SPACE.com -- Moving Van Mounted to Station, Change of Command Underway

The Leonardo supply module is lifted into position against Alpha's Unity node on Aug. 13, 2001 during STS-105.
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Captured before docking, this digital still image from Discovery shows how the STS-105 cargo bay looked after reaching orbit.
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Discovery lifts off from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center on Aug. 10, 2001 to begin STS-105.
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	Moving Van Mounted to Station, Change of Command Underway By Todd Halvorson Cape Canaveral posted: 12:15 pm ET 13 August 2001

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- An orbital moving crew started work at the International Space Station Monday as a change of command began to unfold at the frontier outpost.

With the spaceship Discovery and the station flying in tandem 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, U.S. astronaut Patrick Forrester limbered up the shuttle's robot arm and snatched an Italian-made moving van from the ship's cargo bay.

Slowly but surely, Forrester then lifted the cylindrical shipping container up four stories before mounting it to the station's U.S. Unity module, a $300 million pressurized passageway that leads to all parts of the outpost.

The work with the Canadian-built construction crane took about 90 minutes longer than planned due to difficult lighting conditions and the fact that Forrester had no direct line of sight -- only television camera views -- of the task at hand.

But the job ultimately got done, clearing the way for a weeklong effort to move a new crew into -- and an old crew out of -- the international complex.

"Great work," NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson told the astronauts from NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston. "Great job today."

A changing of the guard, meanwhile, was taking place within the station.

Working inside a Russian Soyuz emergency rescue craft, the joined shuttle-station crews set out to set up custom-made seat-liners for incoming outpost commander Frank Culbertson and two cosmonaut colleagues: Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Turin.

Partial pressure flight suits that the so-called Expedition Three crew would don if they had to abandon ship also were to be checked out Monday before the trio takes the helm of the outpost.

Seat-liners and flight suits belonging to the Expedition Two crew -- Yuri Usachev, Susan Helms and Jim Voss -- were being packed up within the shuttle.

And while the incoming and outgoing station crews will switch ships Monday, a formal change-of-command ceremony won't be held until the end of Discovery's eight-day stay at the outpost.

In the meantime, the 10 astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the linked shuttle-station complex will be busy unpacking the shuttle-borne shipping container, which now is attached to an Earth-facing berthing port on the Unity module.

Dubbed Leonardo, the pressurized cargo carrier is loaded with more than three tons of food, clothing, research apparatus and science experiments that the Expedition Three crew will need during a four-month tour of duty on the outpost.

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