Historic Shuttle Launch Halted Before Liftoff

What was to be the first American spaceflight commanded by a woman was scrapped just six seconds before launch early today after on-board sensors detected a high level of hydrogen fuel in an engine compartment aboard the shuttle Columbia.

Early indications were that the problem could be traced to a faulty sensor rather than an actual fuel leak. If so, NASA officials said, the launch could be rescheduled for Wednesday or Thursday.

The abrupt end of the countdown an instant before Columbia’s main engines were to start caused a wave of anxiety to sweep through thousands of spectators who stayed up late here to see the historic launch.

Among those on hand were First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and several members of the U.S. women’s World Cup soccer team.

Air Force Col. Eileen Collins, 42, and her four-person crew quickly shut down key shuttle systems. No injuries were reported and the crew was able to get out without incident after about an hour.

“The situation is stablized,” said NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham.

With Collins in command, the Columbia was scheduled to roar into orbit just after 12:30 a.m., carrying a $2.7-billion telescope in its cargo bay.

The launch was to come on the 30th anniversary of the first manned mission to the moon.

The five-day mission was intended to lift into space the heaviest payload ever carried by a shuttle. Anchored in the aft end of the cargo bay, the Chandra X-ray Observatory weighs more than 25 tons.

Collins, a mathematician and veteran Air Force test pilot who has made two previous spaceflights, has downplayed the significance of being the first woman to occupy a shuttle’s front left seat. But both Collins’ celebrity and the list of those who were present to see the native of Elmira, N.Y., make history, grew as the week went on.

Other celebrities diappointed by the launch scrub were singer Judy Collins, who was commissioned by NASA to write a song for the occasion, and Sally Ride, who in 1983 became the first American woman in space. Ride’s former husband, astronaut Steven Hawley, 47, is one of Collins’ crewmen.

The chief task of this 95th shuttle flight was to come just seven hours into the mission when the crew was to release Chandra, an orbiting laboratory containing a telescope so powerful that it promises to provide scientists with new glimpses of cosmic mysteries such as quasars, exploding stars and even black holes--stars so dense that light cannot escape their gravitational hold.

Built by TRW Inc. of Redondo Beach, Chandra was scheduled to be cut loose from Columbia 155 miles above Earth, and then kicked into a high-altitude elliptical orbit by its own propulsion system.

Named in honor of the late Indian-American Nobel Laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the observatory is designed to have a life of at least five years as it collects and analyzes invisible radiation from deep space.

At 45 feet in length, Chandra would be the longest satellite ever launched from a shuttle and the third in NASA’s series of Great Observatories, and would join the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory in orbit.

The Boeing rocket motor that is to boost Chandra into its ultimate orbit is identical to one that malfunctioned in April aboard a $250-million missile warning satellite that is now stranded in a useless orbit.

NASA insists that the problems associated with the rocket have been fixed. But there were anxious moments even befre the countdown began. On Friday, mission managers met with TRW engineers to discuss cracks found in power systems similar to those used on Chandra. But the Chandra systems checked out.

Collins was well aware of the fuss being made over her as she prepared to shatter another gender barrier. She was introduced as crew chief last year during a White House ceremony, and she has been asked repeatedly to offer her thoughts on her assignment.

“I’m not too concerned that I’m the first woman shuttle commander,” she said recently. “What’s important now is that we fly a perfect mission. Whether you’re commanding as a man or a woman really doesn’t matter when it comes to getting the mission done.”

Asked if being a woman had been a factor in her success in a male-dominated profession, Collins replied: “I think that there will always be some people that will maybe treat you a little bit differently because of your gender, but those people . . . are few. I really don’t see that gender has really helped or hurt me.”

Nonetheless, Collins’ role and the hoopla over the 30th anniversary of the Apollo moon mission added up to another festival-like launch party for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which scored a huge publicity success last in October with John Glenn’s return to space and has been promoting gender equality. One of every four astronauts is now a woman, and NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin has been talking about putting together an all-female shuttle flight.

There is one other woman aboard this flight, mission specialist Catherine Coleman, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, who flew on Columbia in 1995. In addition to Hawley, other crew members are Navy Cmdr. Jeff Ashby, the pilot and a space rookie; and mission specialist and French astronaut Michel Tognini.