The crew of
the space shuttle Endeavour arrived at NASA's Florida spaceport on Tuesday to
prepare for a planned weekend blast off after nearly a month of delays.
Shuttle
commander Mark Polansky and his crew touched down at the Kennedy Space Center
in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Tuesday afternoon under a cloudy sky as they gear up
for their third
launch attempt in two months. Liftoff is set for 7:39 p.m. EDT (2339 GMT)
on Saturday.
"I can tell
you that this crew and the entire operations team are both eager and ready to get
to work," Polansky said from the tarmac in a brief televised statement. "Hopefully
the next time we talk to you will be from orbit."
Endeavour
is poised to launch on a 16-day construction marathon to the International
Space Station. The shuttle's six-man,
one-woman crew plans to swap out one member of the station's six-man crew
and deliver the last piece of Japan's massive Kibo laboratory at the orbital
outpost. Five spacewalks and challenging robotic arm work using three different
space cranes are also on tap.
The
upcoming flight is the first shuttle mission to the space station since the
outpost doubled
its crew size to six people in late May. When the shuttle arrives, the
station's population will surge to 13 people - the highest ever at the orbiting
lab.
Long-delayed
mission
Endeavour's mission
has been delayed since mid-June, when a potentially dangerous hydrogen gas leak
in a fuel tank vent line thwarted two consecutive launch attempts. Engineers
replaced a misaligned plate and seal on the tank and successfully checked the
repairs during
a fueling test last week.
Polansky thanked
the hard-working NASA team that readied Endeavour for its launch attempt this
weekend after his crew arrived today.
A veteran
space commander, Polansky will make his third spaceflight while in charge of
Endeavour's STS-127 mission. Shuttle pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists
Chris Cassidy, Tom Marshburn and Tim Kopra - all rookies making their first
flight - will also fly aboard Endeavour. Veteran spaceflyers Dave Wolf of NASA
and Julie Payette of the Canadian Space Agency round out the crew.
Kopra will
replace Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata as a member of the space station's
crew. Wakata has lived aboard the station since March and is Japan's first
long-term resident of the orbiting lab.
The station
is currently home to two Russian cosmonauts and one astronaut each from the United States,
Japan, Canada and Belgium. When Endeavour launches, it will be the first time
two Canadians - Payette and space station flight engineer Robert Thirsk - will
be in space at the same time.
Over the
next few days, Endeavour astronauts will perform a series of final medical and
spacesuit checks while Polansky and Hurley practice space shuttle landings
using a modified NASA training aircraft.
NASA spokesperson
Michael Curie said the astronauts will get their first official weather
forecast for the Saturday evening launch on Wednesday. NASA plans to begin
counting down toward the weekend liftoff late Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. EDT (0200
July 9 GMT), mission managers have said.
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