About 25 years in the making, Europe's Columbus space laboratory will finally be launched on a flight to the International Space Station on Thursday. The event occurs just 15 years late of its original launch date. The 17-nation European Space Agency developed the Columbus starting in 1982, aiming to launch it in 1992, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the great navigator's voyage to the New World.

The $2 billion lab will allow experiments to be conducted on the behaviour of weightless liquids, and onmicro-organisms, cells and tissues.

"Certainly, the scientists were on our case. They had experiments ready to go and they want science," said to AP Daniele Laurini, a European Space Agency engineer who is helping to coordinate the project at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We're trying to accommodate that, making sure that we provide them science as soon as we hit the power button on the module," he said.

However, the International Space Station program also left something behind. It's the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a high-tech device which analyzes radiation from distant planets and stars to determine their chemical makeup. It took 500 physicists from around the world 12 years to build, but there is no launch date yet and a lot of people believe it will remain stranded on Earth.

"The credibility of the United States is at stake here, because NASA made a commitment to bring Columbus and AMS to the space station," said Samuel C.C. Ting, to the Washington Post. Ting is a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who conceived the project in 1994 and drew in collaborators from 60 institutes in 16 nations to build and fund it. "After all this work, it would be a terrible blow if the instrument cannot be used."

Columbus is designed for ten years of operation and will be controlled by the special Columbus Control Centre, located at the German Space Operations Centre, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). On May 27 last year, the Columbus lab was flown from Bremen to Kennedy Space Center on board an Airbus Beluga.