Nighttime launch for Endeavour
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Space shuttle Endeavour soared into space early today in a rare nighttime launch.
Endeavour’s seven crew members will deliver a storage compartment for a Japanese lab to the International Space Station -- the first of three lab installments -- as well as a Canadian robot designed to help with outside maintenance.
The lab -- called Kibo, or Hope -- is so big that it will require three shuttle flights to get everything up. The storage compartment is loaded aboard Endeavour; the lab itself will fly on the next mission in May.
This is scheduled to be NASA’s longest space station mission at 16 days.
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