Hectic Week for New Space Station Member
By MIKE SCHNEIDER
HOUSTON – For the international space station’s newest crew member, his first week aboard the orbiting outpost was anything but routine. The failure of computers that control the space station’s ability to orient itself and produce oxygen had brought up the possibility that new crew member Clayton Anderson and his Russian counterparts, Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov, might be forced to abandon their orbiting home.
But Yurchikhin and Kotov, after long hours and several sleepless nights last week, got four of six processors on two computers working again on Friday. They got the remaining two on line Saturday.
"I think I’m hanging in there. It kind of reminds me of one of my first swimming lessons when I just got tossed in the water and they told me to kind of survive," Anderson said of his first week in space. "We’re going to get through all this, just like NASA always does."
NASA officials think the computers are in good shape, but on Sunday they planned to test the station’s orientation system. That will be the final benchmark for deciding whether the computers work properly and whether space shuttle Atlantis – currently docked with the station – needs to stay an extra day to continue offering help.
Also Sunday, two shuttle astronauts planned to conduct the fourth and final spacewalk of their mission to the space station. The spacewalk’s main goal will be to activate a rotating joint on the outpost’s newest segment, allowing a new pair of solar wings to track the sun.
Atlantis was cleared Saturday to return to Earth later this week after engineers determined the space shuttle’s heat shield could survive the intense heat of re-entry.
The shuttle’s 11-day space station construction mission was extended to 13 days so a thermal-protection blanket could be fixed during a spacewalk. NASA has been particularly sensitive about the space shuttles’ heat shields since the Columbia accident killed seven astronauts in 2003. Atlantis is set to land at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Thursday.
Engineers in Moscow and Houston have not pinpointed what caused computers on the space station’s Russian side to fail. A leading culprit was changes to the electrical system from the space station’s growth.
"I feel pretty confident with where we are," said Mike Suffredini, NASA’s space station program manager.
With the computers working again, various systems – such as an oxygen machine, a water processor and a carbon dioxide remover – resumed operating.
U.S. astronaut Sunita "Suni" Williams, who on Saturday set the record for longest single spaceflight by a woman, passing astronaut Shannon Lucid’s record of 188 days in orbit, said the problem with the space station’s computers was an example of how people sometimes forget that spaceflight remains risky.
"We take spaceflight for granted and it’s still pretty darn dangerous. (The space station is) not just a tourist vacation place. It’s a serious place and we’re doing serious business and serious science up here," said Williams, who was replaced by Anderson as the U.S. member of the space station crew.
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Associated Press writer Mike Schneider contributed to this report.
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