Somebody's out there, somebody's waiting; Somebody's trying to tell me something.
-- from `Somebody's Trying to Tell Me Something', 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Monday, 16 October 1989
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
NASA buzzed with the excitement of a launch. Galileo was finally going
to Jupiter.
Administrators and scientists in the world's most prestigious space
agency had spent years trying to get the unmanned probe into space.
Now, on Tuesday, 17 October, if all went well, the five astronauts in
the Atlantis space shuttle would blast off from the Kennedy Space
Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with Galileo in tow. On the team's
fifth orbit, as the shuttle floated 295 kilometres above the Gulf of
Mexico, the crew would liberate the three-tonne space probe.
An hour later, as Galileo skated safely away from the shuttle, the
probe's 32500 pound booster system would fire up and NASA staff would
watch this exquisite piece of human ingenuity embark on a six-year
mission to the largest planet in the solar system. Galileo would take
a necessarily circuitous route, flying by Venus once and Earth twice
in a gravitational slingshot effort to get up enough momentum to reach
Jupiter.
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