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BRUCE BUCKINGHAM: It's a privilege to have Boeing launch manager Rick Navarro here in the studio. Rick, thanks for stopping by.

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RICK NAVARRO: Thank you, Bruce. BRUCE BUCKINGHAM: As we heard earlier, this mission requires a lot of coordination between Goddard

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Space Flight Centerand Kennedy Space Center. How important is this partnership to ensuring a successful launch and a mission?

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RICK NAVARRO: It's been crucial in the success of the mission. Getting here involved a lot of coordination between Goddard,

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Kennedy Space Center and the Boeing launch teams. If it hadn't been for that, we wouldn't be here today getting ready for a launch.

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BRUCE BUCKINGHAM: Well, tell us how the vehicle and the spacecraft were prepared for launch.

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RICK NAVARRO: The best way to show you is to roll a tape, in which we show some of the major components coming together.

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We receive our vehicle hardware

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from our Decatur production facility via a ship, the Delta Mariner. And we offload that ship and you see there the first stage of the vehicle

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coming to our facility for horizontal processing. It's a shirt-sleeve working environment. And there, we see the second stage, which

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we bring to a test facility first. We make sure there was no shipping damage and do a preliminary checkout. Once we're happy with the

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condition of the second stage, then we will bring it to that first horizontal integration facility. Now, the advantages of that facility

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is that we perform all our operations indoors, outside of the weather. We are able to lift both of the stages from underneath without using cranes,

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and we use a precision placer-alignment system that actually cracks the position of the stages and softly and gently mates them, puts

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them together.

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When we are done, we will actually be rolling a mated vehicle to the launch pad, both first and second stages. We use a transporter system

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that picks up the entire vehicle stack and places it on the launch pad. When we go to the launch pad, we park on top of an erection truss

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we call the "fixed pad erector." What this will do is actually take it from the horizontal position and rotate it to vertical. This takes about 20 minutes or so.

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At that point, we have a vertical vehicle, first and second stage. Around the vehicle will be a mobile service tower we call an ST,

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which protects it, and at this point we'll bring the solid motors. With the GOES mission, we have two solid rocket motors.

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We bring those individually to the launch pad, because of the amount of propellant. We carefully place them in an outside facility.

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We bring them to the launch pad and then we hoist them with a crane on the mobile service tower. We bring them around and next to the vehicle,

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and mate them one at a time. You see some of the processing that leads us to bring the solid motors to the launch pad.

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As we mate the solid rocket motors, we now have an integrated vehicle, and when all this comes together, we're able to perform checkout

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leading to today's countdown. BRUCE BUCKINGHAM: Well, Rick, thanks so much for being with us today, and good luck today with

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launch. RICK NAVARRO: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

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