CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Shuttle Endeavour rests on Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center after a six-and-a-half-hour trek Monday.
It is scheduled to launch May 30 on a 12-day mission to the International Space Station to swap out station crews.
Russian commander Valeri Korzun, American Peggy Whitson and Russian Sergei Treschev will be the fifth group to live aboard the station. They will replace Russian commander Yuri Onufrienko and American astronauts Dan Bursch and Carl Walz, who have been in space since Dec. 5.
If the shuttle launches and lands on schedule, Bursch and Walz will be just seven hours short of astronaut Shannon Lucid's record of the longest time in space by an American.
Lucid lived 188 days and four hours aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1996. Walz and Bursch initially weren't scheduled to make such a long flight.
"We moved (Endeavour's) flight back about three weeks to allow the crew to train for an additional spacewalk," said NASA spokesman James Hartsfield.
The station crew did not have any visitors in the first four months of its mission. In the last two weeks, the crew has played host to guests from shuttle Atlantis and a Russian Soyuz capsule that arrived Saturday.
In addition to delivering people and provisions, Endeavour's astronauts will try to fix a faulty wrist joint on the station's Canadian-built robotic arm. Workers at KSC will install the Italian-built Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module into Endeavour's cargo bay Wednesday. This cargo carrier will send up storage space and scientific lockers that will be installed in the laboratory Destiny.
In three spacewalks, the crew will add the Mobile Base System, another segment of the robot arm's railway that will allow the arm to roam along the spindly truss.
Endeavour's move out to the launch pad ushers in a bustling week of space activity at the spaceport.
The four-day Space Congress begins today at the Radisson Resort at the Port in Cape Canaveral.
Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2002 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.
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