British astronaut blasts off on space shuttle

The US space shuttle Endeavour blasted off on one of its last scheduled missions today.

Endeavour, with six crew on board including British-born Dr Nicholas Patrick, took off in darkness from Cape Canaveral at 9.14 GMT - 4.14am in Florida - after the weekend's planned launch was scuppered by bad weather with just minutes to go.

Dr Patrick, 45, originally from Saltburn-by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire, is part of a team who will spend 13 days working on the International Space Station.

The mission - which will feature three spacewalks - comes as America prepares to scale back its space programme.

Only four more shuttle flights are scheduled.

The White House has announced it is to axe the Constellation mission, which had aimed to take space travellers back to the Moon.

Much of the money saved in the process will be directed toward new rocket technology research, the US administration has said, but there are likely to be funding cuts.

Dr Patrick is part of a small band of British-born astronauts to have made it into space.

A space veteran, he has already logged 308 hours in space.

In 2006 he was part of a seven-member Discovery crew who blasted off for a 12-day mission to the International Space Station.

Married with three children, Dr Patrick lives in Connecticut, having become a US citizen in 1994.

But his desire to explore dates back to his early years in Yorkshire when he lived close to where Captain James Cook once resided.

"We would go walking in the Yorkshire Moors, and go and see the monument that was erected to him and that's one of my earliest memories actually of wanting to be an explorer," he said in a Nasa interview.