Good news gets lost in space station shuffle

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON - Two veteran spacemen are completing their six-month expedition aboard the international space station, and to report on their achievements, NASA conducted a news conference this week with top program officials and scientists.

NASA astronaut Bill McArthur and Russian cosmonaut Valery Tokarev have performed spacewalks, space redockings, experiments and observations substantially above the planned program, and a suite of hardware repairs that had hitherto not been considered feasible.

But from most of the post-conference news coverage, you’d think they had lost their spacesuits and broken the station’s driveway.

The headlines sounded pretty scary: “Spacewalks halted” ... “Spacewalks temporarily suspended” ... “Spacewalks put on hold.” But the truth is that no extravehicular activity has been delayed, by as much as a minute. The next outing on the schedule isn't until July. And even if an earlier spacewalk suddenly becomes necessary, the preparations would proceed at the normal pace.

The “problems” reported this week were the result both of normal space housekeeping and of heightened safety awareness by the space workforce — and there should be no complaints about that.

Here are the realities behind the scary headlines:

• Four new air scrubber canisters for the Russian spacesuits have been misplaced, and the crew has been given a few extra hours to look for them among the 18,000 other items currently being cataloged by a computerized inventory control system. One canister, about the size of a 1-liter soft-drink bottle, is needed for every spacewalk. Meanwhile, new canisters are already scheduled for delivery on a supply drone in April, three months before the next planned spacewalk.
• In Houston, a worker noticed unusual corrosion in a handrail fabricated for use on the station’s exterior. Closer testing showed that the handrail and an unknown quantity of others were produced at a different temperature than specified. Although the handrails installed aboard the station have already been in use by spacewalkers for five years with no signs of trouble, the safety certification for them was voided pending further analysis. That analysis should be completed by next month.

NASA officials have developed a contingency plan to address the safety concerns if they had to schedule an emergency spacewalk: If the handrails in space are found to be weaker than expected, spacewalkers would clip their safety harnesses to the stanchions at either end of a handrail, rather than to the handrail itself.

The overlooked story
Most of NASA’s press conference was devoted to details of what officials called the “very successful and rewarding” six months in orbit experienced by McArthur, 55, and Tokarev, 53, on what is obviously their last voyage in space. The crew was “a pleasure to work with,” chief flight director Sally Davis reported. “We got done all that we planned, and even more,” she said.

NASA’s mission manager for Expedition 12, Pete Hasbrook, said schedulers had planned to get seven to nine hours per week of science operations from the crew, squeezed into their heavy load of station maintenance and repair, plus two hours of daily exercise. “We achieved 13 hours a week” for scientific work, he announced.

That was mainly crew time spent to set up, adjust, observe or replace experiments, along with repairs as needed. Much of the science gear runs in automated mode — or is actually remote-controlled by ground scientists using the station’s revolutionary communications links. Out of a group of more than 100 principal investigators, three or four different scientists on Earth are usually simultaneously at work, on different experiments, day and night.

Two of the most important experiments dealt with protein crystal growth and with further investigation of human physiological adaptation to space conditions. Deputy ISS program scientist Julie Robinson gave preliminary results of both:

• A unit called PromISS (Protein Crystal Growth Monitoring by Digital Holographic Microscope for the International Space Station) had become more important during the post-Columbia grounding of the shuttle fleet because it relied less upon delivery of experimental materials to Earth than on transmission of high-resolution imagery from the processing chamber. “This is unique,” Robinson explained, “because we can look at growth while it is happening” instead of waiting for the final result for examination. The scientists do still need the final crystals back on earth for analysis — but the imagery gives a lot of extra information about process not available any other way.
• The system called FOOT, or “Foot/Ground Reaction Forces During Space Flight,” is an attempt to calibrate the actual benefit of the exercise programs used by the crew to counteract bone loss and other effects of spaceflight. “It seems the forces during exercise is perhaps only 60 percent of Earth normal,” Robinson said, suggesting this could guide the development of more effective countermeasures.

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