Shuttle Launch Begins Chase of Ailing Space Telescope : Science: Endeavour blazes into orbit in pre-dawn darkness. The crew is scheduled to capture the Hubble observatory on Saturday.

Under a waning moon, the space shuttle Endeavour arced into orbit Thursday on a plume of superheated steam and fire, beginning a planned 11-day effort to retrieve and repair the $1.5-billion Hubble Space Telescope.

Once in space, Endeavour pilot Ken Bowersox wasted no time in starting the two-day orbital ballet that will bring the shuttle into grappling distance of the telescope by Saturday. The two spacecraft were about 5,529 miles apart by evening Thursday, closing at a rate of 370 miles every orbit.

NASA officials, however, are concerned that the maneuvers could leave the shuttle’s fuel supply dangerously low. Endeavour only carries enough fuel for one attempt at a rendezvous.

“We are very tight on fuel, and we have to do it right the first time,” said shuttle mission director Randy Brinkley.

Endeavour lifted off at 1:27 a.m. PST, lighting up the pre-dawn darkness as it climbed into orbit. As the spacecraft rose, shuttle commander Richard Covey peered over the edge of the atmosphere and radioed: “It’s a beautiful sunrise.”

At same time, from the seaside launch site at the Kennedy Space Center, Hubble chief scientist Edward J. Weiler watched the 100-ton spacecraft diminish into a distant twinkle in a field of morning stars.

“I think my heart stopped,” he said.

It was not the first time Weiler’s hopes for the Hubble project have ridden into orbit aboard a shuttle.

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Along with hundreds of other scientists, Weiler, who has worked on the project since 1979, cheered the launch of the telescope three years ago as the dawn of a new age in astronomy, only to discover that because of a manufacturing defect in its primary mirror, the telescope could deliver only a fraction of the performance its designers had intended.

As other system failures quickly mounted, the telescope--the most sophisticated space-based observatory ever built--became an orbiting parody of extreme old age.

With flawed optics, it stares at the heavens through blurred eyes. Its solar panels are palsied, quivering each time the satellite swings from darkness into light. With three failed gyroscopes and several broken magnetometers, it is losing its sense of balance. An on-board computer suffers memory lapses.

The seven astronauts aboard Endeavour, the most experienced crew ever assembled for a shuttle flight, will try to refurbish the orbiting observatory--a task NASA officials call the most extensive and most difficult servicing mission ever attempted.

“We are going to repair and bring back to youth, if I may say, an instrument that will allow us to see deep into the past of the universe,” said Claude Nicollier, a Swiss astronaut who will operate Endeavour’s robot arm, which will hold the telescope steady while other crew members carry out repairs.

The shuttle crew is scheduled to capture the telescope on Saturday. Early Sunday, the crew will begin the first of a record five spacewalks to work on the telescope.

Astronauts Story Musgrave, Kathy Thornton, Jeff Hoffman and Tom Akers are to install $50 million worth of corrective optical devices and an upgraded $101-million wide-field planetary camera. In addition, they plan to attach new power-generating solar panels, backup gyroscopes, a new computer processor and other equipment.

If all goes according to schedule, the astronauts will replace the telescope’s faulty gyroscopes on Sunday and the quivering solar power arrays on Monday. Only after the major mechanical flaws have been fixed will astronauts install the two instruments key to correcting the telescope’s view of the universe. To aid their work, the crew has brought six times as many tools as NASA planners expect them to need--280 in all.

The astronauts spent 700 hours rehearsing the spacewalks with underwater mock-ups of the telescope. They also used a computerized virtual-reality system to simulate some maneuvers.

There are so many potential mishaps, slips and technical missteps that NASA officials have worn themselves out in the last week reviewing each one.

“The contingency plans make a stack three feet high,” said one NASA engineer.

While the astronauts draw closer to the telescope, scientists on the ground are set to begin testing the new instruments as fast as Endeavour’s crew can install them.

Said John Trauger, project manager for the redesigned planetary camera at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: “It has been so many years that we have been planning for this, and it has suddenly become quite real. In a sense, the stopwatch has started and we are going to be very busy.”

Larry Simmons, the program manager for the camera project at JPL, watched Thursday’s liftoff from the banks of the Banana River, which runs near the launch site. “The real excitement from an engineering and scientific point of view comes next week,” he said. “And the monkey will be back on us to make sure that it does what it is supposed to do.”

Some repairs will be quickly verified, but it may be weeks before scientists are certain that the telescope’s vision has been fully restored, officials said.