Its the mission where you have to destroy asteroids from the way of the cruiser that is heading to jump node in the middle of the asteroid field. And after few minutes also some shivan bombers tag along and try to destroy your cruiser.
When the mission starts, it says cruiser has 6 minutes or so to the jump point, but after it reaches the jump point, it just sits there until it is bombarded with asteroids and blows up.
Shouldnt the cruiser jump when reached way point (jump point) ? I mean when it reaches the jump point I can keep it alive about 10 minutes after it is destroyed, but since it wont jump
I CANNOT COMPLETE THE MISSION
so please, is it just me, because if it is tell me what I have missed:) or if it indeed is a bug, could you please fix it?
PS: after googling I found this video from youtube "Descent: FreeSpace - Paving the Way Part 2/2"
In it someone plays this mission through, it clearly shows that cruiser should jump almost instantly when reached the waypoint.

As far as I know, you need to destroy enough of the asteroids that have the white targeting brackets around them, or perhaps all of them. I don't think the Galatea will jump out until then.
EDIT: Ok, I looked it up and it looks like that this was some sort of design or timing issue. The Galatea has to hit the waypoint exactly more or less. However, being a hard-to-maneuver capital ship, it can sometimes miss and then spend a long time spinning around trying to hit it again.
There's a bunch of solutions for it. You can simply try the mission again and hope that the Galatea hits the waypoint properly this time. You can also try to keep it alive until it spins around enough to actually hit the waypoint which can take around 20 minutes. There's also cheating to help you skip the mission. And last, but not least, you can try using the mission editor, FRED, to fix the problem and have the Galatea only need to be within range of the waypoint to jump. Here's some instructions I found for it:
"If you open the mission up in FRED, find the GTD Galatea and select it and open it in the ships editor, you'll see an area listed as Departure Cues. The cue should be listed as something like
-are-waypoints-done-delay
--NAME OF WAYPOINT PATH
--DELAY FIGURE
Change it to:
-<
--distance
---GTD Galatea
---LAST WAPOINT IN WAYPOINT PATH
--150
If there was a delay figure in the are-waypoints-done-delay, or one in the drop-tab above that, make sure that the same figure is used in the drop-tab (or added together if there happend to be one in both).
This will cause the Galatea to jump out when it comes within 150 M of its final waypoint, rather than when it hits the waypoint precisely head-on. The only possible drawback, is if there is another crucial check in the mission (goals, debriefing stages, events) that use are-waypoints-done-delay for the Galatea and that same waypoint path."
Hope that helps.

Ive replayed the mission now for more than 15 times so trust me, its never going to hit the waypoint.
Yeah I can try that mission editing, only thing is that there is no .FSM map files in the Freespace -folder that FRED uses.
So how Im supposed to get the mission open, and then saved again properly? I use the GOG unmodified version from Freespace.
PS:Since Im not that good hacking game files or anything, if someone just could send me a save game from that point when this mission is finnished flawlessly =)

Ugh, they don't make it easy... and yeah, I'm not much into game hacking either, I just thought it would be simpler than this.
Read up on this some more, and it looks like that everything having to do with the game is in .VP files. My guess is that it's hidden in that big FREESPACE.VP file in the DATA folder. Anyhow, I found a program called VPVIEW that should allow you to extract files from there. Here's the link:
[url=]http://www.descent-network.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi?file=/descman/modules/vpview.w32/vpvw20b5.exe&desc=Descent_Manager_VPVIEW32_V2.0_Beta_for_Windows_95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP&size=641[/url]
I haven't played this game in a while, so I don't have a save for you unfortunately. However, I did find some cheats on gamefaqs.com that includes automatically completing your goals, which hopefully allows you to just skip all this. Here's the link for that:
[url=]http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/code/197099.html[/url]

Hehe I found an UNIVERSAL solution:
Bought FS2 from here on GOG. Installed FSO (FreeSpaceOpen) onto it and with it came the FSport -mod, which allows you to play 100% working original FS1 campaing with up-to-date 2008 grapchics!
The game (FS1) looks AWESOME, and I got through that mission no problems.

Nice! I'll have to remember that the next time I play Freespace.

I have to set this indirect comment as solution:) Because You gave me the idea of FSport and I think that EVERYONE who plays FS1 should play it through FS2/FSO.
Thank you.

I'm running into this bug. Is it going to be fixed?

I don't think this should be marked as solved. The solution to the problem can not be playing mods of another game!

@ethanpd already figured out the only two solutions. And there really are only two solutions: replay the mission and hope the Galatea hits the waypoint properly, or edit the mission.

Now, here's an extra tip: the waypoint behavior probably depends on the random number generator, and the random number generator is buggy, in a mathematical sense, in both FS1 and FS2. (It was later fixed in the open source project.)

Basically, the game isn't sufficiently random. So instead of replaying the mission immediately, wait 24 hours before replaying it. That should do the trick.

Hello, I was having so much trouble with this mission because of the bugs described above that I decided to edit the mission in the way ethanpd described to make sure the Galatea doesn't get stuck.

Here's a link to the modified mission I created. You can extract included Data folder in your Freespace root directory. This will cause the modified mission to overwrite the one inside of root.vp. It is identical to the base mission aside from changing the conditions for the Galatea's departure to be distance based instead of perfectly hitting the waypoint. The departure voice message scripting was also adjusted accordingly.

Edit: I ran into a similar mission with the Hope in the mission "A Failure to Communicate". I've similarly altered the script for that mission to prevent this from happening. This also accounts for the alternative scenario where the Pinnacle is substituted for the Hope if the Hope was destroyed in a previous mission. This updated mission has been added to the below zip file.

Edit 2: I've once again ran into the same issue with Clash of the Titans. The zip file has been updated with a fixed mission.

Edit 3: I've fixed a similar issue in The Great Hunt. This one's not a big deal, but the Lucifer is intended to jump at the beginning of the mission rather than get stuck on the waypoint. Again, the zip file has been updated to contain all the fixed missions.

In my experimentation with this bug, I've also found another workaround, albeit an ugly one that requires you to be a bit conscious of the mission's scripting.

If you enable time compression (Shift+Comma, Shift+Period by default) just before the ship hits the waypoints, it'll usually work. This works too when the ship gets stuck on a waypoint to get them unstuck, but it can still take them a few (real-time) seconds to align and then complete the waypoint.

You can check how close the ship is to their waypoints by targeting them. Usually it's a friendly ship on your escort list, so you can target them quickly with E. When a friendly is targeted, it'll show a waypoint ETA on the HUD. Ideally you should enable time compression just before they hit the waypoint, e.g. 30 seconds before. You can tell a ship is stuck if their waypoint ETA is hovering around 0-1 seconds and never clears.

Dude you are a legend! I ran into this bug (on the Failure to Communicate mission, specifically) on three consecutive attempts last night and was feeling pretty bummed about it. Especially because my free time these days is rather limited (compared to when I first played this game as a teen way back when, that is). You saved the day!