CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Shuttle Endeavour is precisely on course to rendezvous and dock Friday with the International Space Station on Friday, NASA officials said.

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The two ships are to latch together at 12:18 p.m. EDT (1618 GMT), with the final approach to the station expected to begin at 9:57 a.m. EDT (1357 GMT).

Waiting onboard the station to greet their ride home to Earth will be the Expedition Four crew of Yuri Onufrienko, Dan Bursch and Carl Walz.

They have spent the past six months in space and will be relieved by the Expedition Five crew of Valery Korzun, Sergei Treschev and Peggy Whitson, who are to remain in orbit for at least the next five months.

The crew exchange mission began Wednesday with Endeavour's liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center at 5:23 p.m. EDT (2123 GMT) and continued without incident on Thursday.

"Company's on the way," Mission Control in Houston reminded the station crew.

"We're just doing some last-minute tidying up before guests come," Bursch said.

As Endeavour commander Ken Cockrell and pilot Paul Lockhart adjusted the shuttle's orbit for its final approach to the ISS, the rest of the crew went about a relatively normal day-after-launch drill of setting up their ship for the 12-day stay in space, checking out the shuttle's robot arm and inspecting the contents of the cargo bay.

Seven-time space flyer Franklin Chang-Diaz -- a native of Costa Rica who has tied fellow astronaut Jerry Ross for the most number of spaceflights by a human -- took some time to answer questions from a pair of Hispanic news organizations and received a VIP call from Costa Rican President Abel Pacheco.

Meanwhile, workers at KSC report there was nothing more than the usual damage to launch pad 39A and they already have begun preparing it for its next use scheduled for August.

Also, Endeavour's twin solid rocket boosters were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean and the two retrieval ships are on their way back to Port Canaveral and should be arriving at their Cape Canaveral Air Force Station hangar on the shores of the Banana River some time on Friday.