NASA clears shuttle for liftoff on Saturday

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA managers cleared space shuttle Discovery and a crew of seven for launch on Saturday to install Japan's research laboratory onto the International Space Station, officials said on Thursday.

Liftoff is scheduled for 5:02 p.m. ET from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle will be carrying a bus-sized lab module named Kibo, a Japanese word for hope.

"We're definitely going to have good weather too," Air Force meteorologist Kathy Winters told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center.

The 14-day flight will be NASA's last to the space station until November as the agency squeezes in a final shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope in October.

NASA has set a two-year deadline to complete 11 shuttle flights before retiring the three-ship fleet.

"This is a crucial step to Kibo total assembly," said Yoshiyuki Hasegawa, who has been overseeing the program for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA.

NASA delivered a storage closet and experiment racks for Kibo during its last shuttle flight in March. A mission is planned next year to deliver Kibo's outside porch, where experiments can be exposed to the open environment of space.

Japan also will set up a high-definition television system and its own satellite network for beaming pictures and data to and from the outpost.

The $100 billion space station, a project of 16 nations, took on more of an international ambience with the arrival of the European Space Agency's Columbus laboratory in February.

Already aboard were components owned by Russia and the United States and an elaborate robotics system built by the Canadian Space Agency.

Discovery's crew includes a new flight engineer for the outpost, Gregory Chamitoff, who will replace Garrett Reisman.

By next year, NASA plans to begin ferrying all station crew members on Russian Soyuz capsules, paving the way for the end of the U.S. shuttle program in 2010.

(Editing by Jim Loney and Eric Beech)