Endeavour blasts into orbit for NASA’s second-last shuttle flight

ENDEAVOUR blasted off on NASA’s next-to-last shuttle flight, thundering through clouds into orbit as the mission commander’s wounded wife, Gabrielle Giffords, watched along with an exhilarated crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

NASA is winding down its 30-year-old shuttle programme before embarking on something new.

The event generated the kind of excitement seldom seen on Florida’s Space Coast on such a grand scale — despite a delay of more than two weeks from the original launch date because of an electrical problem.