The Malaysian Insider

CAPE CANAVERAL, Nov 10 - The international space station is about to get all the comforts of a modern, high-end, “green” home: a fancy recycling water filter, a new fridge, extra bedrooms, workout equipment and the essential half-bath.

Later this week, space shuttle Endeavour’s seven astronauts will carry up all the frills for more luxurious space station living — and a larger household. Liftoff is set for Friday night.

It will be a home makeover in the extreme. The space station will go from a three-bedroom, one-bath house with kitchenette to a five-bedroom, two-bath house with two kitchenettes and the latest gizmos NASA has to offer.

To be more precise, astronauts will be installing an extra toilet, more sleeping compartments with individual thermostats and laptop hookups, and an exercise machine capable of some 30 routines.

They also will be delivering the essentials of NASA’s first attempt at a closed-loop environmental system in orbit, where almost everything gets recycled. Already, the power on the space station is generated from solar panels.

Most significant is the water recovery system — it will turn urine and condensation into fresh drinking water. The system is essential if NASA is to increase the size of the space station crew from three to six. That switch is supposed to occur by the middle of next year.

Endeavour’s commander, Christopher Ferguson, considers the water system the single most important piece of equipment that he’s delivering. He said the benefits go way beyond the space station — think of all the deep-space exploration made possible once crews are freed of lugging water.

“This is really it, and it has no parallel. I would challenge you to find any other system on the Earth that recycles urine into drinkable water. It’s such a repulsive concept that nobody would even broach it.

“But that day will come on this planet, too, where we’re going to need to have these technologies in place, and this is just a great way to get started.”

Would he drink the stuff?

“Are you crazy? I would never try that,” Ferguson joked. “No, no, no, no, actually, you know what? If they offered me a sample, I would do it.”

Astronaut Donald Pettit, a former space station resident who will help hook up the system, looks at it as one big coffee machine.

“It’s going to take yesterday’s coffee and make it into today’s coffee,” Pettit said.

Hot coffee is no problem in orbit, it’s the cold drinks that are scarce.

The existing space station galley provides hot or warm water — but not cold. The same with food — hot or warm, but nothing cold. Fresh food like apples or onions that go up on Russian supply ships or NASA’s shuttles has to be gobbled up quickly. The lone refrigerator is restricted to science experiments. So the astronauts are quite excited about getting a second refrigerator with the new kitchenette. It will keep drinks cold and food fresh.

“It seems kind of trivial, but six months of lukewarm orange juice can kind of bum you out,” said astronaut Sandra Magnus, who will fly up on Endeavour and move in for 3½ months.

NASA does not expect to get the water generation system up and running before spring. That’s how long it will take to check everything and make sure the recycled water is safe to drink. Until then, the space station crew will continue to use water delivered by the shuttle and unmanned Russian supply ships.

Before Endeavour leaves, urine already collected by space station residents will be flushed through the system and undergo distillation, so recycled water samples can be returned to Earth for analysis. Additional samples will be brought back by another shuttle in February to make absolutely certain the system is working properly.

If everything goes well, the space station will open its doors to six full-time residents next May or June.

The jump in crew size is especially important for the Canadian, European and Japanese astronauts who have been waiting years to live aboard the space station.

“Imagine for a moment that we have an international space station in orbit that we’ve invested in and we don’t have any US crews on board. That’s what the partners live with today,” said Mike Suffredini, NASA’s space station program manager.

Besides providing patriotic public relations, the larger, more diverse crew will boost the amount time spent on scientific research from 10 hours a week — the average now — to 35 hours a week, Suffredini said. Most of the crew’s time is now devoted to upkeep, and the maintenance chores will grow as the 10-year-old space station ages, he noted.

While fixing up the inside of the space station, Endeavour’s astronauts will tackle a greasy, grimy job on the outside. Three of the crew will take turns cleaning and lubricating a jammed solar-wing rotating joint; it’s clogged with metal shavings from grinding parts and hasn’t worked right for more than a year.

A look at Endeavour’s 7 astronauts

# COMMADER Christopher Ferguson secretly wanted to be an astronaut even before he joined the Navy.

His wish came true 10 years ago, and now he’s about to command his first space mission.

“I’ve had this on my mind, I would say, since perhaps high school, and I’m just lucky enough to be able to fulfil the dream,” he said. “It’s nice to be in charge, but it’s also nice to see how the whole thing comes together.”

Ferguson, 47, a Navy captain and former test pilot, has flown in space once before, as co-pilot on a 2006 mission.

He loves music and is a drummer in an astronaut rock ’n’ roll band. He and his wife, Sandra, have a 16-year-old daughter and two sons, ages 14 and 12. All their children play in the school band.

He grew up in Philadelphia.

# PILOT Eric Boe can’t wait to take “a ride of a lifetime.”

The first-time space traveller has been flying for the Air Force since the late 1980s, and has logged more than 4,000 flight hours in more than 45 types of aircraft.

