"They're on the way to see you guys, so clean up the house and put the welcome mat out," NASA astronaut Sandy Magnus told the Alpha crew from the agency's Mission Control Center in Houston.

"Well, we'll have everything ready," Shepherd replied. "Yuri says he hopes that they will be at the station on time."

"It's looking good for that," Magnus said.

The high-flying rendezvous and docking - which will be broadcast live on SPACE.com - will cap a two-day trip from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, the site from which the shuttle crew set sail late Thursday night.

Look for Endeavour commander Brent Jett to guide the winged spaceship up to the station from a point below and behind the outpost, parking at a new shuttle docking port delivered by a construction crew in October.

The link-up will be a bit trickier than previous dockings. The respective centers of gravity of the shuttle and the station will be somewhat offset, creating a situation during which the two craft could sway back and forth after making contact.

"There's going to be a tendency to tip - just like two teeter-totters," Endeavour pilot Michael Bloomfield said in an interview prior to flight. "So Brent will have to make sure everything is lined up exactly."

~

Jett, in fact, will have to align shuttle and station docking rings to within three inches of each other as the craft fly in formation at 17,500 mph (28,000 kilometers per hour).

The daunting task is essential to ensuring that hooks and latches between Endeavour and Alpha lock up in a metallic embrace.

Live Coverage

SPACE.com carries NASA TV around-the-clock so you can always tune in to the very latest news about Space Station Alpha, the Space Shuttle and other space agency programs. Live streaming video.

The inherent difficulty of the precision piloting job, meanwhile, is not lost on Jett.

"Sometimes that keeps me up at night," the veteran astronaut and former military test pilot admitted before flight. "We don't want to be the first shuttle to bounce off the station."

To make room for Endeavour, the Alpha crew launched a trash-filled Russian supply ship away from the station at 11:23 a.m. EST (16:23 GMT) Friday.

Berthed to a station port that would cause it to interfere with the shuttle's arrival, the Progress space freighter headed to a parking orbit 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away from the outpost.

The eight-ton Progress hauled a huge load of supplies and equipment up to the station in mid-November. The Alpha crew unpacked the unmanned cargo ship and then filled it up with trash that eventually will be disposed of in a destructive dive back through Earth's atmosphere.

The shuttle docking will set the stage for a dramatic bid to mount, unfurl and activate a giant pair of power-producing solar wings at the station. That work will be done during spacewalks on Sunday and Tuesday.

A third spacewalk is scheduled to take place Thursday. That excursion will involve setting up a devise designed to gauge whether the solar wings create a shock hazard for spacewalkers working outside the outpost.

The spacewalks will feature the inaugural use of helmet-mounted cameras that will provide an astronauts'-eye-view of the scene outside. All three spacewalks will be broadcast live on SPACE.com.

The Endeavour and Alpha crews will meet face-to-face Dec. 9 before the shuttle astronauts head for home. Endeavour and its crew remain scheduled for a Dec. 11 landing here at KSC.