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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The space shuttle Endeavour lighted the evening skies over Florida on Friday, rising beneath a brilliant moon as it raced toward the International Space Station.
The shuttle thundered off the launching pad at 7:55 p.m., hurtling through a high, thin bank of clouds that rippled and dispersed with its passing.
Its 15-day mission is devoted to construction on the $100 billion orbiting outpost. But while previous missions have often focused on adding modules or solar panels to the station, much of the equipment for this trip will transform the inside so that crew size can be doubled to six.
Michael T. Suffredini, the NASA station program manager, told reporters in a recent briefing that “when the crew leaves, the station won’t look any different on the outside, but it’ll be dramatically different on the inside.”
Shuttle missions are often delayed by technical problems or weather, but the preparations for this launching were smooth and relatively free of glitches.
Equipment headed to the station includes new sleeping quarters, a second toilet, a new exercise machine and equipment for generating oxygen. The 32,000-pound payload also includes a system to recycle water on the station, including urine, to produce purified water for drinking. The $250 million system is designed to recycle 93 percent of the water used on the station.
Sandra H. Magnus, who will begin a stay of several months on the station, said that while many people expressed revulsion at the recycling system, she laughed about the “yuck factor” because the purification would exceed that of most municipal water systems. “I don’t anticipate any problems with the purity of the water once we get this up and running correctly,” she said.
Donald R. Pettit, another of the Endeavour’s astronauts, lived on the station for five and a half months in 2002 and 2003. Dr. Pettit said equipment like the water recycling system was critical to long-term space exploration, since getting new water to an outpost on the Moon or Mars would be expensive and arduous. “I really think this is a key steppingstone for human beings to leave planet Earth,” he said.
The commander of this mission is Capt. Christopher J. Ferguson of the Navy, who is on his second shuttle mission. The pilot, Col. Eric A. Boe of the Air Force, will be on his first mission.
While some of the astronauts work to transfer cargo from shuttle to station, three members of the crew will engage in four spacewalks. Much of the work will be devoted to lubricating a balky rotary joint that helps keep the station’s solar arrays pointed at the sun. Two of the 10-foot-diameter joints turn the arrays.
Last year, mission managers noticed that the joint on the right side was vibrating and required greater-than-expected power to turn it. During this mission, the spacewalkers — Capt. Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper of the Navy, Capt. Steve Bowen of the Navy and Lt. Col. Shane Kimbrough of the Army — will clean metal shavings from the joint and lubricate it thoroughly. They will lubricate the left-hand joint as well as a protective measure.
These are among the final missions of the space shuttles, whose program is scheduled to be wound down by 2010 to make way for a next-generation space program known as Constellation. The spaceships being developed for Constellation are designed to reach the station, but also to return astronauts to the Moon, explore near-Earth asteroids and even go to Mars.
Those craft, however, are not expected to begin flying before 2015. In the meantime, the United States will depend on Russia for passage to and from the station on Soyuz craft.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/science/space/15shuttle.html?ref=space
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