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GEORGE DILLER: NASA will continue building the International Space Station
during STS-116, the 20th flight to the station. The mission is designated assembly flight 12A.1.
It is Discovery’s 33rd flight and the 117th shuttle launch. Space Shuttle Discovery
will carry seven crew members on its liftoff from Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center, set for December 7.
During the 12-day mission, Discovery will dock with the station and the crew will deliver and install
the P5 truss segment between the station’s existing P3/P4 and P6 truss segments during two of three planned spacewalks.
Installation of the P5 truss will allow the solar arrays on the P3/P4 and P6 truss segments to operate and
rotate without interfering with each other. The P5 truss will act as a conduit that
will transmit power and data from the P6 segment to the other segments on the station.
Prior to Discovery’s roll over to the Vehicle Assembly Building, Kennedy Space Center’s
ground processing workers were hard at work inside the Orbiter Processing Facility
preparing Discovery for mission STS-116.
STEPHANIE STILSON: For this next mission, we've had what will be the shortest turnaround flow since return to flight.
What that means is we had a shorter period of time to process the vehicle,
especially in the Orbiter Processing Facility, where the bulk of the work for the orbiter happens.
We had a short flow to begin with and then we had a request that came in and said, "If we could launch a week earlier,
we could get the crewmembers back on the ground for Christmas and have them be with
their families, which obviously we would love to have happen."
So we accelerated the launch date, and by doing that, we then had to accomplish work in an even shorter period of time.
Well, Discovery's team is great, but we needed help. So we pulled in folks from the Atlantis team,
the Endeavour team, and we ended up working seven days a week,
three shifts a day in order to get out of the Orbiter Processing Facility.
DILLER: The excitement built as Discovery was stacked with the external tank
and solid rocket boosters in the assembly building.
RICK SERFOZO: The orbiter comes in from the Orbiter Processing Facility. We actually pick it up from horizontal,
rotate it to vertical and actually mate it to the solid rocket boosters and external tank.
We're talking about actually lifting and rotating a vehicle, and it has to be lifted up into the VAB,
across a crossover and then lowered down and placed to be mated to the solid rocket boosters.
DILLER: Then it was time for rollout to the launch pad and final preparations, including transfer of
the P5 truss segment and SPACEHAB module from the payload canister into Discovery’s payload bay.
ELIJAH WALKER: Boeing itself, we received this payload in 2001. And when we received the payload in 2001,
it was only a small structure with nothing there. It was like a ladder, in a sense. But we didn't have anything mounted
to that piece of hardware, and so the key was to get in there and start the assembly process, which was ideal.
It took quite a bit of time, but it's finally completed.
DILLER: Now, as Space Shuttle Discovery sits on Launch Pad 39-B, the nation and the rest of the world are watching
and waiting as NASA’s space program moves one step closer to completing
the space station and advancing the Vision for Space Exploration.
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