The shuttle Endeavour will light up the skies over Florida early Tuesday, kicking off a busy 16-day mission to the International Space Station. If weather and the millions of parts that make up the shuttle cooperate, NASA will launch the shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. The mission calls for astronauts to deliver the first section of a new Japanese laboratory known as Kibo to the station, as well as an eerily human-looking robot. That robot, a Canadian creation named Dextre, can sit on the end of the station's robotic arm and perform some of the risky maintenance and service work that currently calls for a human touch. "If you had to go to a drawing board and describe an exciting mission from scratch, I think you would come up with STS-123,' Dominic L. Gorie, the flight commander and a retired Navy captain, said at a news conference in Houston recently, using the mission's official name. The mission does, in fact, have a little of everything: a dramatic night launching, five spacewalks and station construction with the first Japanese module, which means that components from all of the station's international partners