Third time's the charm for shuttle liftoff

Space Shuttle Columbia blasts off
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July 23, 1999
Web posted at: 12:36 a.m. EDT (0436 GMT)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (CNN) -- The first U.S. space mission to be commanded by a woman lifted off Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center following two failed launch attempts earlier this week.

Air Force Col. Eileen Collins, 42, is leading the crew on a mission to deploy the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the heaviest payload ever carried by the space shuttle.

The launch followed two "scrubs," or aborted liftoffs, earlier this week. A faulty sensor reading caused Tuesday's scrub in the countdown's final seconds and thunderstorms on Thursday prevented a launch that day.

To increase the odds of getting Columbia into orbit Friday, NASA on Thursday extended the 46-minute launch window to 116 minutes.

If all goes well on the STS-93 mission, Columbia also will release the space telescope payload seven hours into flight.

The 50,000-pound Chandra observatory is a sister satellite to the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronauts and astronomers call the five-day flight one of the most important scientific space missions in recent years.

The initial launch date was to mark the 30th anniversary of the first human footsteps on the moon -- made by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong. Instead, the launch came three days later.

Chandra is the third in NASA's series of major observatories. It follows the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 to study the universe's visible light. The next year, the Compton Space Observatory was launched to study gamma rays.

The costs to build and design Chandra, as well as to launch it and oversee the mission for the coming five years, put the total price tag at $2.78 billion, making it one of NASA's most expensive missions.

Collins, an Elmira, New York, native became an astronaut in 1990 and trained for 15 months with her crew for STS-93. The flight is her third shuttle mission.

The crew also includes pilot Jeff Ashby, a U.S. Navy captain; mission specialist Steve Hawley, a NASA astronaut with a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics; mission specialist Cady Coleman, an Air Force colonel who will oversee the release of Chandra into space; and mission specialist Michel Tognini, a test and fighter pilot and French air force colonel.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.