The astronauts of the STS-123 mission are at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for final launch preparations. The crew arrived at Kennedy's Shuttle Landing Facility in a Shuttle Training Aircraft at 1:21 a.m. EST Saturday, March 8.

After arriving in a driving rainstorm, Endeavour Commander Dominic Gorie made a few comments to media gathered at the runway.
"I think once we get the weather done today we'll have a good shot at launching this week. But we just wanted to convey how excited we are to be here for launch week. We've got a great training team, they've got us ready.”

Endeavour's crew includes Commander Dominic Gorie, Pilot Gregory Johnson and Mission Specialists Rick Linnehan, Robert Behnken, Mike Foreman and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's, Takao Doi. Endeavour is launching with the expectation of staying in space for 16 days, and there are always extra days set aside in case weather or a technical problem delays landing.

The countdown for the launch of space shuttle Endeavour began on time at 3 a.m. EST in Firing Room 4 of the launch control center. The clock picked up at the T-43 hour mark.
The launch weather forecast calls for only a 10% chance of not meeting the launch weather criteria, primarily due to a low cloud ceiling.

NASA has scheduled five spacewalks for the mission STS-123. During the first three spacewalks, the astronauts will install the first pressurized section, Japanese Experiment Logistics Module (ELM-PS), of the future Kibo (Hope) Japanese module and the Canadian Space Agency’s newest contribution to the station, the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator or Dextre.

The Japanese astronaut, Takao Doi, will be the first person to venture inside the module, which will be installed on the zenith – or upper – side of the Harmony Node.

Kibo’s main facility and its robotic arm are scheduled to launch on the following shuttle mission, and a "front porch" that will allow astronauts to expose experiments directly to space will be delivered later.

Dextre will launch as two arms, two wrist end effectors and a main body attached to a pallet. The crew will take the pallet out of the shuttle’s cargo bay and attach it to the station during the second spacewalk. Linnehan and Reisman will spend the remainder of that spacewalk beginning the Dextre assembly. All of the second spacewalk and part of the third will be devoted to finishing the assembly.

The fourth spacewalk will be used to replace a remote power control module and test a shuttle tile repair material. The repair material test was originally scheduled for Discovery’s mission last October, but was rescheduled so that problems with the station’s solar arrays could be addressed.

The goal is to complete this test before space shuttle Atlantis flies to the Hubble Space Telescope in August. Unlike missions to the space station, Atlantis’ crew members wouldn’t be able to wait on the station for another shuttle to bring them home if Atlantis was damaged.

And on the fifth spacewalk, mission specialists Robert L. Behnken and Mike Foreman will store on the station the boom that attaches to the shuttle’s robotic arm for heat shield inspections. The boom is being stored on orbit since the next shuttle will not have enough room to carry both the boom and the larger JAXA module in the cargo bay.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency is preparing for the launch of the Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), a 22-ton unmanned cargo carrier that will ferry almost 8 tons of equipment and spare parts as well as food, air, water and Russian resupply fuel to the station.

The Jules Verne will ride atop an Ariane 5 rocket and it is the largest payload ever carried by this rocket. The launch, which will take place in Kourou, French Guiana, along the northern coast of South America, is scheduled for 5:03 CET on 9 March 2008.