Live in orbit: Mission continues; managers marvel

Pilot Alan Poindexter shows "thumbs up".

Shuttle Atlantis and its astronauts are closing in on the International Space Station as managers marvel at the mint-condition spaceship.

A day after its thundering launch from Kennedy Space Center, NASA engineers are tracking absolutely no problems with Atlantis and it appears that the spaceship came through its climb into orbit unscathed.

"The vehicle could not be performing better," said John Shannon, NASA's deputy shuttle program manager and chairman of its Mission Management Team. "I have never walked up into the engineering room that tracks every little problem that we have on the vehicle and seen a completely blank board. I mean, it is completely blank."

A preliminary look at imagery gathered during launch also indicates that foam loss from the shuttle's external tank was minimal and it appears no damage was done to critical heat-shield components.

Two small pieces of debris were spotted about 70 seconds and 110 seconds into flight, but neither appeared to hit the orbiter, Shannon said. Their mass also was too little to cause damage, he said.

A third piece of debris was seen 440 seconds into flight, and it looked as if it struck fragile thermal tiles that line the underside of the orbiter. But Atlantis was well above the atmosphere at that point, and the debris could not have generated enough kinetic energy in weightless space to do damage.

Atlantis and its crew now are trailing the international outpost by about 5,750 statute miles, closing at a rate of about 575 miles per 90-minute orbit.

With mission commander Stephen Frick at the controls, the shuttle will begin the final stages of a ground-up rendezvous at about 9:36 a.m. EST Saturday. The orbiter will be about nine miles below and behind the outpost at the time.

Atlantis is scheduled to dock at the station at 12:24 p.m. EST Saturday.

You can watch live, round-the-clock NASA TV coverage of the Atlantis mission right here in The Flame Trench. Simply click the link below the image above to launch our NASA TV viewer.