NASA managers decided Friday to set the next launch of the space shuttle Discovery for March 11. Liftoff of the 125th shuttle mission, the first of five planned for this year, is scheduled from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission had been on hold to resolve safety concerns with the ship's fuel pressure valves. We're feeling really, really good," shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach told reporters at a press conference. "It's great to have a launch date."

Led by shuttle commander Lee Archambault, the astronauts landed their T-38 jets on a runway at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida thiw week. Archambault and his crew are poised to launch on a two-week construction mission to deliver the final segment of the space station's backbone-like main truss and install the outpost's last pair of U.S.-built solar arrays. Four spacewalks are planned for the mission.

It appears that the the seven men who will ride space shuttle Discovery into orbit this week are an athletic bunch. When they're not training for a space shot, they're skiing, skating, snowboarding, biking or running. Moreover four of the astronauts' last names begin with "A," so they're sometimes called the "A team." They will deliver and install the last set of solar wings at the international space station. Liftoff is set for Wednesday night. The launch was supposed to be a month earlier, but concerns about shuttle valves led to repeated delays.

Discovery's fourteen-day mission will include the delivery of the final part of an array of solar wing panels to the International Space Station, a $100 billion project under construction for more than a decade. The space shuttle program is due to be retired by the US space agency next year after more than thirty years of service.