Space shuttle Atlantis set for final voyage

Atlantis was slated to blast off at 2:20 pm (1820 GMT). Everything was going well in the countdown and the weather was looking favorable. Forecasters were sticking with their 70 percent odds of good weather, but a NASA spokesman said that likely would improve as the morning wore on.

The launch team began pumping more than 500,000 gallons of fuel into Atlantis' massive external tank well before dawn, just as the six astronauts assigned to the mission woke up.

The 12-day mission is the last one for Atlantis, the fourth in NASA's line of space shuttles. Only two flights remain after this one, by Discovery and Endeavour. NASA hopes to end the 30-year program by the end of this year.

President Barack Obama wants NASA to focus on getting astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and into orbit around Mars by 2035. He canceled the previous administration's Constellation program, considered a continuation of the 1960s Apollo moon program.

The space station, meanwhile, will keep operating until at least 2020. Under the Obama plan, NASA astronauts will keep hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz rockets until US private enterprise can develop spacecraft to safely get humans into orbit; Kazinform cites China Daily. See www.chinadaily.com.cn for full version.