Flying in space has “always been kind of a far-off dream,” said Boe, 44, an Air Force colonel who grew up in Atlanta. He got into the astronaut corps on his first try in 2000 and will be the first shuttle pilot in his astronaut class to reach orbit.

Wife Kristen, now a full-time mother to their 10-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son, used to be a military pilot, too. It makes life easier being married to a pilot, Boe said, “but I can’t tell as many stories ... she calls my bluff a lot more.”

# THIS time, Donald Pettit will visit the international space station for 1 1/2 weeks. Last time, he spent 5 1/2 months there.

Pettit, 53, who has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, was living at the space station when shuttle Columbia shattered during re-entry in 2003. He ended up returning on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft that plunged too steeply to Earth and briefly was lost with his crewmates in remote Kazakhstan. The unflappable Pettit has no hesitation about returning to space.

It helps when you’re on the space station, Pettit said, to have grown up in a small logging and farming town like Silverton, Oregon, his hometown. He worked as a heavy equipment mechanic to help pay his way through college.

Pettit will help hook up a new water recycling system at the space station and operate a robotic arm, or crane, which he says won’t be that different from his construction jobs during summers as a student.

Two years ago, he spent a few months in Antarctica searching for meteorites, in part to draw comparisons between polar expeditions and space station life.

His twin sons will turn 8 while he is in orbit. He missed their 2nd birthdays on his last space trip, but wife Micki did her best to make up for his absence. She’ll do so again.

This is his second spaceflight since becoming an astronaut in 1996.

# HEIDEMARIE Stefanyshyn-Piper is the first woman assigned as the lead spacewalker on a shuttle flight.

She will perform three spacewalks to clean and lubricate a jammed solar-wing rotating joint. On her only other mission in 2006, she took two spacewalks.

Stefanyshyn-Piper, 45, wanted to fly for the Navy in the mid-1980s, but failed the eye exam. She joined the Navy anyway and went into diving and underwater salvage. She would have been “perfectly happy” with that career, but put in an astronaut application and was selected in 1996.

“I decided that spacewalks were more like diving than flying. So I figured now I’d get to fly in the ultimate machine, the space shuttle,” said the Navy captain, who grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Her engineer husband, Glenn Piper, works for NASA and, in fact, is in charge of all the equipment used in her underwater training for the mission. They have one child, a 19-year-old son who is a college sophomore.

# NAVY Capt Stephen Bowen hopes to put his ceramic tiling experience to work on the mission when he uses a caulk gun to apply grease to a jammed space station joint.

He helped out in his father’s tiling business while growing up in Cohasset, Massachusetts. One brother still does that sort of work. Another is a house painter, another a banker.

“Hopefully, the critiques of my brothers (after seeing his space station repair work) won’t be so harsh that they don’t let me work on my house anymore,” he joked.

Becoming an astronaut was right up there with fireman and professional hockey player when Bowen was a boy. He became a submariner instead — Jacques Cousteau inspired him during the 1970s — and was the first submarine officer to be selected as an astronaut in 2000. He saw it as a logical step “if you want to live in a metal tube for long periods of time.”

Bowen, 44, will perform three spacewalks on his first spaceflight.

Bowen and wife Deborah have a 17-year-old son, 15-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son.

# ROBERT “Shane” Kimbrough got rockets in his blood while visiting his grandparents who lived near Kennedy Space Centre. He spent lots of time there in the early 1970s; his father was an Army field artillery officer in Vietnam.

Kimbrough, 41, followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the Army and becoming a helicopter pilot and platoon leader. He went to NASA in 2000 as a flight simulation engineer for the aircraft meant to simulate shuttle landings and became an astronaut four years later.

This is his first spaceflight. He will perform two spacewalks.

A huge sports fan, Kimbrough coaches his 8-year-old son’s football team and tries hard to be humble and “a normal guy.”

“I just tell the kids, ’Hey, I’m just going on a little business trip for a couple weeks and I’ll be back when you guys are in the playoffs.’ I try to keep it down at their level,” said Kimbrough, a lieutenant colonel who grew up in Atlanta and was captain of his West Point military academy baseball team.

Kimbrough and wife Robbie also have 11-year-old twin daughters.

# SANDRA Magnus, bound for a 3 1/2-month space station stay, is leaving behind a hurricane-damaged roof near Johnson Space Centre in Houston that needs to be replaced. Friends have promised to take care of it for her.

Magnus briefly visited the international space station in 2002. This will be her second space trip.

Magnus, 44, decided while growing up in Belleville, Illinois, that she wanted to be an astronaut, but was shy about her dream. It stuck with her even as she worked as an engineer and pursued a Ph.D., and she applied to the astronaut corps in 1995, failing to get in. She reapplied the next year and was accepted.

She doesn’t dwell on the risks of spaceflight.

“To me, this is an interesting job. It’s a challenging job. It’s a job, I think, that is useful, doing something positive. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s how I’ve wanted to spend my life, and certainly there are risks involved, but there are risk involved in everyday life.”

Magnus, who is single, considers her brother’s policeman job in the suburbs of St. Louis far riskier on a day-to-day basis. - AP