Shuttle Endeavour Takes Wing for Space Station

Space shuttle Endeavour blasted off Thursday night carrying five astronauts and giant solar wings for the international space station.

The shuttle rose promptly from its seaside pad at 10:06 p.m. EST in a brilliant blaze of light that turned night into day for miles around. It resembled a bright star as it soared through a clear sky into orbit.

“This is a beautiful night to fly,” launch director Mike Leinbach told the astronauts just before liftoff. “So we wish you luck. Have fun and give our best to Shep, Sergei and Yuri,” the space station’s three residents.

The space station, Alpha, was 230 miles above the Indian Ocean at liftoff, its residents supposedly asleep. Endeavour will catch up with the station Saturday.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who witnessed his first space shuttle flight, couldn’t help but mention the state’s election turmoil while congratulating launch controllers.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed. You all have been very busy. But there’s a lot of attention on Florida over the last couple of weeks,” Bush said, drawing a big laugh. “But I want to tell you that the best of Florida is right here, not what is being depicted on television, but what just happened right now.”

Endeavour’s cargo bay is filled with the world’s largest, most powerful set of spacecraft solar wings. The shuttle astronauts will attach the $600-million wings to the space station Sunday in NASA’s most complicated construction mission to date.

Once unfurled, the wings will stretch 240 feet from tip to tip and 38 feet across, constituting the largest structure ever deployed in space. It is one of the heaviest shuttle payloads ever, 35,000 pounds of panels, batteries and radiators.

The electricity-producing solar wings will provide the power necessary to open up the entire station and to run the U.S.-made laboratory section when it arrives in January. Alpha’s three occupants have been confined to two of the station’s three rooms because of insufficient power for heating.

Space station Cmdr. Bill Shepherd and his Russian crew, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, have been on Alpha for one month.