"We were really happy to take part in delivering Expedition Three to orbit and they're having a great mission right now up there on the space station, " Horowitz told reporters after inspecting Discovery with fellow shuttle crewmembers Rick Sturckow, Dan Barry and Pat Forrester.
The vehicle left the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana at 23:06 local time on Monday (02:06 GMT, Tuesday), placing three satellites in orbit.
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Hong-Sheng Zhao of Leiden University in the Netherlands calculates that a close encounter with another one of the Milky Way's satellites, the Large Magellanic Cloud, could have knocked Sgr into a closer orbit two or three billion years ago.
In preparation, four Earth orbital Mercury launches (carrying one astronaut each), one suborbital and nine Earth orbital Gemini flights (two astronauts each), two Earth orbital Apollo tests (three astronauts each), and two orbit tests made the lunar landings possible.
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J-1's muscular new engines should allow it to put three times the payload of its predecessor into orbit.
The Mars Observer, launched in 1992, dropped out of sight three days before it was scheduled to enter orbit.
So far, the research team has identified three planets circling Kepler-30, all of which orbit the star in the same plane.
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The award would be presented to each crewmember from all 12 three-man Apollo missions, including the Apollo 7 and 9 Earth-orbit flights as well as the Apollo 1 crew, which perished in a launch pad fire in 1967.
By launching closer to the equator, the rocket receives a bigger boost from the Earth's rotation, meaning it can lift nearly double the mass of a normal Baikonur payload - a maximum of three tonnes, as opposed to 1.7 tonnes, into a geosynchronous orbit 36, 000km above the Earth.
Whereas the orbiter could carry seven people at a time into orbit, the Russian Soyuz capsules being used at the moment will only ferry three individuals per flight.
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