Space station crew takes a brief road trip

HOUSTON - While the space shuttle may be grounded, the crew of the international space station is about to go on the move. Early Tuesday morning, the two astronauts will pack up their scientific results, load their Soyuz space vehicle, don their spacesuits, turn the space station to autopilot, dim the lights and leave the station.

And no, it's not an emergency.

Instead, the space station duo is taking advantage of the time they had otherwise scheduled to entertain Discovery's crew and moving up a maneuver originally planned for next month.

This road trip is a brief one, however. After undocking the Soyuz from the space station, pilot Sergey Krikalyov and flight engineer John Phillips will back it up, shift the spacecraft sideways about thirty feet and finally move back in to dock at another of the station's three ports.

The maneuver is routine (this is the sixth time it’s been done by station crewmembers), but Krikalyov and Phillips still must go through an extensive checklist to reconfigure the space station, in case a docking problem prevents them from getting back inside and they have to return to Earth. But experts consider the chance of any mechanical problem extremely remote. If there were difficulties at the new docking port — say, interference from a piece of stray insulation — the Soyuz could easily return to the docking port it had just left.

Prior to undocking at 6:35 a.m. ET, the two spacemen will don their ‘Sokol’ pressure suits, load the Soyuz with experimental results to be returned to Earth (so that they will have them if they have to suddenly return), and close all hatches securely. The flyaround is scheduled to occur while the station is crossing Russia, in contact with ground sites. They will be redocked within half an hour and then begin a day-long process of resetting the station's systems.

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