expanded long-duration crews of six. The mission is set tofeature four spacewalks.

However,if the team is forced to delay Discovery's launch date because of weather,managers may decide to remove up to two spacewalks from the flight to shortenit, allowing them to launch as late as March 16. The spacewalks, or EVAs,wouldn't be cancelled, but just rescheduled for later missions.

"Wecould give those EVAs up if we needed to get more launch time," Shannonsaid.

Discovery'screw includes pilot Tony Antonelli and mission specialists Joseph Acaba, SteveSwanson, Richard Arnold, and John Phillips. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agencyastronaut Koichi Wakata will also ride aboard Discovery to take up position asa new flight engineer for the space station's Expedition 18. He will relieveNASA astronaut Sandra Magnus, who has been on the station for more than fourmonths. WakataCopy the following code and paste it into your web page to embed this video:

In this candid and heartwarming interview, Tam O'Shaughnessy, the life partner of the late astronaut Sally Ride, describes her long relationship with the first American woman in space. From their days on the teen tennis circuit in California through Sally's historic flights on the Space Shuttle Challenger to their parallel academic careers and later, founding their own company, Tam tells how their deep friendship blossomed over time into a romance that ended with Sally's death from cancer in 2012. As the Executive Director of Sally Ride Science@UC San Diego, Tam continues to inspire girls to embrace STEM, and shares her profound pride as the sponsor of the newly commissioned R/V Sally Ride, the first