"With this flight I believe that we finally became a real partner of the (space station) project, not just one of the members on the list, after 20 some years of effort in the project," said Keiji Tachikawa, head of the Japanese Space agency.
Work on the space station project began in the mid-1980s, with preliminary design work for Kibo (pronounced KEE'-boh) starting in 1990. Space station construction, however, was stalled over the years for various reasons, most recently the 2003 Columbia tragedy.
The main part of the Kibo lab will fly on the next shuttle mission in May, with the final installment, a porch for outdoor experiments, going up next year.
Altogether the Japanese Space Agency has invested about 6.7 billion U.S. dollars in the space station program, including a Kibo control center near Tokyo.
Canada's 200-million-plus-U.S.-dollar Dextre, meanwhile, is designed to eventually take over some of the more routine outdoor maintenance chores from spacewalking astronauts. Dextre, short for "dexterous" and pronounced like "Dexter," will join the space station's Canadian-built robot arm, already in orbit for seven years.
In addition to working with their international payloads, Endeavour's astronauts will try out a caulking gun and high-tech goo on deliberately damaged shuttle thermal tile samples.
The test—part of NASA's ongoing post-Columbia safety effort—should have been performed last year but was put off because of emergency space station repairs.
Astronaut Garrett Reisman will stay behind on the space station until June, swapping places with a Frenchman who accompanied Europe's Columbus lab into orbit in February.
A Japanese astronaut is also part of Endeavour's all-male crew.
The Launch
Endeavour's countdown was the smoothest in years, officials said. Shortly after liftoff, however, the astronauts had to deal with a couple of problems that ended up being minor.
They got alert messages for some of their ship's steering thrusters, but it turned out to be a bad electronics card. Then the primary cooling system failed, and they had to switch to the backup.
A cursory look at the initial launch images—fewer than usual because of the nighttime launch—showed only one significant loss of debris from the external fuel tank 83 seconds into the flight. But it appeared to miss the right wing.
In any event, Endeavour will be checked thoroughly in orbit for any potential damage, standard procedure ever since the loss of Columbia because of a foam strike.
"This is just a wonderful beginning to what's going to be a long and challenging mission for us," said LeRoy Cain, a shuttle manager who gave the final "go" for launch. "But we're really looking forward to it and we're ready to go, ready to get to work on orbit."
It is the second of six planned shuttle missions this year, all but one to the space station. NASA faces a 2010 deadline for finishing the station and retiring its shuttles.
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