Endeavour's flight plan will be nearly a mirror image to shuttle Atlantis' October trip to the station, which featured the installation of the $390 million S-One (S1) truss segment to the station's growing backbone.
This time the almost identical 45-foot-long (14-meter-long) P-One (P1) truss will be attached to the opposite end of the girder-like structure. This will give the station some aesthetic balance and the second half of a heat-dispelling radiator system that eventually will help keep the station's electronics cool.
"It is a very complex mission because we have a major assembly task putting a truss out," said Kim Ulrich, NASA's launch package manager for this STS-113 mission. "We're also rotating the Expedition Five and Expedition Six crew, which adds to the complexity of the mission."
The Expedition Five crew -- Valery Korzun, Sergei Treschev and Peggy Whitson -- have been living and working on the ISS for about five months, keeping the science complex operating, assisting in assembly tasks and enjoying the occasional visitors from Earth.
They will be replaced by the Expedition Six crew, which includes new station commander Ken Bowersox, science officer Don Pettit and Soyuz commander Nikolai Budarin.
Compared to previous station crews, this Expedition Six team has the potential to be the loneliest as only an unmanned Progress freighter is scheduled to visit during their stay. The next people they see in March will represent their ride home -- assuming no shuttle program delays crop up.
"I've told everybody I'm good out to a year if they want to go that long," Bowersox said. "I doubt we'll go over a year but anything less than that, I wouldn't make a bet."
Before the new station crew truly make the orbiting laboratory their home, they first must assist with the major assembly tasks that are part of Endeavour's busy STS-113 mission.
"I really like to have a challenging mission," said Endeavour commander Jim Wetherbee, who will be making his sixth spaceflight. "Because they are so labor intensive and expensive we do want to get up there and accomplish a lot, so we try to fill the mission with as much as we can."
Wetherbee and his three STS-113 crewmates -- pilot Paul Lockhart and mission specialists Mike Lopez-Alegria and John Herrington, the only rookie on the shuttle crew -- will have their hands full just as the commander wished.
Assuming an on-time launch early Monday morning, Endeavour will be flown to a docking Tuesday night.
Beginning Wednesday evening and continuing overnight into Thursday morning, the combined shuttle and station crews will mechanically and electrically attach the P1 truss to end of the S-Zero (S0) truss, that straddles the top of the U.S. Destiny science module.
Endeavour's robot arm will be used to pull the P1 truss free from the shuttle's cargo bay and hand off the truss to the station's robot arm. This will then be used to put the P1 truss in place against the S0 truss.
After mechanical bolts are automatically driven to lock the hardware together, Endeavour astronauts Lopez-Alegria and Herrington will depart the station's Quest airlock to begin a 6.5-hour spacewalk in which they will electrically connect the new truss to the station.
With the truss installed -- one of 11 that eventually will be installed to create a backbone that will stretch the length of a football field -- and kept alive with electrical power, the spacewalking pair will head back inside to complete what is expected to be the busiest day of the mission.
Two more spacewalks are planned on alternating days to continue hooking up all the ammonia fluid lines and prepare the P1 truss so it can support future assembly operations in 2003 as NASA launches additional sets of solar wings.
During the second spacewalk there is to be a particularly dramatic task as Lopez-Alegria and Herrington remove a railroad-car like work platform from one end of the truss and install it on the other end, making room for the station's robot arm to be moved to a place needed for a future mission.
As part of that operation, Herrington will have to hold the cart as he is swung at the end of a robot arm through a half-circle that will take him high above the docked station and shuttle. The 30-minute maneuver promises to give Herrington -- and NASA TV viewers looking at the scene via his helmetcam -- and unprecedented view of the multinational complex.
Some of the work seen during Atlantis' mission -- such as the release and deployment of a center radiator panel on the truss -- will not be done during Endeavour's stay. Instead, Bowersox and Budarin will pick up that work during a station-based spacewalk now scheduled for Dec. 5.
If the mission holds to its timeline, Endeavour will undock in the evening of Nov. 19 with the Expedition Six crew remaining at the station and the Expedition Five crew inside the shuttle for their ride home.
Just in time for the holidays, the Expedition Five and STS-113 crews will return to Earth with a landing two days later at the Kennedy Space Center.
Although NASAs 112th shuttle mission and Endeavours 19th is complex and filled with lots to do, the crewmembers say they are up to the challenge.
"We think we can accomplish this and I'll be very happy if we pull it all off," Wetherbee said. "We're ready to go."
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