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“What a beautiful launch we had this morning… the orbiter performed extremely well,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations, during the STS-130 postlaunch news conference. “This is a great start to a very complicated mission.”
Jean-Jacques Dordain, European Space Agency director general, thanked NASA, the crew and the ground teams for “a very beautiful launch.” Dordain said, “It was an important event. Even more important for us because the shuttle was full of European hardware.”
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html
