NASA Impatient to Launch Space Station Gear

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —  The parts have been piling up ton by ton, month by month, year by year. But now that Russia’s Zvezda control module is finally hitched to the international space station, NASA can start launching all the gear.

America’s science lab, Destiny. Italy’s cargo carriers, Leonardo and Raffaello. Canada’s robot arm. Trusses and solar panels and antennas and radiators.

More than 260,000 pounds of space station stuff in all, stacked in buildings five miles from the shuttle launch pads.

NASA can’t wait for the pieces to be out of the Kennedy Space Center and in orbit where they belong. Delivery and assembly trips begin this fall, with one shuttle flight after the other.

“It’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen in the next 1 1/2 years,” says John “Tip” Talone, director of space station and payload processing.

“We’re going to get all the elements up we need to get up there to operate as a space station, with a crew on board with science and with an airlock that allows them to go out and do maintenance and to have the arm up there to do whatever you have to do. And then it’s just going to be adding on the rest of the hardware.”

It’s the end of another long, taxing week inside the Space Station Processing Facility, but Talone is animated and his step is light as he shows a reporter around. The Russians have just launched Zvezda, Russian for Star, breaking a two-year logjam.

“There was a lot riding on it. Like the whole program,” Talone wryly observes.

Without Zvezda, none of the space station pieces under Talone’s watchful eye could fly and no one could move into the spartan platform circling Earth since 1998. The 43-foot-long service module was needed for navigation, propulsion and life support but got bogged down in Russia by inadequate funding and wayward rockets.

Zvezda’s flawless launch on July 12 and docking with the space station on July 25, more than two years late, jump started the program.

“I’ve got a couple hundred-thousand pounds of space station hardware that we can now launch because the service module is up there, not a pile of rubble on the steppes of Kazakstan, which was my biggest fear,” says Kennedy Space Center’s director, Roy Bridges.

Astronauts and cosmonauts will spruce up Zvezda inside and out during a brief space shuttle visit in September. They’ll install a toilet and treadmill, hook up power cables and an oxygen generator, and stock the pantry and clothes bins.

The real construction work will begin when another shuttle crew hauls up the first piece of space station truss, or framework, in October. Then the first permanent crew, led by American Bill Shepherd, will move in.

Scientific research will begin in earnest with the arrival of the Destiny lab in January. And so it will go as more and more components are added to the 240-mile-high complex.

Fifteen launches to the space station are planned, beginning with Zvezda, over the next year alone. Space station manager Jim Van Laak calls it “the most intense period of flight operations human space flight has ever undertaken.”

“We’re all very excited about that, but I think we’re all very awed by the challenge that it represents,” Van Laak says.

NASA expects space station construction to be completed in 2005, followed by a full decade of operation. The finished product should stretch as long and as wide as a football field and pack 1 million pounds.

Already, researchers are salivating.

“There’s no doubt that the excitement level is way up,” says Kathryn Clark, senior scientist for the space station program.

“Rather than just kick back and read books,” Clark says, scientists took advantage of the Zvezda delays by perfecting their experiments. At the same time, Talone and his engineering team ran extra tests on the space station building blocks accumulating in the processing facility and adjacent buildings.

The tests uncovered a slew of computer software snags, “nit-noise stuff that would have been an aggravation on orbit,” says Talone.

“Hopefully, we’re going to make these first few months up there a lot easier,” he says.

The space station’s bulky batteries went into a freezer to extend their shelf life as the wait dragged on. Everything else remained in the air-conditioned chambers, raised off the floor in large metal cradles and stands.

On this particular afternoon, a dozen workers wearing powder blue lab coats and cloth caps flit among the large cylindrical modules. They need gloves in order to touch; the sweat from their hands could, over time, corrode the metal.

Talone likens the giant room--which soars 62 feet--to a garage.

“Nothing is lying fallow here,” says Talone. “Actually, we’ve got things parked in a couple other spacecraft facilities. Partially because it’s too crowded, but also we don’t want to just store stuff in here. If it ain’t busy, we don’t want it in here.”

With Japanese and European modules to come and lots more U.S. parts on the way, Talone realizes “there’s a lot of hard work to go.”

“It’s not that it’s going to get any easier,” he says. “It’s just that we really understand where we’re headed now--and it’s a good feeling.”

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NASA on the Net:

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