August 8, 2007— Well, it’s back to the salt mines at Kennedy Space Center.

You’ll be hearing a lot of Barbara Morgan angles on this mission. She’s the Endeavour astronaut who was the back-up to Christa McAuliffe—one of the crew that was killed in the Challenger accident in 1986. Equally compelling is the fact that one of Morgan’s crewmates, astronaut Charlie Hobaugh was the last person to speak by radio with the crew of Shuttle Columbia before that Shuttle broke apart and burned up in 2003.

The usual cast of characters will be on hand. Veteran journalists are joined by the "new guys" who scurry up to the Air Force weather forecaster everytime a storm cloud shows up on the radar. True, rain or low clouds within twenty miles or so of the pad can scrub a liftoff. However, the press has to be in place hours before the liftoff and NASA is only worried about weather at launch time. Basically, a monsoon could blow through, so long as it’s out of the way when the countdown ticks close to zero.

Another angle that seems lost in the "Barbara Morgan" shuffle is poor Spacehab. NASA says this will be the last flight for the warehouse compartment in Endeavour’s cargo bay which dates back to NASA's Shuttle/MIR heyday. The compartment contains five thousand pounds of cargo for the International Space Station. Spacehab started life in the mid 1990’s as an experiment in space commerce. Its builders arranged to install the module in the empty space of the Shuttle’s cargo bay, with an eye on selling experiment racks to paying customers who wanted their projects to go into orbit. It turns out that most university researchers apparently couldn’t afford the cost, so NASA was the biggest buyer. Spacehab got a new "lease on life" once the Shuttle started docking with the older Russian Space Station MIR, which needed re-supply flights. Now, Spacehab seems to have run its course.

Endeavour will deliver cargo and a thirty five thousand pound section to the Space Station’s external frame.