Newest Shuttle Mission To Rewire Space Station

STATION NEWS

The crew of STS-116

by Jean-Louis Santini
Washington (AFP) Dec 04, 2006
Confident after two nearly flawless launches, NASA will send the Discovery shuttle Thursday on what it calls the most complex mission yet, to give the International Space Station a new electricity system. In three spacewalks the astronauts will rewire the orbiting station, replacing its eight-year-old temporary power cable system with a permanent one, made possible after the previous mission in September installed two huge electricity-generating solar array panels on the ISS.

Discovery will also transport a new 11-million-dollar truss segment weighing two tonnes for the ISS that will be installed during a spacewalk.

The mission, one of the hardest ever for NASA's astronauts, the agency says, is key to getting ISS construction back on pace.

Building the station is years behind schedule after long safety-related delays, and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is in a race to complete the ISS before its aging shuttle fleet is retired in 2010.

The US and international partners Russia and Europe eye using the orbiting laboratory as a base for further exploration of the solar system once construction is completed.

President George W. Bush announced in 2004 a vision of a manned mission eventually to Mars, with the short term goal of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2018.

But ISS construction was stalled by the devastating accident of February 2003, when the Columbia shuttle disintegrated while returning to Earth due to breaks in its heat shield, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

That put a halt to the shuttle program, only resumed in 2005 with a mission that showed that NASA still had not put to end worries over crucial insulation tiles being damaged during liftoff -- the problem that led to the Columbia disaster.

But two successful missions this year left the space agency's engineers confident they have overcome the problem and could resume a hectic schedule of 14 more flights by the three-ship fleet by 2010 to complete ISS construction.

The Discovery launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, scheduled for 9:35 pm Thursday (0235 GMT Friday), will carry seven astronauts on a 12-day mission during which the main task will be to rewire the space station.

The crew includes six Americans -- two of them women -- and Sweden's first-ever astronaut, physicist and mission specialist Christer Fuglesang.

One of the women, former US Navy test pilot Sunita Williams, will stay behind on the ISS while one of the three current station inhabitants, Fuglesang's European Space Agency colleague Thomas Reiter of Germany, will return to Earth on the shuttle.

If the launch goes ahead as planned, it will be the first night launch in four years.

Because of the worries about foam breaking off at launch and damaging the shuttle's protective heat shield, NASA restricted the last three missions to daylight launches, to better observe and record what happens at liftoff.

In each of the last missions the liftoff was recorded by scores of cameras so that engineers could be sure no crucial damage was incurred.

If weather or technical difficulties force NASA to postpone Thursday's launch, the space agency has set a window for rescheduling the lift-off that lasts until December 17.

After that the agency will have to wait until January for another chance to get the mission underway.

Source: Agence France-Presse

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