CAPE
CANAVERAL, Fla. - An Olympic athlete-turned-astronaut and a rookie spaceflyer
are leading a spacewalking team set to launch toward the International Space
Station (ISS) aboard NASA's shuttle Discovery this week.
Veteran
shuttle astronaut Scott Parazynski and first-time flyer Douglas Wheelock are
taking the first shift for the five spacewalks on tap for NASA's STS-120
shuttle flight slated for a planned
Tuesday launch. Together with their five crewmates, the spacewalkers will help
a vital connecting node to the station to serve as the anchor for new
international laboratories and larger ISS crews.
"It's very
exciting to think that we'll be enabling, in small part, the future expansion
of the space station, in particular the science activities," Parazynski said in
a NASA interview.
During
their planned 14-day flight, Parazynski will perform four of the five STS-120
spacewalks - three with Wheelock and a fourth with crewmate Daniel Tani - to continue
ISS construction. The space station's Expedition 16 crew will conduct the
fifth spacewalk.
'Grizzled'
veteran
With four
spaceflights under his belt, Parazynski is the most experienced spaceflyer of
Discovery's STS-120 crew and hopes to help his rookie crewmates develop the
skills to lead on future missions.
"I am not
the oldest, but I am the most grizzled," Parazynski, 46, told reporters. "I
take the responsibility of developing them as one of my highest priorities."
Parazynksi
is the chief
spacewalker for Discovery's STS-120 flight. Hailing from Palo Alto, Calif., and Evergreen, Colo., he studied medicine at Stanford Medical School, where he
competed on the U.S. Development Luge Team and later served as a Olympic team
coach for the Philippines during the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, Canada.
Parazynski conducted
extensive studies in the human body's adaptation to long-duration spaceflight
and joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1992 after completing his residency in
emergency medicine in Denver, Colorado. But the seed for his astronaut career
was planted much earlier.
"I had a
wonderful upbringing, great parents, and as luck would have it, a father who
worked in the space program," Parazynski said, adding that his father worked
for Boeing to support NASA's Apollo moon program. "So I grew up with the
posters on the wall, the model rockets ...I had the dream early on and, I just
never lost track of that aspiration."
According
to Parazynski's calculations, he is also the first NASA astronaut to be born
after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard's May 5, 1961 launch to become the first
American in space. Parazynksi, who is married to wife Gail and has two
children, was born on July 28 of that year.
Parazynski
first launched into space aboard the shuttle Atlantis in 1994 during an 11-day
Earth science mission, then flew to Russia's Mir Space Station aboard the same
orbiter in 1997 on cargo and crew exchange flight. He flew alongside former
NASA astronaut John Glenn during 1998's STS-95 shuttle flight aboard Discovery
before launching to the ISS aboard its sister ship Endeavour in 2000 to help
install the space station's robotic arm.
During the
STS-120 flight, Parazynski said he is looking forward to his fourth spacewalk,
which is slated to test
a shuttle repair technique that uses a pink goo-like material to
fill in damaged heat shield tiles. The test was a late addition to the upcoming
mission following tile damage to the shuttle Endeavour during its August
spaceflight.
"I'm
really excited about it to answer the fundamental question how is this material
going to behave [in space]," Parazynski told reporters.
A pilot's
orbital Holy Grail
Considered
the "happy guy" of Discovery's STS-120 crew by commander Pamela Melroy,
Wheelock is eagerly awaiting his first spaceflight after nine years of
training.
"He is the
life of the party," Parazynski said of his
spacewalking partner, who goes by the nickname "Wheels."
Wheelock,
47, is a native of Windsor, New York, and an active U.S. Army colonel with degrees
in applied science and engineering, as well as aerospace engineering. While he
recalls watching the Apollo moon landings as a nine-year-old boy, Wheelock's
path to the launch pad seems to have evolved from his work as an Army aviator
and test pilot.
"For me, it
was more like a sort of logical progression," Wheelock said in a NASA
interview. "Because of my engineering interest, the assembly of, and
construction of an orbiting laboratory just was sort of the Holy Grail, if you
will, for me as a mission specialist."
Since
joining NASA's spaceflying ranks in 1998, Wheelock has served in a veritable
cornucopia of positions ranging from ISS spacecraft communicator in Mission
Control to NASA's Director of Operations at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, where he was trained to serve as a flight engineer for
Soyuz spaceflights. He also lived on the ocean floor during NASA's 10-day NEEMO
6 expedition to the Aquarius undersea laboratory.
During his
three STS-120 spacewalks, Wheelock will help install Harmony, reattach the
station's old Port 6 solar array to its final position on the outpost's
port-most edge and test shuttle heat shield repair methods. The complicated
orbital work should prove among the highlights of Wheelock's spaceflight debut,
but the astronaut said he feels fully trained to tackle his tasks.
"The
enormity of the task is not lost by my excitement for sure," Wheelock said. "I'm
very well aware of the complexity of what we're doing, and I've a healthy set
of butterflies, you know, just sort of the feeling before the big game."
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