Astronauts board space shuttle Atlantis

Steve Mort, Cape Canaveral
The space shuttle Atlantis has blasted off following two months of delay because of faulty fuel sensors.

The orbiter is carrying the European Columbus science lab to the International Space Station, as well as a drawing by a South African student who won a competition to raise awareness of child abuse.

The National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) earlier feared bad weather might have forced it to push the launch of Atlantis back yet again. Weather forecasts had put the chance of bad weather scrubbing the launch at 70% - just hours before lift-off.

Earlier, NASA managed successfully to fuel the shuttle without a repeat of the fuel gauge, or ECO sensor, problems that have delayed the launch of Atlantis since December. Launch Director Doug Lyons says it came as a relief.

While in space, European Space Agency astronaut Leypold Eyharts will display a picture drawn by a 15-year-old South African student, Dewald Prins, from John Vorster High School in Nigel. The image will be beamed back to earth.

The picture took joint first prize out of hundreds of entries in an international competition last year hosted by Celebrities for Humanity Foundation in South Africa to raise awareness of work to combat child abuse.

But before the picture can be displayed from the heavens, NASA has to begin installing the $2 billion high-tech European laboratory - Columbus - which has been 23 years in the making. NASA administrator Mike Griffin says it's a major step forward.