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Homebound Station Crew Ready for Return to Terra Firma
By Todd Halvorson
Cape Canaveral
posted: 07:00 am ET
08 August 2001
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The soon-to-be homebound crew of the International Space Station is ready to return to Earth after five busy months of critical outpost construction work, but a vacation break will have to wait. Instead, outgoing station commander Yuri Usachev and two American flight engineers -- Susan Helms and Jim Voss -- will face extensive debriefings and months of medical rehab when they touch down on terra firma in just two weeks. "They have promised us some time off, and I'm sure that will happen. And that will be a nice relief after having worked so hard for many, many months up here," Helms said Tuesday. "But the doctors will have their hooks in us right after landing, and you can bet that we'll be spending a lot of time in the clinic doing post-flight medical testing and then starting up our round of debriefings." Such is life for the so-called Expedition Two crew, which boarded the station in March and will taxi back to the planet aboard shuttle Discovery. Set for launch at 5:38 p.m. EDT (2138 GMT) Thursday, Discovery and a crew of four shuttle astronauts will fly to the station with a new resident crew that includes U.S. commander Frank Culbertson and two Russian cosmonauts: Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Turin. With shuttle launch preparations continuing at Kennedy Space Center, Usachev and his crew spent the day packing and reflecting on a highly successful tour of duty that included two crucial station construction jobs:- The assembly in April of a $600 million Canadian robot arm that will play a key role in future outpost construction.
- The activation last month of the station's new $164 million Quest airlock, which will enable future outpost crews to perform spacewalking construction or repair work when no shuttle is present at the complex.
Both jobs had to be carried out before NASA and its 15 international partners could press ahead next year with a series of shuttle flights aimed at erecting the station's 356-foot (108-meter) central truss. Three U.S. electric power towers then will be mounted on the truss so that Japanese and European science laboratories can be added to the station in 2004 and 2005, respectively. "I think overall our crew is pleased and proud that we've been able to participate in the assembly of the International Space Station," Voss said. "We're one of the early flights, and some of the things that we did...were to get it ready for the final phases of assembly." In space now for 153 days, Usachev, Helms and Voss also kicked off more than a dozen research experiments in the station's U.S. Destiny lab and spent a good deal of time wrestling with command-and-control computer problems and start-up glitches with the Canadian arm. But the daily grind on the outpost, Voss said, is "not unlike an average day on the ground for many people." Next page: Life in space
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