Shuttle Endeavour blasts off

The 4:14 a.m. EST (9:14 a.m. British time) blastoff from the Kennedy Space Centre shattered the predawn tranquillity with a deafening roar and a brilliant tower of flames that momentarily turned the dark Florida sky as bright as day.

"What a beautiful launch we had this morning," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space flight. "This is a great start to a very complicated mission."

Low clouds forced NASA to postpone Endeavour's first launch attempt on Sunday morning. Scattered clouds rolled in off the Atlantic on Monday morning as well, but cleared enough for Endeavour to slip through and begin its 13-day mission.

The shuttle carries the station's last connecting hub and a dome-shaped cupola with seven windows to provide the crew with panoramic views outside the station. Endeavour's crew is to install them during three spacewalks.

The modules were built in Italy for NASA and will complete U.S. assembly of the orbital outpost, a $100 billion (64.2 billion pounds) project of 16 nations that has been under construction since 1998.

Four more shuttle missions remain to deliver cargo platforms, spare parts and experiments before the fleet is retired later this year. Monday's launch was the last scheduled to take place in the dark.

"Every launch is a little bittersweet," said Mike Moses, a shuttle program manager at the Kennedy Space Centre. "We're one closer to the end."

The Endeavour crew includes commander George Zamka, pilot Terry Virts, flight engineer Stephen Robinson, spacewalkers Robert Behnken and Nicholas Patrick and mission specialist Kay Hire. The shuttle is scheduled to reach the station on Wednesday for a nine-day stay.

A couple of small pieces of insulating foam broke off Endeavour's external fuel tank during launch but did not appear to cause any damage to the spaceship, Gerstenmaier said.