Perhaps the agency and the astronauts were more focused on the daunting job at hand. After all, the shuttle crew first had to pull off a tricky docking with the 13-story station.

[inset]Next came a difficult bid to mount the first part of what eventually will be a 10-piece metal backbone than spans an area as long as a football field.

What followed was a four-day surge of some of the most ambitious spacewalking construction work ever attempted in orbit. As it turned out, though, the astronauts whistled their way through an effort to wire up a girder-like truss that cost U.S. taxpayers $273 million. And they waltzed through an equally important job: Outfitting the outpost with a new shuttle docking port.

The spacewalkers also rigged up crucial station power converters and even had time to "test-drive" emergency jet backpacks that might save future construction workers accidentally cast adrift from the lumbering station. 

And when it was all said and done, the astronautsdeclared the new international outpost ready for its first full-time tenants: U.S. astronaut Bill Shepherd and two Russian colleagues - Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev.