Shuttle Soars Aloft With Aquatic Animals

The space shuttle Columbia roared through clouds into orbit Friday, beginning a scheduled two-week mission to study the development of aquatic animals and cells.

NASA officials fretted throughout the morning that storms might interfere with liftoff. But the weather cooperated and the shuttle blasted off at 9:43 a.m. PDT.

It was the first shuttle launch since April and the fourth this year.

A puff of some material briefly appeared near the right solid-rocket booster about a minute into the flight as Columbia streaked over the Atlantic Ocean. Shuttle manager Loren Shriver said it probably was condensation created by shock waves, but he asked flight controllers to check their data as a precaution.

Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston also had to cope with a computer problem in the final minutes of the countdown. Some of their monitors were off by nearly a second, but they worked around the problem.

Once settled in a 184-mile-high orbit, the seven astronauts began powering up the bus-sized laboratory in the shuttle cargo bay. The crew includes Dr. Chiaki Mukai, the first Japanese woman in space.

Columbia is carrying a variety of Japanese fish, newts and sea urchins as well as toad eggs. There also are flies, slime mold, mouse bones, roots, cress and lentil seedlings, day lily cells, yeast cells, and human and mouse white blood cells.

More than 80 experiments are planned, with more than 200 scientists from around the world participating. Shriver called the mission “a stepping stone into the space station program.”

Columbia is scheduled to return to the space center on July 22.