Winds Delay Launching of Shuttle

Brisk crosswinds, intermittent showers and an errant ocean tanker that strayed into a restricted recovery zone added up to a 24-hour delay Wednesday in the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour on the most complex U.S. space mission since the Apollo moon landings.

NASA officials rescheduled the launch of Endeavour and its crew of seven astronauts to 1:27 a.m. PST today, and Air Force forecasters predicted better weather.

Crosswinds over the shuttle’s Florida landing strip, which the spacecraft might have needed in an emergency, forced NASA early Wednesday to scrub the first launch attempt in a $629-million mission to repair the $1.5-billion Hubble Space Telescope.

During the 11-day flight, astronauts plan to stalk the ailing orbital observatory, capture it with Endeavour’s robot arm and then, during a record five spacewalks, fix the telescope’s flawed optics, shivering solar arrays and broken gyroscopes.

If necessary, the crew could conduct seven spacewalks in all to install $86 million worth of new telescope parts, with an additional spacewalk possible to deal with any emergency.