The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has said it plans to launch Discovery with its seven astronauts on December 7 or possibly a day earlier.

It will be the second ISS construction mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster, which had halted the orbiting laboratory's assembly.

NASA successfully resumed ISS construction in September after two shuttle missions aimed at improving safety following the Columbia tragedy in which seven astronauts died.

A massive crawler transporter slowly took Discovery across seven kilometers (4.2 miles) from its hangar to launchpad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

NASA plans 15 shuttle missions over the next four years to finish the ISS before the three-shuttle fleet is retired in 2010.

The Discovery astronauts will bring a new 11-million-dollar segment for the space station and install it in a spacewalk. Two other spacewalks are planned to reconfigure power cables.

In the September mission, Atlantis brought a new set of solar panels that will ultimately provide a quarter of the outpost's power.

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