View of space shuttle Discovery on the launchpad from the NASA Media Site, 90 minutes before launch. Photo by Heather Goss.

Washington, D.C. native Alvin Drew was the sixth and last astronaut strapped in a few minutes ago aboard the space shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is Drew’s second shuttle mission, his first since STS-118 in 2007.

Drew, a graduate of Gonzaga College High School, will perform two spacewalks while the crew is aboard the International Space Station, installing hardware and performing some maintanence work.

The crew is also taking the slightly creepy “dexterous humanoid robot” Robonaut 2 into space.

This mission is the very last for space shuttle Discovery; afterwards, the orbiter will be decommissioned and sent to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center to replace Enterprise.

The shuttle launches at 4:50 p.m. this afternoon and you can watch live on NASA TV or SpaceFlight Now.