Space shuttle closes in on space station

Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Saturday, May 31, 2008. Space Shuttle Discovery with seven crew members are on a 14 day mission to the International Space Station. (AP Photo/Terry Renna)

HOUSTON—Shuttle Discovery closed in on the international space station Monday with a super-size delivery: a scientific lab that's as big as a school bus.

With the shuttle less than three miles away, space station resident Garrett Reisman played C.W. McCall's "Convoy," the 1975 novelty song about truckers, for Discovery's crew.

"Keep on truckin' Discovery," Reisman radioed to the shuttle.

"We are really looking forward to seeing you guys," said Discovery commander Mark Kelly as he guided the shuttle to its Monday afternoon rendezvous with the orbiting outpost. About two hours before docking, the shuttle was less than 3,000 feet from the station.

Discovery was also ferrying up Reisman's replacement: astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who will call the space station home for the next six months. Reisman will return to Earth aboard the shuttle.

Throughout Monday morning, astronauts conducted a series of engine firings that put the shuttle on its final approach to the orbiting outpost.

The space shuttle and its seven astronauts are delivering the $1 billion lab on behalf of Japan. They will install it Tuesday with help from the space station's three residents.

The lab is named Kibo, Japanese for hope, is 37 feet long and weighs more than 32,000 pounds.

Kelly and his crew also have a new pump for the space station's malfunctioning toilet. The Russian-built toilet broke 1.5 weeks ago, and space officials hope this pump -- from a different manufacturing batch than the spares on board -- will get it working normally.

Before parking at the space station, Kelly guided Discovery through a slow back flip so the station residents could photograph the shuttle's underside.

It's one of the safety measures put in place by NASA after the 2003 Columbia accident to check for launch damage.

On Sunday, the astronauts performed a cursory wing inspection using their ship's 50-foot robot arm. They sent ground controllers images of the upper edges of the wings, but could not check the lower edges of the wings and the nose cap because they lacked the proper laser tools.

Their laser-equipped inspection boom is at the space station, left there by the previous shuttle crew in March. They will retrieve it and, after they depart, perform a full survey.

Discovery did not have enough room for the 50-foot boom -- standard equipment on all previous post-Columbia missions -- because of the enormous lab filling its payload bay.

About five pieces of insulating foam broke off Discovery's external fuel tank during Saturday's liftoff, and one or two of them may have hit the shuttle. NASA officials said they were not too worried because the foam losses occurred after the crucial first two minutes of the flight and therefore lacked the acceleration to do much, if any, damage.

What's more, the foam fragments looked to be thin and flimsy.

Astronaut Karen Nyberg said neither she nor her crewmates saw anything wrong as they were surveying the wings.

"To me, it looked really good," flight director Matt Abbott said from Johnson Space Center. But he cautioned: "We've got a lot of work to do to go through the data."

Discovery's fuel tank was the first one built from scratch with all the post-Columbia safety changes. The tank, at least from the early data, looks to have performed well, said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team.

On Monday, NASA officials said they would be forming an investigation board to find out how a section of the shuttle's launchpad in Florida sustained "severe damage" when Discovery blasted off on Saturday.

A 100-foot by 20-foot section of the flame trench -- a concrete and brick structure that deflects the flames from the shuttle's main engines and from the solid rocket boosters -- had been broken up and scattered. Information about how the damage occurred or if it had any effect on the shuttle was not immediately available.

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