Space shuttle ready to blast off with Europe’s Columbus lab

Work on the lab started more than 22 years ago.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — To the pleasure of NASA’s international space station partners, prospects were good for an on-time liftoff of shuttle Atlantis and Europe’s long-awaited Columbus lab on Thursday.

Columbus will be the second scientific laboratory added to the space station. NASA’s Destiny lab made its debut in 2001, and Japan’s huge lab Kibo, which means hope, will go up in three sections beginning on the very next shuttle mission in February.

The shuttle’s commander, Stephen Frick, and his crew are keenly aware of how passionate the Europeans are about Columbus and how long they have waited. About 750 Europeans connected to the lab have begun gathering at the launch site, prompting one British official, Alan Thirkettle, to quip, “We’ve invaded.”

Three of Frick’s crew have waited almost 10 years for a shot at space. Frick noted that some of the scientists and engineers who have worked on Columbus have waited even longer — nearly a quarter-century — for the lab to fly.

Columbus is “our cornerstone, our baby, our module, our laboratory,” Thirkettle, the European Space Agency’s station program manager, said Wednesday.

The 17-nation European Space Agency has spent more than $7 billion so far on the space station program, including $2 billion for Columbus, Thirkettle said. That investment will reach $13 billion by the end of 2015.

For the first year or so, most of Columbus’ experiments will be operated largely from the ground, Thirkettle said. There simply isn’t the manpower in orbit; the three space station astronauts spend almost all their time on construction and maintenance work. Once the crew size doubles to six in 2009, Columbus will be able to run full blast, Thirkettle said.

“We don’t have to wait so long,” he said, laughingly referring to the more than 22 years that have passed since development of Columbus began.

The European Space Agency hopes to get at least 10 years’ use out of Columbus, but that’s still uncertain. NASA plans to pull out of the space station in 2015 and focus on the moon, which would leave the Europeans relying on their own and other countries’ cargo ships.