Working within an Italian-made moving van, four shuttle Discovery crewmates carted the last of 5 tons of supplies and equipment into the station for incoming Russian commander Yuri Usachev and his two American colleagues, Susan Helms and Jim Voss.
Then the quartet started repacking the Leonardo cargo carrier with a ton of dirty laundry, empty food containers, surplus gear and other garbage accumulated by the stations first tenants, who will taxi back to Earth aboard Discovery next week after a 140-day stay in space.
"Were bringing back a whole bunch of logistics and supplies that are no longer necessary, and frankly, a lot of trash and things like that that we want to clear out of the station," Discovery pilot Jim Kelly said in a space-to-ground interview.
"Obviously, as new things come up [to the station], there are packing materials and foam and bags and all those kind of things, which we dont want to leave inside the station, cluttering it up."
The so-called Expedition Two crew had more critical work to do.
Helms and Voss set up and began activating the computer brains of the stations Canadian-built robot arm, which will be delivered to the outpost by a crew scheduled to launch aboard shuttle Endeavour on April 19.
Now located in the stations $1.4 billion U.S. Destiny laboratory, two sophisticated computer work stations will play a crucial role in operating the 57-foot (17-meter) robot arm, a crane-like device that must be put in place in order to continue outpost construction.
Helms and Voss aimed to make certain that an associated video system will work properly when it comes time to mount the Canadian crane on the station next month.
While that work was going on, outgoing station skipper Bill Shepherd and his two Russian crewmates, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, packed up for Discoverys planned landing here at Kennedy Space Center at 2 a.m. EST (07:00 GMT) next Tuesday.
Fears about a potential collision with a fumbled piece of spacewalking gear, meanwhile, turned out to be a false alarm.
Flight directors ordered Discoverys crew to boost the 17-story outpost into a higher orbit Wednesday when updated tracking data indicated that a 10.5-pound (4.7-kilogram) tool attachment gadget had crept within a mile (1.6 kilometers) of the joined shuttle-station complex.
The viselike metal device, which enables spacewalkers to clamp tools to portable work platforms, was accidentally let loose by Voss during a sortie outside the outpost Sunday.
Engineers initially thought the so-called portable attachment device, or PAD, had drifted to a point 8 miles (13 kilometers) in front of the station, and as it turned out, they were right. The updated tracking data proved to be inaccurate.
"The PAD was really no threat at all to the station and the shuttle. It was still about 8 to 10 miles (16 kilometers) out," said NASA lead shuttle flight director John Shannon.
With the move to a higher orbit, "its a good 20 miles (32 kilometers) away from us," he added, "and its just something we dont have to worry about anymore."
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