Shuttle Off on Space Chase : Will Try to Snare Huge Satellite

The crew of the delayed shuttle Columbia thundered into orbit today, flexed the ship’s robot arm and set off after a falling satellite to pluck the 11-ton spacecraft out of orbit for return to Earth.

Ringing in the new decade with a roar, Columbia and its three-man, two-woman crew blasted off from Kennedy Space Center on time at 7:35 a.m. to kick off a 10-day mission, the first of 10 flights planned for 1990 and the most ambitious attempted in the post-Challenger era.

“A new decade of spaceflight begins!” launch commentator Lisa Malone exclaimed as Columbia shot skyward through a partly cloudy sky.

Eight-and-a-half minutes later, the shuttle was in orbit and the astronauts quickly got to work, opening Columbia’s payload bay doors, readying a Navy communications satellite for launch Wednesday morning, activating experiments and checking out the shuttle’s electrical and mechanical systems.

Astronaut Bonnie Dunbar unlimbered Columbia’s 50-foot robot arm and put the space crane through its paces to make sure it will be ready to snare the Long Duration Exposure Facility on Friday. The giant scientific satellite would otherwise fall to a fiery demise in Earth’s atmosphere around March 9.

After checking out the spindly, $50-million Canadian-built robot arm, Dunbar said, “It’s a beautiful- looking piece of hardware.”

The shuttle was grounded Monday by low clouds and was running 22 days behind schedule overall. Columbia skipper Daniel Brandenstein, 46; co-pilot James Wetherbee, 37; Marsha Ivins, 38; G. David Low, 33, and Dunbar, 40, had little to say during the initial hours of the mission, but officials on Earth were jubilant.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cleaner countdown and launch,” said Richard Truly, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “What a marvelous way to start the 1990s!”

LDEF was deployed from the shuttle Challenger on April 7, 1984. It was built to do little more than serve as a platform for 57 experiments, most of them passive in nature and designed to simply expose a variety of high-tech materials to the harsh space environment.

Engineers with NASA’s space station Freedom project and the strategic defense initiative missile defense program are especially eager to get LDEF back intact to learn more about which materials and construction techniques are best suited for spacecraft that will remain in orbit for long periods.

NASA originally intended to retrieve the bus-size satellite after just 10 months, but a series of shuttle delays and the 1986 Challenger disaster delayed the rescue mission until now--just in the nick of time.

To catch the errant satellite, Brandenstein and Wetherbee are scheduled to fire Columbia’s maneuvering rockets 12 to 14 times in an orbital ballet designed to put the shuttle just 35 feet above LDEF on Friday.

If all goes well, Dunbar will use the robot arm to grab the satellite about 9:44 a.m. Friday.

Columbia’s mission is scheduled to last 10 days, the second-longest since shuttles began flying in 1981. The spacecraft is due to land at Edwards Air Force Base.