Patched-up Atlantis blasts off

Cape Canaveral (Florida): A patched-up Atlantis blasted off with seven astronauts on Friday on the first space shuttle flight of 2007, putting

NASA back on track after a run of bad luck and scandal that included a damaging hailstorm and a lurid love triangle.

Its big orange fuel tank covered with white blotches where the foam insulation had been repaired, the spaceship rose from its seaside launch pad with a roar and climbed into a clear and still-brightly lit sky at 7:38 pm EDT, setting a course for the international space station.

"See you in a couple weeks," Atlantis commander Rick Sturckow said shortly before lifting off.

The countdown was nearly flawless, but it appeared that something fell from the tank more than two minutes into the ascent, several seconds after the solid rocket boosters separated from Atlantis.

Falling debris from the tank poses the most danger to the shuttle from liftoff to around that point in the ascent.

Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said at a news conference that foam did fall off the tank, as expected, but that it happened too late in the ascent to be a problem. A preliminary analysis showed it didn't strike the shuttle, he said.

"The tank performed in a magnificent way, despite having several thousand repairs to it," Hale said. "(The debris) should not be a hazard that late in the flight."

The shuttle smoothly settled into orbit around the Earth.

During the 11-day flight, Atlantis astronauts will deliver a new segment and a pair of solar panels to the orbiting outpost. They will also swap out a member of the space station's crew.

The mission had been delayed for three months after a freak storm at the launch pad hurled golf-ball-size hail at Atlantis 154-foot fuel tank, putting thousands of pockmarks in its vital insulating foam and one of the orbiter's wings.

"It took us a while to get to this point, but the ship is in great shape," launch director Mike Leinbach said just before liftoff.

Over the past few months, NASA has also seen the arrest of astronaut Lisa Nowak in an alleged plot to kidnap her rival for a shuttle pilot's affections; a murder-suicide at the Johnson Space Center in Houston; and the derailment of a train carrying rocket-booster segments for future shuttle launches.

More recently, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has come under fire for suggesting that global warming may not be a problem worth wrestling with.

"We've had a tough six months for a number of different reasons," Griffin told The Associated Press hours before the liftoff. "We'd love to have a textbook launch and a textbook mission. It would just make everybody feel good."

NASA has not had a shuttle launch since December.

A hailstorm forced NASA to reduce the number of shuttle missions in 2007 from five to four. The space agency hopes to fly at least 12 construction missions besides this one to the space station, and also plans to send a crew to repair the Hubble Space Telescope before the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010.