Skip to navigation | Skip to content

Space Station gets new crew


The changeover (Pic: NASA).

The International Space Station has had its first formal crew exchange, an occasion marked with handshakes, hugs and the handing over of the ships log.

According to Reuters the passing of the ship's log from one commander to the next was accompanied by the statement "this ship belongs to the people of Earth."

"Sail her well. I am ready to be relieved," said the station's first skipper, American William Shepherd, as he passed command to a Russian, Yury Usachev.

"I relieve you," said Usachev, taking the log book. Usachev and his American teammates Susan Helms and James Voss are to spend four to six months on the orbiting outpost.

It was a scene reminiscent of countless command changes in harbours and at sea back on Earth, but was unprecedented in space.

The space station, dubbed "Alpha" by Shepherd, is not the world's first, but it became the first to have commanders from both the United States and Russia, once bitter Cold War rivals and competitors in space exploration.

The station was proof that "our crews can work together as equals and our countries as partners," said Shepherd.

The station was little more than floating closet space when the Expedition One team arrived. They activated a command module, making the station livable, and continued to activate systems and new modules as they arrived on space shuttles and Russian cargo craft.

The exchange ceremony came toward the end of a difficult day for the astronauts, as they struggled with a mysterious pressure leak and worries about some critical flight software.

The major morning job was removing the Italian-made Leonardo cargo module from the station and returning it to the shuttle for the return flight to Earth.

But a small vestibule compartment between the space station and the 6.4 meters cylindrical module twice began to refill with air after the crew tried to depressurise it.

NASA was about to send an astronaut into the compartment to investigate when one of the space-station crew, James Voss, discovered the problem - a leaky connection on an air hose that could be safely ignored.

Earlier, the Discovery crew spent hours testing the software on two shuttle computers that had been turned on too quickly.

This is not the first time the crew has fallen behind in its work. A 13th day was added to the flight when astronauts could not fill Leonardo with used station parts and garbage in time to make the scheduled departure.

A routine spacewalk stretched into a record nine-hour marathon after an astronaut fumbled a piece of hardware and had to find a replacement.

And the shuttle was even late docking to the station after one of the station's giant solar arrays failed to lock into a safe position.

Despite the series of delays, the shuttle crew has met all their mission objectives. They delivered about five tons of supplies and hardware to the station along with the Expedition Two crew.

They also installed the first early components of a Canadian-built robot arm that will arrive at the station next month. The arm is a bigger, smarter and more dexterous version of the one that Australian-born astronaut Andrew Thomas used to pluck Leonardo from the space station's walls and nestle it in the shuttle's payload bay.

The $150 million Leonardo module is making its maiden flight and is designed to make about 25 round trips to the station.

The space station, still under construction, is a joint project of space agencies in the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada. NASA expects to spend $95 billion to build and then operate the facility for a decade or more.


[an error occurred while processing this directive]