Huge day for NASA, as space shuttle Discovery left Florida’s Coast on Saturday, heading for the International Space Station. The weather was perfect, and the launch was flawless, with no technical issues overshadowing the “greatest show on Earth,” as Commander Mark Kelly called it.

 As NASA Administrator Mike Griffin pointed out, it was a huge day for the space station partnership, for the Japanese Space Agency, for NASA and for everyone who hoped to see the space station do what it was designed to do: “to be a place in orbit where we can learn to live and work in space.”

Discovery’s STS-124 mission is one of three flights to launch components of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kibo laboratory and install the Kibo Japanese Pressurized Module (JPM) and its remote manipulator system (RMS) on the International Space Station.

The shuttle will be in charge of delivering, in addition to the Kibo components, new station crew member Greg Chamitoff. At the same time, it will be in charge of bringing Flight Engineer Garrett Reisman back home, after three months aboard the International Space Station, NASA announced.

The STS-124 mission will include three spacewalks, as follows: on day 4, astronauts Ronald J. Garan Jr. and Michael E. Fossum will transfer the Orbiter Boom Sensor back to the shuttle from its temporary location (during the last mission, the Boom Sensor was left at the station for lack of room) and then prepare for the JPM removal from the shuttle’s payload bay.

The second spacewalk will take place two days after the first one. Garan and Fossum will have the mission to install covers and external television equipment on the JPM and remove covers on the RMS, as well as prepare for the flight day 7 relocation of the Japanese Logistics Module.

The third and final spacewalk will be performed by the same astronauts, whose primary mission will be to replace a failed hydrogen tank assembly on the station’s truss with a spare one that has been temporarily stored on one of the station’s external stowage platforms.

Now that Discovery started its space journey, Commander Kelly and his crew prepare for a 14-day mission to install the new Japanese laboratory module on the International Space Station. According to NASA, the 36-foot-long module is the largest habitable section to be launched to the orbiting research post.