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This mission should really produce some impressive improvements to the ISS.
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Space shuttle rolled out to Florida launch pad



The U.S. space shuttle Atlantis was moved to its ocean-side launch pad early on Wednesday, as NASA readies itself to resume construction of the International Space Station later this month.

Despite the delay, NASA still has plenty of time to prepare the shuttle for blastoff as early as August 27, said Kennedy Space Center spokesman Bruce Buckingham.

The mission will be the agency's first space station assembly flight since before the 2003 Columbia accident forced NASA to ground the shuttle fleet for safety upgrades.

Tanner and his crew mates have been training for four years to install the station's next major module -- a second set of solar arrays that will double the station's onboard power.

With laboratories built by Europe and Japan due to arrive as early as next year, boosting the station's power supply is a crucial step.

The solar array module that will be carried aboard Atlantis weighs nearly 35,000 pounds (16 tonnes) -- one of the heaviest loads ever carried aboard a shuttle. It fills the shuttle's payload bay.

"It's a bit of a shoehorn operation to even get it out of the payload bay when we're docked with station," Tanner said.

Installation of the arrays requires back-to-back spacewalks on three days of the flight.

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