CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- One month into their planned six-month stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the two-man Expedition Seven crew say they are doing fine.
"Life here is good," astronaut Ed Lu said Thursday during an interview broadcast on NASA TV. "We are having a really good time, we're doing a lot work and I think we're being productive."
Lu and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, the current station skipper, were launched into orbit April 25 aboard a Soyuz TMA spacecraft. They docked to the ISS two days later and relieved the Expedition Six crew, who returned to Earth on May 3.
Expedition Seven was to be a three-person crew delivered via a NASA space shuttle, but the Feb. 1 Columbia disaster forced a change in plans.
With the shuttle fleet and its large cargo carrying capability grounded for the foreseeable future, NASA and its international partners decided to go with two-person crews to act as outpost caretakers, relying in the meantime on the Russian Soyuz as a crew transfer vehicle.
So far the two-person scheme seems to be working out.
"It can sometimes get a little busier and sometimes it's good to have that third set of hands doing stuff," Lu said, noting that mission managers are doing their best to keep the work load to a minimum. "Things are going pretty good."
The pair are scheduled to remain in space until relieved by the Expedition Eight crew in late October, after which they will return to Earth in the same Soyuz TMA spacecraft they flew into space with.
Both men said they were comfortable that their spacecraft would perform well, despite the troubles the Expedition Six crew had when they re-entered and landed several hundred miles short of the intended target.
Lu said they are following the progress of the Soyuz investigation, as well as the work of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.
"We're keeping up with the developments up here," Lu said. "We get regular reports on what they're finding out, and obviously we're going to need some time before we fly the shuttle again."
In other station news, the complex will fire its maneuvering thrusts at 12:50 p.m. EDT (1650 GMT) Friday to raise the outpost's orbit by 1.09 miles (1.77 kilometers) in order to avoid a small communications satellite. The two spacecraft are in very different orbits but their paths are intersecting close enough to require NASA to take the precaution of adjusting the station's trajectory.
This "evasive action" will mark the sixth time since November 1998 that the station has had to move out of the way of potentially damaging objects of one kind or another. The last time was on May 15, 2002.
This is slightly less than the number of evasive maneuvers originally predicted for the ISS program, said NASA spokesman Kyle Herring. That number was two times per year.
Meanwhile, mission managers have declared that the microgravity science glove box inside the Destiny laboratory module is now fully functioning again and science experiments can resume within the container.
The device hasn't been properly working since it was delivered into orbit during the December 2002 shuttle mission. Troubleshooting by the station crews and the delivery of spare parts by a Russian spacecraft resulted in the success.
A so-called "smart fluid" experiment is scheduled next week in which researchers will study the way a new kind of vibration dampening substance works in the near weightlessness of Earth orbit.
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