Shuttle Endeavour climbs into the Florida night sky headed for a rendezvous with the International Space Station. Photo: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now

The shuttle Endeavour rocketed into orbit this evening on a high-stakes mission to attach a $600 million set of solar arrays to the international space station that will make the outpost one of the brightest "stars" in the night sky.

They also will provide nearly 20 kilowatts of power, enough for 15 homes on Earth, freeing NASA from dependence on electricity from smaller arrays on two Russian modules.

The Boeing-built P6 array is the largest structure ever built for deployment in space. Its two solar wings will extend 240 feet from tip to tip -- longer than the wingspan of a 747 jumbo jet -- generating more electrical power than any system ever launched.

And it is that power that will allow NASA to press ahead with launch of the U.S. laboratory module, Destiny, in late January and to begin on-board research next summer.

"I think there's going to be a very sudden shift in people's perception of international space station," said Canadian astronaut Marc Garneau. "Because suddenly it's going to look much, much bigger than it already is."

Shuttle mission STS-97 is the 11th of 88 planned space station assembly, maintenance and resupply missions and the most complex so far. Even so, says commander Brent Jett, "we think we have a pretty good chance to pull this mission off successfully."

The five member crew of shuttle Endeavour leave for the launch pad Thursday evening. Photo: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now

Jett, Garneau, pilot Michael Bloomfield and spacewalkers Joseph Tanner, Carlos Noriega suited up and began strapping in aboard Endeavour around 6:45 p.m. to await liftoff on the 101st shuttle mission.

The only technical problem of any significance in the countdown was a two-hour delay fueling the shuttle because of work earlier today to remove a loose bracket on the side of the "white room" used by astronauts to board the shuttle.

But that problem was easily corrected and Endeavour flashed to life on time at 10:06:01 p.m., the moment Earth's rotation carried the launch pad into the plane of the international space station's orbit.

Visible for hundreds of miles around, the shuttle majestically climbed skyward, wheeled about its vertical axis and streaked away on a course paralleling the East Coast of the United States.

Endeavour at sunrise on Thursday. Photo: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now

Observers at the Kennedy Space Center could see the light of its three main engines for seven minutes and 30 seconds - just one minute shy of main engine cut off - as Endeavour passed due east of New York.

It will take Jett and company two days to catch up with the international space station. Approaching from directly below, Jett will manually guide Endeavour to a linkup with a downward-facing port on the U.S. Unity module Saturday afternoon.

To make room for Endeavour, the station's on-board crew -- commander William Shepherd, cosmonaut Yuri Gidzenko and flight engineer Sergei Krikalev -- will undock an unloaded Progress supply ship from a nearby port on the Zarya module at 11:20 a.m. Friday.

The Progress vehicle will be moved to a parking orbit about 1,000 miles away while Russian engineers assess the feasibility of redocking the craft early next year to provide additional trash stowage volume.

Endeavour is scheduled to dock with PMA-3 at 2:57 p.m. Saturday. Shortly after the two craft are locked together, Garneau plans to unlimber the shuttle's robot arm and to unberth the 35,000-pound P6 array.

The truss is launched with its batteries fully drained as a safety precaution and it must be moved out of the shuttle's cargo bay as quickly as possible to keep it from getting too hot or too cold before installation.

That is scheduled for Sunday when Tanner and Noriega will venture into Endeavour's cargo bay for the first of three critical spacewalks.

The P6 array is made up of two 115-foot-long "wings" that will extend in opposite directions atop a central truss. Each wing, in turn, is made up of two 15-foot-wide flexible blankets covered with 32,800 electricity generating solar cells.

An artist's illustration of Endeavour docked to the space station with the new solar arrays unfurled. Photo: NASA
 

After attaching the P6 truss to the top of Unity's Z1 truss, Noriega and Tanner will crank the two main wing supports into place and extend the four solar array blanket boxes, two on each support, housing the folded solar blankets.

Noriega then will make electrical connections between the P6 and Z1 trusses. Both spacewalkers will stand by in Endeavour's airlock while Jett, operating a computer on Endeavour's flight deck, sends the commands that will actually unfurl the array blankets.

Extending one at a time, each two-blanket array wing will be driven open by a central mast powered by redundant motors. The open framework masts are made up of Tinker Toy-like open bays that will snap into place as they emerge from their storage canisters.

"I think the view is going to be absolutely fantastic," Tanner said. "These (arrays) are huge, they're quite colorful and I think the view from the cameras in the crew module is going to be fantastic."

The reflective array blankets will make the space station one of the brightest "stars" in the dawn or dusk sky when satellites are still in sunlight and viewers on the ground are in darkness.

NASA officials have said the station will be the third brightest "star" in the sky, second only to the moon and Sirius. But Venus and Jupiter are both brighter than Sirius and it's not clear what the station's actual magnitude will be.

It is safe to say, however, that the outpost will be one of the brightest objects in the night sky, easily visible to observers along its ground track 51.6 degrees to either side of the equator.

When the station is in direct sunlight, part of the P6 array's output will be diverted to 12 batteries. The batteries, in turn, will power the station when the lab is in orbital darkness.

The P6 array, the first of four that ultimately will be attached to the station, will generate 160-volt DC electricity, which will be stepped down to 120 volts for distribution to the rest of the space station.

All of NASA's earlier manned spacecraft operated at 28 volts DC. The higher voltage from the station's arrays allowed Boeing to save weight by using lighter wires.