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Just a few hours from liftoff, NASA fueled space shuttle Endeavour for one last ride into orbit Friday as hundreds of thousands of visitors converged on the coast for prime viewing spots.
The launch team began loading more than a half-million gallons of fuel into Endeavour at dawn, moments after Prince William and Kate Middleton exchanged wedding vows across the ocean in London. Three hours later, the tank was full and NASA was keeping a close watch on a nearby storm.
Forecasters put the odds of acceptable weather at 70 percent.
Commanding Endeavour on NASA's next-to-last shuttle flight is Navy Capt. Mark Kelly, who is married to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. She planned to watch the launch from Kennedy Space Center. Giffords was shot in the head in January and left rehab in Houston behind to attend the afternoon liftoff.
"Gabrielle is just as excited as all of you!" her staff said in a Twitter update late Thursday.
She's being accompanied by her husband's identical twin, Scott, also a space shuttle commander.
"Ready if replacement is required," Scott joked in a tweet.
President Barack Obama also will attend with his wife and two daughters — the first time in NASA history that a sitting president and his family will have witnessed a launch.
A storm pushed through the area after daybreak, but NASA expected it to be gone by launch time at 3:47 p.m. Low clouds and stiff crosswind, however, remained a concern. Launch controllers quickly resolved a minor shuttle problem: elevated pressure in a fuel tank for on-board thrusters.
Endeavour is bound for the International Space Station.
For its last hurrah, it's carrying one of the most expensive payloads in NASA's 30-year shuttle history: a $2 billion particle physics detector that will seek out antimatter and dark energy across the universe.
Kelly and his all-male crew — all six of them space veterans — saw their families for the last time Thursday. Four of them went for a 3-mile early morning run Friday on the beach, including astronaut Mike Fincke, who thanked the Lord for his family and "the chance to fly in space again."
