Countdown Begins for Shuttle Launch

NASA began the countdown for the launching of the space shuttle Columbia, which will conduct a 16-day research mission featuring the first spacewalk by a Japanese astronaut. Columbia’s six-member crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida soon after the countdown began for the planned blastoff at 11:46 a.m. PST Wednesday. Air Force meteorologists were predicting fair weather for the shuttle’s 2 1/2-hour launch window, and ground controllers were facing no technical problems, NASA said. The shuttle will carry a suite of microgravity experiments, an instrument to monitor the distribution of ozone in Earth’s atmosphere and a free-flying satellite to study the sun.