CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Shuttle Atlantis and its five orbital assembly workers cruised along in hot pursuit of the International Space Station Friday as the crew onboard the outpost prepared to resume construction at the frontier complex.
Lapping the planet at 25 times the speed of sound, the Atlantis astronauts zoomed through the midway point of a two-day trip that got underway Thursday with a spectacular predawn launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
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| Shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station are scheduled to link up at 10:53 a.m. EDT Friday (0253 GMT Saturday). Click here for live coverage of the final rendezvous and docking, which will begin with an engine firing about 8:32 p.m. EDT Friday (0032 GMT) Saturday. |
Ground controllers told the station crew that a series of shuttle thruster firings was proceeding as planned, putting the visiting astronauts on course for an on-time docking at the outpost at 10:53 p.m. EDT Friday (0253 GMT) Saturday.
"That's great," station flight engineer Susan Helms replied. "We're getting real excited about them getting here."Look for the last stages of the shuttle's ground-up rendezvous to begin at 8:30 p.m. EDT Friday (0030 GMT Saturday). With Atlantis trailing the station by nine miles (14.4 kilometers), shuttle engines will be fired to close the final gap between the craft.
Hatches between Atlantis and the outpost are scheduled to swing open about 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday (0430 GMT Saturday) as the shuttle and station crews band together for a mission that will cap the first full phase of the $60 billion outpost assembly project.
Said NASA flight director Paul Hill: "This has been a long time coming."
A joint project of 16 nations on four continents, the station initially consisted of two building blocks that were launched and linked in space in late 1998.
The construction project then came to a standstill for nearly two years as cash-strapped Russia struggled to build the station's crew quarters, which finally rocketed aloft on July 12, 2000.
Launched on the one-year anniversary of that flight, the Atlantis voyage marks the 19th station assembly, supply or crew transport mission to be carried out in the past 12 months. And during that time, the complex has grown from a small, vacant outpost to a permanently staffed orbital research park that has as much space as a standard three-bedroom house.
"It's just amazing that all of this has been done in a very short period of time," said David Bethay, a space station ground operations manager with The Boeing Co., NASA's prime contractor on the project.
Now cradled in the cargo bay of Atlantis, the newest addition to the station will be a $164 million airlock that will serve as a staging area for spacewalks to be carried out at times when visiting shuttles aren't docked to the outpost.
Built at a fraction of the cost of the $700 million airlock planned for NASA's former Space Station Freedom program, the airtight chamber is designed to give outpost crews an independent means of building and maintaining the international complex.
Next page: Preparing for company
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