DISCOVERY—Getting ready to haul the freight

May 8, 2007—The crew of Space Shuttle Discovery is at the Kennedy Space Center for one last practice session before the planned May thirty-first liftoff. The astronauts' job is to haul the thirty two thousand pound main laboratory for the Japanese Kibo complex to the International Space Station.

The Discovery crew is in Florida for what’s called the Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test or TCDT. The main event is Friday when the astronauts zip up their dayglow orange spacesuits and make the acrobatic entry inside the Shuttle’s cramped crew cabin at the launch pad. They’ll sit out a practice countdown, flipping and turning the two thousand switches and dials on Discovery’s dashboard before a false emergency prompts them to evacuate the Shuttle. If there’s a fire at the pad, or some other emergency on launch day, they’ll need those escape skills to scramble away from Discovery to the safety of a nearby bunker.

When the real liftoff occurs, Discovery will carry the thirty two thousand pound Kibo lab in its cargo bay. A scale model courtesy of the Japanese Space Agency, or JAXA, is pictured above. It’s part two of the three section Kibo complex on the space station. After this spaceflight, the only big part left to go is an open “porch” that will snap onto Discovery’s big lab module. A Japanese robot arm will tend experiments left out on the porch, exposed to space.

Also, if you some spare “surfing” time, my conversation with former Channel 6 Health reporter Charna Davis-Wiese about my book "Final Countdown" somehow got onto “YouTube”. It was for a new UCF-TV program called “Expressions” featuring local authors, and you can have a look by clicking here…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv_lMXGFtFA

More to come...