Astronauts open up new billion-dollar lab

[June 05, 2008]  CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Astronauts opened up Japan's new billion-dollar space station lab, then got ready for another spacewalk, this time to spruce up the outside of the huge addition.

Crewmen Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr. were headed back outside Thursday for the second time in three days. Their objective: to set up TV cameras on the Kibo lab and remove covers from its robot arm, and do some advance work for a nitrogen-gas tank replacement scheduled for their third and final spacewalk this weekend.

The door to Kibo -- Japanese for hope -- was swung open Wednesday, a day after its installation at the international space station.

It was a momentous occasion for Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, who hung a banner over the threshold and led the procession inside.

Hoshide noted that Kibo was empty, for now, but quoted an engineer back on Earth who told him, "It looks really empty but it's full of dreams."

"Enjoy your new module," radioed Japanese Mission Control near Tokyo.

The 10 inhabitants of the linked shuttle Discovery and space station took advantage of all the empty space inside the bus-size lab and twirled, performed back flips and bounced on the walls. Then they started hauling in racks for science experiments.

Flight director Annette Hasbrook described Kibo as "stunning" and said it was "just an amazing sight" to see it up and running.

At 37 feet in length, Kibo is the largest of the nine rooms now at the space station. It surpasses the two other labs, belonging to NASA and the European Space Agency, by 9 feet and more, and it's going to expand.

A large float-in closet for Kibo arrived at the space station in March; it will be installed on the lab later this week. A third section -- essentially a porch for experiments -- will be launched next spring. That's when full-scale science operations are expected to begin inside Kibo.

The other good news Wednesday was that the space station's toilet finally was working normally again.

Russian space station resident Oleg Kononenko put in a new pump that was delivered earlier this week by Discovery, after being rushed to the launch site from Moscow. When it was apparent the toilet was working, flight controllers gave the go-ahead for its use.

For two weeks, the three men living aboard the space station had to manually flush the Russian-built toilet with extra water several times a day. It was a time-consuming job and waste of water, not to mention an unpleasant chore.

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On the Net:

NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/

Japanese Space Agency: http://www.jaxa.jp/index-e.html

[Associated Press; By MARCIA DUNN]

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