CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA has officially set Nov. 11 as the launch date for space shuttle Endeavour's International Space Station (ISS) assembly and crew rotation mission.
Liftoff from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center will be between midnight and 4 a.m. EST (0500-0900 GMT). Docking with the orbiting outpost would follow on Nov. 13 and landing back at the launch site would take place some time in the evening of Nov. 21.
NASA will not announce the exact launch time until the day before liftoff because of security concerns.
This will be NASA's fifth and final shuttle mission for 2002.
"Endeavour's flight will complete a year for the shuttle program that has included a complex overhaul of the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as fourflights to add over 45 tons of components to the International Space Station," said shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore.
The formal launch date decision was made Thursday at the conclusion of the STS-113 Flight Readiness Review, a traditional pre-flight gathering of top shuttle program managers at the Florida spaceport.
The date selected is one day later than the space agency had been advertising for the past few weeks.
Managers decided they wanted a little more time for the Expedition Five crew now on board the ISS to get ready for the shuttle's arrival.
Endeavour's docking will follow just four days after a Soyuz taxi crew plans to depart the station. That mission, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Tuesday, is scheduled to dock with the outpost very early Friday morning.
The Soyuz taxi mission was delayed because of the Oct. 15 explosion of an unmanned Soyuz-U rocket at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.
Russian space officials needed a little more time to make sure a problem with a contaminated fuel line in the Soyuz-U rocket would not repeat on the more reliable Soyuz-FG version. The Soyuz-FG was the type of rocket used to launch two Russian cosmonauts and a Belgian astronaut to the ISS on Tuesday.
Another issue addressed and cleared at the meeting was a problem that came up during Atlantis' launch from pad 39B on Oct. 7.
Explosive charges that break apart the eight large bolts that hold a shuttle to the launch pad did not work properly. One of two sets of charges that are in each bolt did not fire. Although Atlantis launched safely, the trouble set off other problems with the ground-based computers that control the countdown.
Inspections and tests at the launch pad didn't turn anything up, nor did checks of Atlantis' systems reveal anything that could have caused the failure. Engineers were unable to recreate the problem.
Some hardware was replaced at the pad as a precaution and since Endeavour has passed all of its tests at the launch pad officials say they are confident they can safely launch.
"The shuttle team's achievements are remarkable and they have done a great job getting Endeavour ready to go," Dittemore said.
Endeavour is to carry seven persons into orbit. Four make up the STS-113 shuttle crew, and the other three the Expedition Six team destined to spend the next four months or so aboard the ISS. The Expedition Five crew now in space will be returning to Earth aboard Endeavour.
During the week that all 10 humans are together, the joined shuttle and station crews will install another truss segment onto the station's ever-growing backbone. This construction will be basically a mirror image of the hardware attached to the station during Atlantis' mission earlier this month.
Like the Atlantis STS-112 mission, this flight will include three spacewalks to help make all the connections between the P-One truss and the rest of the station.
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