A British astronaut was celebrating his first day in space yesterday after a spectacular shuttle launch that turned the Florida night sky to day and sealed a new dawn for Nasa.

Nicholas Patrick and six crewmates streaked into orbit at 17,500mph after dismal weather conditions suddenly cleared over Cape Canaveral to allow Nasa’s first night-time launch in four years.

At the moment of ignition, the explosion from Discovery’s 500,000 gallons of fuel lit up the sky for 30 miles and the spacecraft was visible across much of the eastern US as it climbed aloft trailing a blinding fireball, on route to the International Space Station.

“What you have seen today was the successful accomplishment of the most challenging, demanding, technically state-of-the-art, difficult thing that this nation or any nation can do,” Michael Griffin, the head of Nasa, said.

The launch rounded off a triumphant hat-trick for the US space agency, which last week announced two momentous developments — confirmation that water exists on Mars, and a plan for building the first manned base on the Moon within 20 years.

Before the Columbia disaster in 2003, Nasa lacked the ambition to venture beyond the International Space Station, Dr Griffin admitted, leaving many — including himself — sceptical about its value.

But the catastrophe, which cost the lives of seven astronauts, highlighted Nasa’s shortcomings and prompted changes that have led to a more purposeful agenda for wider exploration of the solar system, including returning Man to the Moon and then on to Mars.

“The space station is now a stepping stone on the way to that, rather than being the end of the line,” he said.

“On the space station we will learn how to live and work in space, we will learn how to make hardware survive and function for three years that we will need if we are going to go to Mars . . . we have to learn how to live on other planetary surfaces and use what we find there and bend it to our will, just as the pilgrims did when they came to what is now New England,” Dr Griffin said.

“The space station now has a role in this larger plan. Over the next four years we will systematically complete the space station, we will expand to a crew of six, they will begin to do more and more productive work . . . Yes, it will take us a generation to get to Mars, but it will be a busy generation.”

Dr Griffin, who was appointed the head of Nasa after the Columbia disaster, added: “What the US is doing with its space programme has changed, is changing.”

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