CHAPTER 4 DAY IN THE LIFE: THE MAKING OF A MISSION 80 Fly After an unusually lengthy and busy interval of preparation, it was finally time to fly. The road was long, but everyone was ready by February. The training was done. The multitude of programmatic reviews were complete at NASA, culminating in the Flight Readiness Review. The consoles were stocked with office supplies and extra food. The mission was scheduled to lift off on February 7, 2010, but was delayed due to poor weather. After a frenetic rush toward the mission for many years, there was an eerie calm— not unlike that slow creep up and over the first hill by a roller coaster before it takes a deep plunge. On February 8, Space Shuttle Endeavour launched perfectly (Figure 15). The final mission timeline and plan for the spacewalks are shown in Figures 16 and 17, respectively. Figure 15. Launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour on February 8, 2010 (left). View of Endeavour’s cargo bay from the ISS showing Node 3 with Cupola attached to the end. Due to the weight of the module, the rest of the cargo bay was empty. The Space Shuttle flight control team and its flight director monitored all the systems of the orbiter while preparing for rendezvous and docking. Things were a little quieter in the space station flight control room, since their part of the mission did not begin until final rendezvous. This gave the team time to make the last updates of procedures and provided an opportunity for the flight director to, once again, write down a