First of all, happy new year to all Spaceuropeans out there! I hope the recent festivities have been a time of rest, fun and sumptuous meals. They certainly have been for me.

Now, back to the subject matter. The Columbus we are talking about is not the Genoese sailor who accidentally stumbled into America back in 1492. We mean the orbiting laboratory built by the European Space Agency for the International Space Station. This high-tech cylinder, seven metres long and 4.5 metres wide, will host several scientific experiments, both by ESA and NASA, during its projected 10-year lifespan. We can see it below, all packed up and ready to be shipped from Bremen airport (photo Oliver Amend).

Columbus ready to be shipped

You may have heard a flurry of frantic news items about Columbus last December. Its launch on board the Atlantis Space Shuttle was given as imminent, then delayed and rescheduled several times because of various technical problems, until an eerie silence shrouded it all... what happened then? Did they give up?

Not really, they are still trying, although according to the latest news there will be no launch attempt earlier than 24 January. There's no better place than the official Columbus blog to follow the moving tale of heroic engineers tirelessly patching up the venerable Atlantis (first flight in 1985) to make it hop into orbit one more time.

But you know what? It doesn't really matter. The launch of Columbus was originally planned to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the famous voyage by that other Columbus. Just do the math and you'll find out that we are now sixteen years late. Are we going to worry about a few more weeks, seriously?