Space Shuttle Discovery ready to do heavy lifting Saturday

— -- In a way, space shuttle Discovery is a delivery truck carrying one of the heaviest, and widest, loads yet to the International Space Station.

Getting the 37-foot by 15-foot, 32,500-pound Kibo module into orbit will require 8.5 minutes of heavy lifting. NASA hopes to start the job at 5:02 p.m. Saturday with the firing of the space shuttle main engines and solid rocket boosters to launch Discovery, Kibo and seven astronauts off the Earth. The weather and the spacecraft appeared near perfect heading into the final hours of the countdown today.

But the spectacle and excitement of the blast off from Kennedy Space Center only begins the work.

"If you look at it from the outside, we're just taking a large module up and attaching it to the outside of station and that seems simple," associate NASA administrator for space operations Bill Gerstenmaier said of the two-week construction mission. "When you get into the details of what's actually involved ... this is, again, a very complicated mission."

After the new high-tech Japanese science laboratory is attached to the space station, a smaller Japanese storage module delivered during the last shuttle mission must be moved atop the larger module. Hooking up connectors that provide power to the new lab, among other setup tasks, will take parts of three spacewalks.

The technology-minded Japanese have longed to be a major player in space science, and this module cements their position among the leaders in space exploration. Japan intents to launch an automated cargo module as early as next summer and a capsule for humans someday.

"Adding the Kibo module is a big deal for the Japaneese," said Gerstenmaier. "This really brings them up to speed."

The Kibo science module also increases the size of the space station to equivalent of a five-bedroom house, with nearly 11,000 cubic feet of habitable volume.

Kibo cost 200 billion yen. That's almost $2 billion in U.S. currency. It's the longest compartment added to the space station. Most other modules have been shortened during the design and development effort, cutting costs for budget-minded governments.