NASA Accountants Cheer New Shuttle Launch Roll

The space shuttle Columbia rocketed into orbit Wednesday, performing for the first time a 180-degree roll that will allow NASA to save money by closing an obsolete ground station.

The shuttle made a routine 90-degree roll seconds after blastoff to place it on course for a 170-mile-high orbit and six minutes later, for the first time, it performed the second roll of 180 degrees to allow it to communicate with mission control through a relay satellite.

Columbia completed the 40-second maneuver 70 miles above the Atlantic on its race toward space at 13 times the speed of sound.

The new procedure will allow NASA to close a tracking station on Bermuda and save about $5 million per year. The roll, which space agency managers said was not risky, will only be required on shuttle flights that head due east.

Columbia’s multinational crew includes natives of four countries: the Japanese space agency’s Takao Doi; Ukrainian cosmonaut Leonid Kadenyuk; Indian-born NASA astronaut Kalpana Chawla; and three U.S.-born astronauts, Kevin Kregel, Steven Lindsey and Winston Scott.

Doi is expected to become the first Japanese astronaut to walk in space when he ventures outside the shuttle with Scott on the sixth day of the mission.

During the six-hour spacewalk, Doi and Scott will test techniques for the construction of the planned international space station. The excursion will include tests canceled when Columbia’s spacewalk hatch jammed during a mission last year.

Kadenyuk, who trained to pilot the Soviet Union’s now defunct Buran space shuttle, is the first Ukrainian astronaut to fly on a U.S. spacecraft. He will conduct joint U.S.-Ukrainian plant experiments and broadcast to schoolchildren from orbit.

Chawla was born in Karnal, India, and came to the United States to study aeronautical engineering. She is the first Indian woman to fly in space.

*

The astronauts were supposed to tackle their first big job--releasing a solar observatory--this afternoon. But Mission Control was considering delaying the release until Friday because of problems with another spacecraft.

A 2-year-old solar observatory called Soho shut itself down Wednesday because of an unexplained spike in voltage, and engineers estimated it would take 24 hours to bring it back to normal. Soho and the Spartan satellite aboard Columbia are supposed to make simultaneous observations of the sun during the two days that Spartan flies free of the shuttle.

Scientists can achieve all their objectives even if Spartan is set loose later than planned, provided Soho is working, NASA said.

Columbia’s cargo bay is also housing a suite of microgravity experiments and an ozone instrument.