Japan's space lab about to get bigger

[June 06, 2008]  CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- The newest space station addition, a giant Japanese science lab, is about to get bigger. After installing TV cameras and removing covers during a spacewalk Thursday, the astronauts at the linked shuttle and station got ready for their next challenge: attaching a storage shed to the bus-size lab. The 210-mile construction job was set for Friday afternoon.

The lab, named Kibo, Japanese for hope, is so big that it had to be split into three shuttle missions to get to the international space station. Its 14-foot storage shed was delivered in March and left in a temporary parking spot. The third and final section, a porch, will be launched next spring.

Spacewalkers Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr. looked like puffy white dolls Thursday against the 37-foot-long, 14-foot-wide lab, which is now the space station's biggest room.

It was their second spacewalk in three days.

"I feel like I'm on a camping trip trying to pack up a wet tent on a Sunday morning," Fossum said as he wrestled with some of the lab's insulation. He and Garan removed thermal covers from the lab's robot arm and added them to a variety of attachment points.

As the spacewalkers toiled outside, their eight colleagues hauled more experiment racks into the billion-dollar lab, and flight controllers near Tokyo monitored the power systems.

"Lots of people at work in there," astronaut Kenneth Ham informed the spacewalkers.

"No, there's not. I don't see anybody," one of the spacewalkers said.

"They got tired of your banging on the roof," Ham answered.

Even with all the racks moving in, Kibo was still noticeably bigger than the eight other rooms at the space station. "We have not seen that much space in space since Skylab," Mission Control told the astronauts in a written message. Skylab was NASA's first space station, back in the 1970s.

Space shuttle Discovery's astronauts delivered and installed Kibo earlier in the week. There are now three labs at the orbiting complex, supplied by NASA, the European Space Agency and, now, the Japanese Space Agency.

On Saturday, the astronauts will test drive Kibo's 33-foot robot arm. The two TV cameras that were set up on the lab's exterior Thursday will be instrumental in those robot-arm operations.

And on Sunday, one final spacewalk will be conducted to replace an empty nitrogen-gas tank at the space station. Fossum and Garan got a head start on that work Thursday.

Just before the seven-hour spacewalk ended, Fossum checked the solar wing rotating joint on the space station's left side. He found streaks of white grease, but no metal shavings like those that are clogging an identical joint on the right side.

Flight director Annette Hasbrook said the left joint looked to be in fine shape and noted that the leaked grease actually may be preventing a buildup of friction between the moving parts.

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

[Associated Press; By MARCIA DUNN]

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