Discovery's Astronauts Suit Up, Strap In For Dress Rehearsal

LIVE IMAGES: Refresh this page to see the latest still images from live video feeds in the Launch Complex 39 area at Kennedy Space Center.

Discovery's astronauts boarded their spaceship at Kennedy Space Center's launch pad 39A today as NASA stepped through a practice countdown for the planned April 5 launch of the first of only four remaining International Space Station assembly-and-outfitting missions before shuttle fleet retirement late this year.

Mission commander Alan Poindexter led a crew of seven out of the Operations & Checkout Building in the KSC Industrial Area earlier this morning and all boarded NASA's silver "Astro-Van" for a 30-minute trip out to the pad. The astronauts had donned full-pressure launch-and-entry suits prior to departure for a launch-day dress rehearsal.

With 150 to 200 engineers staffing Firing Room 4 of the Launch Control Center, the astronauts and the launch team are marching through all the same countdown preparations they will do on April 5, with one notable exception: the shuttle's 15-story external tank is not fueled with more than a half-million-gallons of supercold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

The crew includes pilot James Dutton and five mission specialists: Clay Anderson, Rick Mastracchio, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson and Naoko Yamazaki of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Dutton, Metcalf-Lindenburger and Yamazaki all will be making their first flight into space. Wilson is a veteran shuttle robot arm operator. Mastracchio is a veteran spacewalker and Anderson served a long-duration tour on the station his first flight.

Bit of trivia: Anderson is the only astronaut ever to read down from space the names of every town and hamlet in his home state of Nebraska.

Another:The commander's father, John Poindexter, was National Security Advisor in the Reagan Administration. First in his class in the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958, John Poindexter graduated with former astronaut Bruce McCandless. McCandless is the subject in one of the most iconic pictures in the 30-year history of the shuttle program, the astronaut flying the Manned Maneuvering Unit against the blackness of space.

The two-day practice countdown picked up early Thursday and will conclude at 11 a.m. with a simulated main engine shutdown at T-Minus 4 seconds.

The astronauts then will perform an emergency drill. They'll practice a rapid egress from the vehicle, cross the Orbiter Access Arm on the 195-foot level of the launch tower and then climb into the metal baskets that would whisk them down a 1,200-foot slide-wire in an emergency.

They will not, however, hit the metal bar that would send their baskets scooting down the slidewire at a top speed of about 55 mph to an emergency bunker on the western perimeter of the pad area.

The Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test is the last major training exercise at KSC for shuttle crews prior to launch. The Discovery astronauts will head back to Johnson Space Center in Houston later today.

ABOUT THE IMAGES: Click to enlarge the images taken during crew walk-out today by award-winning Florida Today photographer Michael R. Brown, who has been documenting the shuttle program at Kennedy Space Center since 1978. The shot at the left shows the crew in front of the Astro-Van. From left to right are Anderson, Yamazaki, Wilson, Metcalf-Lindenburger, Mastracchio, Dutton and Poindexter.