Third time's the charm for shuttle launch

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Discovery, trailing a tail of yellow fire and billowing gray smoke, launched into central Florida's dazzling summer sky Tuesday like an outsize Independence Day Roman candle.

After two weather delays over the weekend and questions about lost insulation foam from the orbiter's external fuel tank, Discovery enjoyed an incident-free countdown on its way to the first-ever launch of a space shuttle on the Fourth of July.

Shuttle Project Manager Wayne Hale said the external tank "performed very well indeed." He said there were five instances of foam loss during launch, but "we saw nothing that gives us any concern about the health of the vehicle."

Astronaut Michael Fossum had reported that heat-shielding fabric came loose from the orbiter, but it was, in fact, ice that drifted away from the nozzles of the shuttle's main engines, which are cooled with liquid hydrogen during launch, Hale said.

"We have seen it come off several times," Hale said at a news conference. "You look at it and you say it's got to be fabric, but it's clearly ice."

He said NASA engineers would continue analyzing launch photography and imagery over the next few days. In addition, a painstaking on-board inspection of the orbiter will consume most of the crew's first day in space today.

Hale told reporters that all the incidents of foam loss from the tank occurred at least 2 minutes 53 seconds after launch, well after what engineers regard as the danger period for damage to the orbiter. Impacts that occur less than a minute after launch do no harm because the shuttle has not built up enough speed, while impacts after 2 minutes 15 seconds have no effect because the atmosphere is so thin.

Videotape of the external tank showed that most of the debris incidents involved pieces of foam falling away in an almost spraylike pattern, and Hale said all but perhaps one fragment were smaller than the smallest piece that engineers believe could endanger the orbiter.

Liftoff followed a tense off-day in which engineers studied the loss Sunday of a piece of foam insulation from the external tank, finally deciding the mishap posed no problems for launch.

Despite what appeared to be a minor glitch in launch preparations, any problem with external tank foam rates major attention from NASA in the aftermath of the 2003 loss of the space shuttle Columbia. It disintegrated on re-entry after a large piece of foam breached the orbiter's heat shielding during launch.

Foam loss during a launch last July grounded the shuttle fleet for a year, and Tuesday's launch was preceded by prolonged disagreement among top NASA officials over whether engineers should have first redesigned foam insulation covering brackets that hold pressure lines and cables to the side of the orbiter's external fuel tank.

Discovery will deliver German astronaut Thomas Reiter to the space station, where he will join Commander Pavel Vinogradov of Russia and Flight Engineer Jeffrey Williams of the United States, bringing the station's crew up to its normal complement of three for the first time since the Columbia tragedy. Reiter will stay aboard for about six months.

Discovery's 12-day mission will focus on spacewalks to test new shuttle equipment and repair station machinery.