19891776 Club
Atlantis lifts off with Galileo bound for Jupiter
Six hours later the probe separates over the Pacific, starting a six-year detour through the inner solar system to reach the outer one.
Anti-nuclear demonstrators gathered outside Kennedy Space Center that morning, protesting the plutonium packed into Galileo's power generators. At 12:53:40 EDT on October 18, 1989, Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on STS-34 anyway, carrying the Jupiter-bound probe in its cargo bay. Just over six hours later, Atlantis released Galileo and its attached booster stage, which fired the spacecraft toward Venus on the first leg of a six-year, looping path to the outer solar system. STS-34 was only the second shuttle flight ever to deploy a planetary spacecraft…
