Shuttle Mission

I had not heard that the ISS module being delivered on the Atlantis mission was the one of the heaviest shuttle payloads yet. Nor that this mission team has been training for four and a half years due to the Columbia tragedy. The delivery of the new module will allow for the completion of the ISS over the next four years.

" Atlantis Commander Brent Jett says more is at stake in finishing the international space lab than just building a place for science experiments. "It's preparing us as an agency to take the next step back to the moon for a permanent outpost or onto Mars," said Jett, who will be making his fourth space trip. Jett said his crew will set the tone for the next four years of construction since each mission to the station builds off the next. The other crew members are pilot Chris Ferguson and mission specialists Joe Tanner, Dan Burbank, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper and Steve MacLean of the Canadian Space Agency."

The mission will launch between Aug 27 and Sep 13 with hopes for an launch before Sep 7 so as not to interfere with a Russian Soyuz mission later in September. The Atlantis crew is facing a challenging and difficult series of tasks.

"After docking with the space station, the 45-foot-long addition will be lifted by robotic arm from the shuttle's payload bay and handed off to the space station's robotic arm. The next day, Tanner and Piper will go out on the first spacewalk, followed a day later by a second spacewalk by Burbank and MacLean. The next day, the solar wings will be opened, and the following day, Tanner and Piper will go on a final spacewalk."

That's a lot of space walking, folks.