At last we have shuttle liftoff

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space shuttle Discovery, trailing a tail of yellow fire and billowing gray smoke, launched into a 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 in 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.”

A report by Astronaut Michael Fossum that heat shielding fabric had come loose from the orbiter was, Hale said, in fact ice that drifted away from the nozzles of the shuttle’s main engines, which are cooled with liquid hydrogen during launch.

“We have seen it come off several times,” Hale said. a”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. In addition, a painstaking on-board inspection of the orbiter will consume most of the crew’s first day in space today.

Mission Commander Steven Lindsey and the six other members of Discovery’s crew, wearing bright-orange launch suits, left the crew’s quarters shortly before 11 a.m. All except European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter, a German national, waved American flags. Reiter had a German flag.

“I can’t think of a better place to be on the Fourth of July,” Lindsey said.