"Seems kind of appropriate," said crewmember Charles Hobaugh, whose family dedicated the song to him. "We're excited to get out to a great day with the (spacewalking) team."
Back on Earth, NASA continued to review data on a worrisome gouge on the belly of the docked shuttle Endeavour. The damage, about 3 inches square, appears to have been caused by ice that broke off the fuel tank a minute after liftoff, though managers won't know for sure until they get more information.
Wednesday's launch blasted teacher-turned-astronaut Barbara Morgan and her six crewmates into space for a two-week mission.
The shuttle astronauts will inspect the gouged area more closely on Sunday using the shuttle's robotic arm and laser-tipped extension boom. If the damage is deep enough, they may need to patch it during a spacewalk, said John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team.
"What does this mean? I don't know at this point," Shannon said Friday.
Damage to the shuttle's skin, which protects it from the intense heat of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, has become a focus of the space agency since the Columbia disaster in 2003.
During the spacewalk Saturday, spacewalkers Rick Mastracchio and Dave Williams will provide on-the-scene guidance, while astronauts inside the space station use a crane-like robotic arm to maneuver the 2-ton, $11 million segment into place. Mastracchio and Williams will then work on removing launch restraints and bolting the segment into place.
The addition will act both as a spacer between a pair of the station's power-generating solar arrays and as a channel through which lines of electricity, data and cooling liquid will run.
The midday jaunt outside the orbiting outpost is set to last for about 6 1/2 hours.
On two spacewalks planned for later in the mission, astronauts will install a giant storage platform for spare parts and a new gyroscope that controls the station's orientation, replacing one that is broken.
