KSC-05-S-00074

At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Lili Villarreal spends her days packing Space Shuttle Discovery's suitcase for Return to Flight. The suitcase is a module called Raffaello, one of three Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules built by the Italian Space Agency to carry supplies to and from the International Space Station. 'We fill up the cargo module with racks, and those racks hold either experiments, food supply, clothing for the astronauts... Anything that needs to go up to the Space Station, or anything that needs to come back from the Space Station, gets installed in the module.' Preparing the module for Return to Flight was an intensive process. 'The MPLM had to go through a lot of extra process that we didn't expect. We had to remove hatches and reinstall them, we had to do weld inspections to make sure the welds on the MPLM were okay to fly. Half of the racks we had to completely take apart, and modify them so that they're able to hold more weight, and are able to send up more supplies.' With Return to Flight marching ever closer, the MPLM team is finishing up preparations for this high-profile, and high-stakes, mission. 'We've started doing our stowage processing already. We've installed all the bags that go on the back side of the Resupply Stowage Platforms -- that's a special rack that we have. And currently, right now, all the bags are actually empty, because there's a lot of weight flying for STS-114 on the way up, and on the way back we're going to have a completely full module.' According to Lili, the most difficult part of her job is what makes the work so enjoyable. 'During our test and assembly, we have a lot of issues that come up, and we have to deal with it, and sometimes we don't have a lot of time to figure out what the solution's going to be, so that's very challenging for this job, and that's what keeps this job very exciting.'