The camera system was installed at a cost of $760,000. Intended for use by NASA's public affairs office, the incredible views also might help engineers better understand how the shuttle's fragile heat-protection tiles are damaged during launch by ice crystals and debris falling from the external tank.
The video was near perfect until the twin solid rocket boosters were jettisoned. That's when exhaust from the separation motors smudged the camera lens and made the rest of the video difficult to see. Although Atlantis' separation from the external tank could be made out as a sort of dark, ghostly image.
"For what there was of it, it was a spectacular, unique view of Atlantis leaving the planet," said mission commentator Rob Navias, a Johnson Space Center public affairs manager who was instrumental in arranging the video's presentation on NASA TV.
Next stop for Atlantis: a docking with the International Space Station at 11:29 a.m. EDT (1529 GMT) Wednesday.
Today's launch was timed to coincide with when the outpost's orbital plane crossed over the launch site. The crew will now spend the next two days catching up to the station by adjusting Atlantis' orbit with its onboard thrusters and maneuvering engines.
On Tuesday the crew is to spend time continuing to set up the shuttle for its planned 11-day stay in space, check out Atlantis' robot arm and begin preparing their spacesuits for a trio of spacewalks.
In addition to Ashby, Atlantis' team includes pilot Pam Melroy, mission specialist Sandy Magnus, cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and spacewalkers Dave Wolf and Piers Sellers. Magnus, Sellers and Yurchikhin are the rookies on this flight, while Wolf is the most experienced crewmember having served aboard the Russian space station Mir for 119 days during 1997-98.
The flight plan
The main goal of this fourth flight of the year is to attach a $390 million truss segment to one already bolted to the ISS. Known as S-One (S1), the 45-foot-long (13.7-meter) truss holds three radiators and much of the plumbing that will be required to keep the entire complex cool once additional modules and power-generating solar arrays are added in the future.
"Overall, it's almost mind-boggling what we're doing putting this thing together," station program manager Bill Gerstenmaier said during a pre-flight interview.
Three spacewalks will be required to make all the electrical, mechanical and other connections between the Boeing-built S1 and S-Zero (S0) trusses. The S0 truss was bolted atop the Destiny science module during Atlantis' last mission to the outpost in April.
"It's hard to convey in words what we're really doing. The thing that's challenging about this is this is the first time we've ever attached two truss segments together," said station program manager Bill Gerstenmaier. "You have all of the connectors and fluid lines that have to be mated. There's all the electrical stuff. There are new computers out there that have to interface with the other computers on the station."
The two segments are among 11 planned for the station and that will eventually stretch the length of a football field. Once assembled, the outpost will have the power-generating and heat-dispelling capability to support adding international science laboratory modules from Japan and the European Space Agency.
"I think the way to look at it is, if you're building the railway between New York and San Francisco 150 years ago or something, we're laying down the bit that comes up to the Appalachians. One of the first chunks," Sellers said during a pre-flight interview.
During Atlantis' mission there also will be time for a few science experiments, as well as the transfer of several hundred pounds of supplies to the station. A new treadmill for the space station's current Expedition Five crew of Valery Korzun, Sergei Treschev and Peggy Whitson also is to be installed.
If the schedule holds up as planned, a docking on Wednesday will be followed by the truss installation and first spacewalk on Thursday. Spacewalks two and three will happen on Saturday and next Monday, Oct. 14, respectively.
Atlantis is scheduled to undock from the station on Oct. 16 and land back in Florida just before noon EDT (1600 GMT) on Friday, Oct. 18.
Launch delays
Atlantis originally was supposed to fly more than a month sooner in August, after a science research mission was flown in July using shuttle Columbia. Endeavour was to fly to the station this month to replace the Expedition Five crew aboard the orbiting complex.
All that changed on June 17 when a sharp-eyed inspector found tiny cracks within the plumbing of Atlantis' propulsion system.
The cracks were in metal flow liners inside the main liquid hydrogen fuel lines that feed the shuttle's three Rocketdyne main engines. Checks of the rest of the orbiter fleet turned up a similar problem. Even an old test article once used on an engine stand in Mississippi sported the same fault.
Although there were no cracks in the actual fuel pipes themselves, the concern was that metal pieces from the flow liners might break off from an expanding crack and fly into the engines.
Such debris in a worst case could trigger a catastrophic engine shutdown, which in turn could lead to the loss of the crew and the shuttle. The problem was serious enough to put a halt to all shuttle processing work and keep the fleet grounded through most of the summer while NASA mobilized its engineering resources to come up with a solution.
By the time the fix was selected, tested, practiced and implemented, several weeks had passed and the space agency was forced to shuffle its schedule so that the higher-priority station-related missions would not be delayed too long. Paying the highest price was shuttle Columbia's science research mission, which was delayed from July to next January.
Atlantis wound up targeted for launch in late September. However, the agency pushed the launch date to Oct. 2 due to the repair of cracked bearings that were found in the crawler transporters that move the shuttles out to their launch pads at KSC.
And then Hurricane Lili entered the picture.
In another space program first, Atlantis' mission was delayed because of bad weather at Mission Control in Houston. Hurricane Lili was spinning in the Gulf of Mexico last week on a path that put the greater Houston area on the extreme western edge of the warning area.
Faced with the possibility of evacuating the Johnson Space Center, officials began working through their procedures to shut down the Mission Control rooms that monitor space station and space shuttle operations. By Wednesday night that work was complete and Lili turned more to the north, away from Houston.
The next morning the computer systems were turned back on, but still required several days of tests to make sure they were ready to support the missions again. By Saturday night that work was complete, in plenty of time for activation of Atlantis' communication and network systems on Sunday.
A pair of last-minute technical problems cropped up during the weekend but were easily solved in time to begin filling Atlantis' external tank with its half-million gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen at 6:20 a.m. EDT (1020 GMT) today.
A launch pad problem was solved by sending a team out to reset a trio of circuit breakers.
And the Air Force reported a half-dozen "innocent intrusions" into the restricted airspace over Central Florida. Four involved small Cessna aircraft and two were ultralights. All six were intercepted by F-15 jets more than three hours before launch.
The tight security now present around and over the Canaveral Spaceport for every shuttle launch is the direct result of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on America.
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