"Except for one issue, we are ready to go. That one issue is the external tank door power drive unit," said shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore.

"I am very optimistic it is going to come out fine."

A seven-member crew of astronauts and enough equipment to construct the first space railway will be aboard Atlantis when it launches Thursday afternoon from the Kennedy Space Center here.

A 70-percent chance of favorable weather, combined with the shuttle's "excellent shape for the mission" means everything "is ready to go," Thursday said Jeff Spalding, NASA's flight test director.

The crew is to spend the bulk of its mission assembling the Mobile Transporter, a rail system to carry the station's Canadian-built mechanical arm along a 91-meter (300-foot) truss when it is completed in 2004.

Shuttle commander Michael Bloomfield, co-pilot Stephen Frick and mission specialists Rex Walheim, Ellen Ochoa, Lee Morin, Jerry Ross and Steven Smith, will transport and install the railcar and first truss segment of the Mobile Transporter during the mission, the 13th to the station.

The structure -- the longest ever assembled in space -- will move the arm at a speed of just 91 meters (300 feet) per hour as the station travels around the Earth at 27,000 kilometers an hour (17,000 miles an hour).

"This flight is every bit as complex and challenging as the Hubble maintenance flight completed a few weeks ago," Dittemore said. "It starts an ambitious year of station missions, delivering more than 50 tonnes of components by year's end, and begins a new phase of assembly destined to enhance what already is an unprecedented facility."

Added NASA Mobile Transporter Subsystem manager Tom Farrell: "To build the rails that linked the east and west coasts of the United States, thousands of workers endured desert heat, frigid mountains and countless obstacles. These rails in space will run in temperatures far hotter than any desert and far colder than any mountain. And just like the transcontinental rails pulled together our country, these rails pull together 16 nations around the world, cooperating in orbit."

Atlantis is scheduled to return April 15.

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