Nasa delays shuttle launch

The launch of the US space shuttle Endeavour was delayed at least 48 hours Friday due to a technical failure with the shuttle's heating units that arose shortly before liftoff, Nasa said.

Engineers were working to determine what caused the problem, which postponed until at least Sunday the shuttle's last journey to the International Space Station and what will be the second to last shuttle flight ever.

“Endeavour's launch has been scrubbed for at least 48 hours because of an issue with Auxiliary Power Unit 1 heaters,” the US space agency said.

Mission control said the delay could possibly last longer than 48 hours, and a press briefing was expected in the afternoon to discuss the problem.

The news came as a disappointment to as many as 750 000 onlookers who had converged on the area around Cape Canaveral to catch a glimpse of the shuttle's blast-off.

President Barack Obama and the wounded wife of shuttle commander Mark Kelly, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, were among the more than 100 dignitaries who planned to attend.

Giffords was shot in the head at a neighbourhood political gathering in January but was allowed by her doctors in Houston, Texas to take a break from rehab in order to watch the launch from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

The shuttle Endeavour is the youngest of the three-member space flying fleet. It was built in the wake of the Challenger disaster in 1986 and flew its first mission to space in 1991.

Discovery, the oldest, flew its last mission in February and March, and is in the process of being stripped of all its valuable components ahead of its retirement in a museum on the edge of the US capital Washington.

Endeavour will carry a $2 billion, seven-ton particle physics detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2, which will be left at the space station to scour the universe for clues as to how it all began.

There have been six space shuttles in all, including Endeavour, Atlantis and Discovery.

Enterprise was a prototype that never flew in space; Challenger exploded after liftoff in 1986, killing all seven on board and Columbia disintegrated on its return to Earth in 2003, also killing seven astronauts. - Sapa-AFP