CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The U.S.-Russian crew aboard the International Space Station will step up work outside the orbital outpost this month, setting out on two spacewalks aimed at carrying out key assembly jobs at the 17-story complex.
Station commander Yuri Onufrienko and flight engineer Carl Walz are scheduled to venture outside the outpost at 3:50 p.m. EST (2050 GMT) Jan. 14 on the first of the two excursions.
The job at hand: Moving a Russian Strela cargo boom from a stowage point outside a conical U.S. docking port to the exterior of the station's Russian Zarya space tug, which doubles as an orbital warehouse at the outpost.
James Hartsfield, a spokesman for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the idea would be to place the crane within reach of a similar boom that was erected outside the station's Russian Pirs airlock late last year.
Hefty cargoes as well as suited astronauts and cosmonauts then will be able to be moved from one crane to another during future construction and maintenance work outside the outpost, he said.
The spacewalk is expected to take about six hours to complete and represents the first of two sorties the station crew plans to perform outside the outpost this month.
Onufrienko and flight engineer Daniel Bursch will head outside the station Jan. 25 to set up ham radio and Russian television antennas on the outer hull of the outpost's Russian-built Zvezda crew quarters.Onufrienko and Bursch also will carry out several other chores during that excursion.
Metal deflectors will be mounted next to Zvezda steering thrusters to prevent toxic rocket exhaust from damaging the exterior of the bus-sized module, and contamination monitors also will be set up in the same area.
In addition, the pair will retrieve a materials science experiment that was set up outside the station during an earlier spacewalk.
The two spacewalks will be the first of as many as eight such excursions that are tentatively planned at the station during the tenure of the Expedition Four crew.
A visiting shuttle crew is slated to perform four spacewalks during an April mission to deliver and install the central segment of a huge station truss that will eventually stretch 356 feet (108 meters) from end to end.
Once the shuttle crew departs, Busch and Walz are tentatively scheduled to carry out as many as two more spacewalks to finish outfitting the truss segment.
Launched Dec. 5 aboard shuttle Endeavour, the Expedition Four crew boarded the station two days later, setting out on a five-and-a-half-month tour of duty.
Much of their first month in orbit has been spent unloading a Russian Progress cargo carrier and starting up some of the 65 U.S. and Russian research experiments they plan to carry out onboard the outpost.
The Progress cargo carrier will serve as a giant trashcan over the next two months before it is jettisoned from the station Feb. 27 and then sent on a destructive plunge back through Earth's atmosphere.
A new Progress space freighter then is scheduled to arrive at the station three days later, hauling up food, water, clothing and station equipment to the crew.
The crew's first visitors are scheduled to launch April 4 aboard shuttle Atlantis. The seven U.S. astronauts are to arrive at the station two days later with the central truss segment.
A Russian Soyuz taxi crew then is slated to launch April 17 on an eight-day round-trip to the station. Headed by veteran cosmonaut Yuri Gidzenko, that crew will include European Space Agency astronaut Roberto Vittori and Mark Shuttlesworth, an Internet entrepreneur who is destined to become the first South African to fly in space.
The Expedition Four crew now is scheduled to return to Earth May 13 aboard shuttle Endeavour, capping a 159-day stay in orbit. Their replacements - Russian cosmonauts Valeri Korzun and Sergei Treschev and U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson - are to remain at the outpost until mid-September.
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