The Nation - News from July 4, 1988

Discovery moved into the glare of spotlights on its long-awaited trip to the launch pad and a giant step toward America’s first space shuttle flight since the Challenger tragedy. A flag-waving Fourth of July crowd of several hundred space workers cheered as the 85-ton spaceship edged out of an assembly building at 12:50 a.m., riding upright on the broad back of a giant tracked transporter called a crawler. The 4.2-mile journey to Launch Pad 39B, planned for early morning to avoid thunderstorms, was scheduled to take six to seven hours. Attached to Discovery were a 154-foot-tall external fuel tank and the two 149-foot solid fuel booster rockets that will hurl the craft into space on a flight scheduled for early September.