles with the Challenger’s heat protective tiles forced NASA to substitute the Discovery and reset the flight for March 3. Other problems forced other delays, and the craft finally lifted off at 5:59 a.m. PST.

Water Droplets Threat

Water droplets at 15,000 feet, which could have damaged the shuttle’s protective tiles, nearly forced postponement of the launch, but the moisture eased just as the launch window was about to close. It was the first launch of a civilian shuttle mission since last November, ending at least for awhile a series of nagging problems that have forced extensive rescheduling.

“It seemed like a long dry spell until this morning--and then it looked like rain,” said Tom Utsman, director of shuttle operations at the Kennedy spaceport.

Insisting that NASA’s crowded schedule had not forced the agency to compromise its own guidelines and launch in spite of the weather, Utsman said: “We did it with 55 seconds to spare, but it wasn’t brinkmanship.”

Considering its size, the crew aboard the Discovery was exceptionally quiet during the first day of the flight, with only occasional, mostly technical, exchanges with Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Astronaut Tests Hearts

M. Rhea Seddon, 37, a physician and the fifth American woman in space, used a sound-probing instrument to examine her heart and the hearts of Garn and Hoffman to check the effects of weightlessness.

“All three hearts look just beautiful,” she said.

“What she really meant to say is our hearts are in the right place,” Hoffman added.

“They are in excellent spirits,” flight director Cleon Lacefield said of the crew.

The Discovery lifted off on the fourth anniversary of the first shuttle flight and 24 years after the first space flight by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

16th Shuttle Flight

The flight is the 16th in the shuttle program, which showed several signs of maturing Friday. Just before the launching, the fourth spacecraft in the shuttle fleet, the Atlantis, left Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California atop a Boeing 747, bound for Florida and its maiden voyage later this year. It is to arrive here today after spending the night in Houston.

Meanwhile, workers were preparing the Challenger, for rollout to the launch pad Monday for a scheduled blast off on April 29--just 11 days after Discovery’s scheduled return to the Kennedy spaceport at 6:10 a.m. PST Wednesday. That would be a record “turn around.”

During the five day flight, the Discovery crew is scheduled to launch a second commercial satellite and carry out several experiments. Garn, who is listed as a “payload specialist,” has several responsibilities--including getting sick. Experiments aimed at shedding new light on an old subject, space sickness, will rely on the senator’s ability to prove his susceptibility.

He has suggested on several occasions that he expects to succeed in that effort, although there was no indication Friday that he had done so. If he does become ill, word will probably have to come from the senator himself because NASA no longer releases information about the health of crew members.

Satellite in ‘Storage’

The satellite launched Friday is owned by Telesat Canada and is the second communications satellite the Ottawa firm has placed in orbit, although neither is needed at this time. The satellite, which will take two weeks to reach its station 22,300 miles above the Earth, will join another Telesat bird in “deep storage” where it can be activated should its services be needed.

The Discovery is to launch a Hughes satellite today, which will be leased to the Department of Defense.

The Discovery is scheduled to land at Kennedy on its 79th orbit Wednesday. The crew also includes Discovery commander Karol J. Bobko, 47, pilot Donald E. Williams, 42, S. David Griggs, 45, and Charles D. Walker, 36.