Good news gets lost in space station shuffle

Keeping busy in orbit
Meanwhile, the crew was given a running list of one- to two-hour tasks to choose from during any spare time that opened up — sort of an orbital "job jar."

"Bill did 87 hours of work off of this list," Davis said. "That’s an additional two full weeks of work."

McArthur dove into all tasks requested of him. Davis recalled that her favorite quotation from his radio communications was about work: “The difference between a workday and a non-workday,” he explained, “is that I get to pick what work I do.”

One special Saturday activity McArthur concentrated on was the study of bubble formation and bubble control — which is a major problem in zero-gravity, because bubbles do not float to the top of the fluids in which they are suspended. During previous space biology experiments, Robinson noted, “bubbles can keep nutrients from spreading, so the cell cultures die” — an unwanted effect. McArthur tumbled himself as a “human centrifuge” to develop better ways to manually filter bubbles from fluids.

This was far from merely a scientific concern. Space station program official Kirk Shireman was asked what had changed to make the formerly troublesome Russian-built oxygen generator run so smoothly in recent months.

"The problems seemed to be related to clogging from bubbles in the water" to be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, he explained, “and the bubbles are removed manually — so crewmen get better with experience.” In addition, he pointed out that the current unit was the first one from a new manufacturer, so it may have had some design improvements.

Repair crew at work
Continuing the tradition of space repair of equipment originally thought not to be fixable in flight, McArthur installed several spare parts on an air-quality analyzer, constructed a fix-it device for some misaligned connection pins by following instructions from ground controllers — and finally restored the equipment to full operation.

Another achievement came during a spacewalk last November, when McArthur and Tokarev wore NASA spacesuits that had been repaired in orbit. That outing marked the first-ever operation using that hardware without having an extra crewman to assist the two spacewalkers. (The two-person operation is far more common with Russian spacesuits, which are built for more autonomy.)

Aside from the crew activities, the station hardware also acquired new capabilities, Hasbrook reported. Among the most important improvements is the ability now for ground controllers to operate the Canadian robot arm attached to the station, without the need for onboard crew attention. Whenever the arm must be moved without bothering the crew, and especially during intense activity times such as crew handover, the new control mode will save a great deal of time and effort in space.

Correction: An earlier version of this story inaccurately attributed the details of the PromISS and FOOT experiments to flight director Sally Davis; it was deputy ISS program scientist Julie Robinson who provided them.

NBC News space analyst James Oberg spent 22 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer.

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