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Pat Duggins
Pat Duggins
Senior News Analyst
pduggins@wmfe.org

 

Road signs in Space

 

February 16, 2008—Now that the seven astronauts aboard space shuttle Atlantis are wrapping up their docked mission to the International Space Station. I was struck by a statement from crewmember Dan Tani about moving around the station. Up to now, all of the crew modules snapped together on the outpost to form a straight line. That meant an astronaut or cosmonaut could float pretty much in a straight line from the Zvezda crew cabin through the Zarya space tug module, through the Unity node, the U.S. Destiny lab, and the Italian Harmony compartment. But, now with the Columbus lab snapped onto Harmony left-hand docking port, there’s a sharp turn involved. “We’re all still learning to negotiate that turn,” said Tani.

 

That reminded me an exchange I had with STS-88 payload manager Glenn Snyder that wound up in “Final Countdown”. We were both standing in the Space Station processing facility at Kennedy Space Center when the Unity module was being packed up for loading aboard Endeavour for the first station construction mission.  The outpost was expected to be to so big that compartments have road signs on the inside and the outside.  In this picture during expedition one, you see Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev floating from Unity to Zarya.   

  

 

Look at the blow-up photo which zooms in spot just below him.  The sign that reads Node 1 refers to Unity’s technical name. So, crewmembers floating from this module to the next, know where they’re going. Similar signs are on the outside of the compartments, so spacewalkers know where they are. I write about that first construction mission in chapter 9, which includes how astronaut Nancy Currie was left hanging in mid air in the middle of Unity by crewmates James Newman and Krikalev.Again, copies of “Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program” are available at local bookstores, amazon.com, or through the “Scientific American” book club. Here’s the link to that…

 

 http://www.sciambookclub.com/doc/full_site_enrollment/detail/fse_product_detail.jhtml?repositoryId=903808B450

 

Atlantis comes back to Earth for a landing scheduled for Wednesday.

 

More to come…

 

Photos courtesy of NASA

 

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