NASA Preps Shuttle Discovery For Overnight Rollout

NASA is gearing up to move shuttle Discovery to its oceanside launch pad at Kennedy Space Center during an overnight trip that will mark a key milestone for a planned early April launch on an International Space Station assembly mission.

Now parked beneath the shuttle and its mobile launcher platform, a giant Apollo-era crawler transporter is scheduled to edge out of the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building at 12:01 a.m. The 3.5-mile trip to launch pad 39A is expected to take about six to eight hours to complete.

You can watch the shuttle as it makes its final approach to the pad right here in The Flame Trench. Click the NASA TV box on the right side of the page to launch our NASA TV viewer and live coverage beginning at 6:30 a.m.

Discovery and seven astronauts are scheduled to blast off at 6:27 a.m. April 5 on a mission to haul tons of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station, the construction of which is now more than 90 percent complete.

The shuttle will carry an Italian-built cargo carrier filled with science racks for the laboratories aboard the station. Three spacewalks are planned to perform maintenance work outside the outpost. Astronauts will replace an ammonia tank assembly and a domed-shaped gyroscope. They also will retrieve a Japanese science experiment.

Discovery's flight is one of only four shuttle missions remaining before fleet retirement late this year. It will be the 33rd shuttle mission carried out in the assembly and maintenance of the station, the first two building blocks of which were linked in low Earth orbit in late 1998.

The mission commander is Alan Poindexter. The pilot is James Dutton. There are five mission specialists: Rick Mastracchio, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson, Clay Anderson and Naoko Yamazaki of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The astronauts are at KSC today taking part in emergency training at the launch pad. Specifically, they are learning to drive M-113 armored personnel carriers that would be used to evacuate the pad area in the even of an emergency.

ABOUT THE IMAGE: Click to enlarge the NASA image of Discovery being positioned beside its external tank in High Bay No. 1 of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Photo credit: NASA/Troy Cryder