Astronaut crew boards shuttle for dry run

The Endeavour astronauts are boarding their spaceship at Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A today for the last few hours of a practice countdown for their planned March 11 launch on an International Space Station assembly mission.

STS-123 mission commander Dom Gorie was the first to crawl through the side hatch of the orbiter from a small enclose -- "the white room" -- on the end of a catwalk at the 195-foot level of the launch gantry at pad 39A.














That's Gorie in the image above.

Mission specialist Garrett Reisman, pictured below, was the second to board. He's flying up to the station for a three-month tour of duty, replacing European Space Agency astronaut Leopold Eyharts, who will return to Earth on Endeavour.














The rest of the crew includes pilot Gregory H. Johnson and mission specialists Michael Foreman, Robert Behnken, Richard Linnehan and Takao Doi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The astronauts aim to deliver the first section of the Japanese Kibo science research facility to the station. They'll also haul up a two-armed Canadian robot that will do maintenance tasks outside the outpost.

The practice countdown involves the NASA launch team here at KSC and serves essentially as a full up dress rehearsal for launch. The astronauts donned bright orange partial pressure launch-and-entry suits at crew quarters at the Operations & Checkout Building this morning and then walked out to the NASA "AstroVan," which transported them to the pad.

Check out the video here: Crew Walkout.















A large contingent of Japanese journalists flocked to the walkout to see Doi, a veteran astronaut who flew on the STS-87 mission aboard Columbia in late 1997.















The astronauts posed for a photo before climbing aboard their transport.















With countdown clocks ticking backward here at KSC, the astronauts will go through all the communications checks and launch preparations that they will carry out on launch day. The clock will come to a stop around T-4 seconds.

A main engine cutoff and launch-pad abort will be simulated, and the crew will scamper out of the orbiter and over to launch tower escape baskets to culminate their last major training exercise here at KSC prior to launch.

NOTE ON IMAGES: Click to enlarge any of the images above. The first two black-and-white images are screen grabs from a live NASA video feed at launch pad 39A. The color photos show a Japanese journalist and the astronauts walking out to the NASA "AstroVan" as they departed crew quarters at the KSC Operations & Checkout Building and headed out to the pad. Photo credit: Todd Halvorson, FLORIDA TODAY.