This story
was updated at 6:31 p.m. EDT.
NASA's space shuttle Endeavour is officially set to blast off toward the
International Space Station on June 13 to finish work on the $100 billion
outpost's massive Japanese lab.
Shuttle
mission managers on Wednesday approved plans to launch Endeavour on a marathon station
construction flight at 7:17 a.m. EDT (1117 GMT) on June 13, nearly three
weeks after the successful return of its sister ship Atlantis from the Hubble
Space Telescope.
"We're
getting pretty darn close to kicking this mission off next Saturday,"
Endeavour's commander Mark Polansky told reporters today at the shuttle's
launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Fla. "We're excited about the work we're going to
do."
Finishing
Japan's space "hope"
Polansky's
six-man, one-woman crew is poised to lift off from a seaside launch pad at
NASA's Kennedy Space Center to deliver a porch-like external platform for the
space station's massive Japanese
laboratory Kibo, which means "Hope" in English.
The $1
billion Kibo lab is the space station's largest room, about the size of a tour
bus, and currently sports an attic-like storage module, small airlock and
robotic arm. The new platform will be attached to the lab's exterior to expose
experiments and materials to space for long duration studies.
Five intricate
spacewalks and complicated maneuvers with three different robotic arms are
planned during the 16-day mission, which will tie the record for the longest
station-bound mission to date.
"This
mission is unbelievably complex," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's space operations
chief, in a televised briefing late Wednesday. "It'll be a very challenging
mission for the team."
The
spaceflight, NASA's third shuttle mission of the year, is also the first to
send seven astronauts to the space station since the outpost doubled its permanent
crew size to six people last week. When Endeavour arrives, 13 people will live
and work aboard the station - the most ever aboard the orbital
outpost.
"It's just
a really good mix of folks and I think we're going to work well together as a
team," said Endeavour astronaut Tim Kopra from the launch pad.
Kopra will
replace Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata as a member of the space station's
six-man crew after Endeavour arrives. Wakata, who has lived aboard the station
since March, is Japan's first long-term resident of the orbital laboratory and
due to return home in late June aboard Endeavour.
Endeavour's
STS-127 astronaut crew will climb aboard the shuttle on Thursday for a launch
dress rehearsal at the Kennedy Space Center. They will cap the launch simulation
with an emergency
escape drill before returning home to NASA's Johnson Space Center in
Houston.
Tight
schedule
NASA has a
slim three-day window in which to launch Endeavour to the station before
standing down to allow an unmanned moon probe, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
and the attached LCROSS impactor, to blast off on June 17 from the nearby Cape
Canaveral Air Force Station.
If the shuttle does not launch by June 15, it
could try again four of five days later, but only of the moon-bound mission lifts
off on time. If Endeavour is unable to fly in June, it would have to wait until
July 11 when sun angles at the space station are more favorable, mission
managers said.
Pete Nickolenko,
launch director for Endeavour's flight, said the schedule is tight, with no
reserve days to deal with unexpected glitches. On Sunday, the shuttle moved to
its current seaside Launch Pad 39A from the nearby Pad 39B, where it had been
on standby to fly a rescue mission for Atlantis' Hubble telescope service call
in case of an emergency.
While no space
rescue was required, the effort to prime Endeavour for flight streamlined the
work required for its current mission to the station, said Nickolenko. As long
as the Florida weather cooperates, the shuttle should be ready for its June 13
launch, he added.
"I think we're
running on all cylinders, in my mind ... we're hitting our strides," Nickolenko
said. "It's all rapid-paced, but it's all doable, manageable. The teams are
seasoned, but I believe that they're focused."
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