Well, everything looked fine so far. The ascent went off without a hitch, and now they’re just coasting, waiting to do the orbital insertion burn in a few minutes. No indication that there were any anomalies at all, from what I could hear on the chatter. Good job, to all the people who worked this flight. Launch Control Team can breathe a sigh of relief, and now the Flight Control Team is in charge.

It will be interesting to see how the tiles look in an inspection at ISS, now that they’re sensitized to the issue.

[Update a little after noon]

OK, not quite perfect. The cameras caught some insulation in the act of peeling off the ET after SRB separation. No indication of damage to the Orbiter, though.

There’s a silver lining to this little cloud–it will provide more data to allow NASA to calibrate and gain confidence in their other, non-video instrumentation to detect such things, which if successful, means that they won’t have to be afraid of launching in the dark for much longer.

There are a lot of misconceptions about NASA’s decision to launch tomorrow even with another sensor failure like the one that caused the last attempt to be scrubbed almost two weeks ago. They’re on full display by some of Alan Boyle’s readers:

There are a lot of misconceptions about NASA’s decision to launch tomorrow even with another sensor failure like the one that caused the last attempt to be scrubbed almost two weeks ago. They’re on full display by some of Alan Boyle’s readers:

There are a lot of misconceptions about NASA’s decision to launch tomorrow even with another sensor failure like the one that caused the last attempt to be scrubbed almost two weeks ago. They’re on full display by some of Alan Boyle’s readers:

Jeff Foust says that, when it comes to commercial space, NASA may at long last be (in the word of Paul Dietz, a frequent commenter here) bowing to reality.

I suspect he’ll have more tomorrow at The Space Review.

Clark Lindsey also has an interesting wrap-up on the subject from Jim Muncy in Las Vegas:

Getting another “big idea” accepted is also making progress. Large scale space settlement must become the primary goal of the space program. No Antarctica-like outposts on the Moon but Las Vegas-es instead. Griffin, in fact, stated in testimony to Congress that human expansion into the solar system is his long term vision for space policy. However, this big idea is still foreign to many at NASA, in Congress, the press and the general public.

We have to continue to work to change that.