A Day Early–Another Step Forward
The Kennedy Space Station set the scene today at 12:32 p.m., finalizing the Endeavour’s mission to the International Space Station. Undocking Sunday, which ended a nine-day-stay, the shuttle arrived one day early due to Hurricane Dean, it touched down two weeks after its original launching from the Florida space port for its ISS destination for several joint operations with the crew of the Expedition 15.
Regardless of the damage done to the shuttle’s underbelly or being forced to arrive early due to the hurricane, the mission was a success with 2.7 tons of cargo for the ISS crew. With a total of nine work days at the station, both the Endeavour crew and an ISS U.S. astronaut made four spacewalks, installed a mechanical truss which was placed on the orbiting laboratory, and also fixed the gyroscopes for stability. The good news is that that ISS is approximately 60 percent complete.
The importance of the International Space Station as a stepping stone to the Mars’ manned mission is a dream that is becoming a reality. Twelve shuttle missions remain for a 2010 deadline, completing the 100-billion dollar station for human colonization on Mars. According to NASA, with two missions behind its belt, additions are remaining for the orbiting laboratory, which will include lab segments from Japan and Europe, along with some new node module. These will be accomplished when the two more shuttle missions are completed—October and December—but there is a possibility they will be delayed until the foam issue is resolved.
Once the October STS-120 mission is in launch, a connecting module will be added that will increase the ISS’s interior space for the orbiting laboratory. Referred to as the Harmony module, it will provide “attachment points” for the European and Japanese laboratory modules that will be arriving to complete the ISS. More technically, it is referred to as Node 2, and is pretty much the same as the six-sided unity module which links the United States and Russian sections of the ISS.
The gateway to the international partners, without the deliverance and activation of Node 2 there would be nowhere to put all the international partner modules that would be required to finish the International Space Station. As a critical mission, several of the astronauts are looking forward to the STS-120 is the most exciting due to its position with finishing the station.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Mission History, Mission Objectives, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
