CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) _ The three men who will move into the international space station for the winter say they benefited from all of space shuttle Endeavour's launch delays.
The extra time allowed them to get more sleep and hit the gym.
The two weeks of postponements also pushed the shuttle flight into normal daylight working hours and out of the deep graveyard shift.
``Physically, the delays helped us,'' said Kenneth Bowersox, the astronaut who will take over as the next space station commander.
Bowersox and the six others aboard Endeavour were expected to arrive at the space station Monday afternoon, ending a two-day chase. Astronaut Donald Pettit and Russian Nikolai Budarin will join Bowersox on the station.
After training for five years for a four-month space station stint, Bowersox said it was hard to believe he was finally on his way.
``I can't wait,'' he said in an interview with The Associated Press on Sunday night. ``I've seen two or three sunrises during the last couple days and I can't believe how many more I've got ahead of me. But I think every day is going to be precious up here.''
Bowersox will replace Russian cosmonaut Valery Korzun as the space station's skipper.
Korzun and his crew, American Peggy Whitson and Russian Sergei Treschev, have been living on the space station for almost six months, although the mission was to have lasted just 4 1/2 months.
Endeavour should have flown in October, but was grounded because of cracked fuel lines found throughout the shuttle fleet. Then Endeavour ran into other trouble that delayed liftoff another two weeks.
Pettit took advantage of the last two weeks of delays to eat _ and eat.
``It gave me an opportunity to try to put on a few pounds before flight,'' Pettit said. ``So I did a lot of eating. And then I did a lot more sleep after that. And then, of course, we have to go to the gym.''
Bowersox said being in orbit over the holidays may intensify the space station experience, at least for him.
NASA made sure turkey breasts were aboard Endeavour for Thanksgiving. As for Christmas, Bowersox noted: ``I can't think of a whole lot better place to spend Christmas than up in Earth orbit looking down, trying to find Santa Claus.'' He has three young sons.
Pettit's twin sons will turn 2 this Friday. Because they are so young, ``it's going to be kind of hard staying in touch with them,'' he said. ``It's going to be sort of like I fell off the planet.''
Budarin, their cosmonaut crewmate, also has two sons but they're both grown.
Earlier Sunday, the astronauts gave Endeavour's robot arm a workout. The job took on added significance because of the damage that workers inflicted two weeks ago during oxygen-leak repairs; they accidentally hit the arm with scaffolding.
Despite the 2-inch bruise near the shoulder of the 50-foot crane, it operated fine in orbit, although a wrist joint was sluggish. Mission Control said recently applied lubricant may not have had a chance yet to work its way into that joint.
The arm will be used Tuesday to lift a giant girder from the shuttle payload bay for installation on the space station.
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