Oldest Shuttle Lifts Off With Oldest Astronaut, 61

America’s oldest space shuttle and NASA’s oldest active astronaut, 61-year-old Story Musgrave, rocketed away Tuesday on a busy scientific mission that will include a Thanksgiving Day spacewalk.

One of the mission’s top priorities was the launch late Tuesday of a joint NASA-German Space Agency satellite equipped with an ultraviolet telescope to study the birth and death of stars. The reusable ORFEUS-SPAS satellite will be retrieved after 14 days of autonomous operation.

A second satellite, designed to grow near-perfect semiconductors in the vacuum of space, will be launched Friday and hauled back aboard three days later.

“This is one of those missions that a few years ago you wouldn’t dream would have been possible, the number of things we have going on for just five people to share,” commander Kenneth Cockrell said before launch.

Running nearly three weeks late because of technical concerns and bad weather, Cockrell, pilot Kent Rominger, Thomas Jones, Tamara Jernigan and Musgrave blasted off aboard the veteran shuttle Columbia for NASA’s seventh and final flight of 1996.

“Save us some leftovers from that turkey day dinner,” Cockrell radioed the launch control team. “We’ll see you next month.”

Liftoff came about three minutes late because of last-minute concerns about a small hydrogen leak in the shuttle’s aft engine compartment. After an unplanned hold in the countdown at the 31-second mark, engineers concluded that the leak rate was within allowable limits and Columbia was cleared for launch on the 80th shuttle mission.

Jones and Jernigan plan to stage two spacewalks midway through the mission, the first on Thanksgiving night, to test tools and procedures needed to build the international space station.

For Musgrave, who joined NASA in 1967 and first flew in space in 1983, blastoff marked the beginning of the end: his sixth and final shuttle mission, tying a world record set by astronaut John Young in 1983. He is in good health, but NASA managers told Musgrave when he was selected for Columbia’s mission not to expect another.