GARDINER -- What do black holes in space and a long-haul trucker from Gardiner have in common?

The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, NASA's most powerful space observatory.

The telescope blasted into space from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 12:05 p.m. Wednesday to begin a five-to 10-year mission orbiting earth.

In the decade it took to conceptualize, design, build, test and launch the telescope, moving the observatory was one of the few times the $850 million project would have been exposed to failure, according to Scott Clough, NASA's instrument systems engineer.

That is why Jeff Crane, of Gardiner, a trucker for 30 years, is the only person allowed to transport the telescope, which is known by its acronym.

"Jeff moved GLAST or major portions of GLAST across the country five times," Clough said. "Not once did we have any issues with our transport. Being such an expensive and delicate observatory, we travel with redundant sets of instrumentation, including temperature, humidity and shock recorders. This monitoring is required to ensure that the hardware being shipped is not compromised during shipment."

GLAST, the first imaging gamma-ray observatory, will explore the most extreme environments in the universe, Clough said. The telescope will detect thousands of gamma-ray sources, most of which will be supermassive black holes in the cores of distant galaxies.

After a final meeting of scientists, engineers, technicians and officials on Wednesday, the observatory received the final "Ready to Go!" from all teams. The telescope was launched on United Launch Alliance's Delta II Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral.

Crane stood by Wednesday morning and waited to see if the launch would take place.

He had to take the huge empty crate in which the telescope was transported back to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"I'm waiting outside down here in Florida with the big huge empty crates in anticipation that this thing will take off today," Crane said in a telephone interview before launch Wednesday. "I'm going back to D.C., then come back down here and pick up my trailer, which will be loaded with all the launch computers and stuff and take that back to the Goddard Space Flight Center."

Crane is employed by VIP Transport Inc., and is an agent for the Mayflower moving company in Corona, Calif.

The father of five and grandfather to seven lives in Gardiner with his wife, Jacqueline, who rides along with her husband in the winter.

"I don't see him otherwise," she said. "He's home 40 days a year. When I go with him I meet all of his friends and the people he works with. They're all real nice. Anyways, it's cold here. So I'm in Florida where the weather is warm."

She said her husband doesn't just haul the telescope but is a member of NASA's team.

Clough said Crane's professionalism has shown through, as he has had to endure multiple NASA engineers and managers watching over his shoulder questioning how items are being secured.

"He demonstrated more patience than I did," Clough said. "Jeff's experience with NASA personnel watching over his shoulder did not end with loading and unloading his loads. He also had a bus full of NASA personnel following him on all of the trips, monitoring the shock, temperature and humidity instrumentation on our hardware. But riding on that bus gave me the opportunity to see Jeff in action. Not once did I see anything that made me question the security of the observatory."

Crane's stepson, Mark Coulombe, of Randolph, said the weather often affects his stepdad's schedule.

Crane had been waiting in Florida for a week for the launch to get the go-ahead. NASA initially targeted June 7 for the launch, but the rocket's flight termination system battery needed to be replaced.

But even with those kinds of delays, Coulombe said his stepfather couldn't have a more interesting job.

"I just think it's very, very cool what he's doing, and the fact he's been doing it for quite a while," Coulombe said.

Crane said he hopes to head home soon for a visit, but summer is his busiest time.

After the launch on Wednesday, he was off to another job. Relocating a medical laboratory from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City to the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

"Then I have to do something else for NASA, bringing a load down here to Florida for some other project," Crane said.

"I'm extremely proud to be a part of what America's doing with space research."

Mechele Cooper -- 623-3811, Ext. 408

mcooper@centralmaine.com