Stopped old Space Station construction resumes

• For more than three years, the International Space Station that is half-built has floated above the Earth. But now construction, which has hung in limbo since NASA’s space shuttle fleet was grounded after the 2003 Columbia disaster, is scheduled to resume.

• Work on the station stopped because of the Columbia accident, which forced NASA to redesign many shuttle systems and its own safety procedures. The Columbia disintegrated while returning from a mission on Feb. 1, 2003, killing its crew of seven. The shuttle had been critically damaged during liftoff when a piece of insulating foam broke off its fuel tank and ruptured part of its heat shield.

• The project began in late 1998 with the joining of two American and Russian modules, the United States and 15 other nations have slowly put together a structure that weighs more than 400,000 pounds, with a habitable volume of almost 15,000 cubic feet. When completed, it is to weigh almost a million pounds and have a cabin volume of more than 33,000 cubic feet, larger than a typical five-bedroom house.

• NASA has allotted about 15 flights to complete the project before the shuttles are retired in 2010. The next four missions will carry other massive truss segments to extend the station’s central girder to more than 350 feet. The girder will eventually support four huge sets of solar-power arrays, batteries and heat-dispensing radiators.

• The additional truss segments, which will increase the mass of the station by 40 tons, will also include 10-foot-wide rotary joints shaped like wagon wheels that will allow the solar arrays to track the sun for optimum power as the station moves in orbit. The Atlantis is delivering the second array, joining one put on the station in 2000.

• NASA managers say shuttle flights should still be considered experimental and somewhat dangerous, but they call the risks “acceptable” for the missions left to finish the station.

• The director of the shuttle program N. Wayne Hale Jr. said, “We expect to have some foam loss from the tank on the next flight,” But a better understanding of these issues, and progress in developing ways to repair damage in flight, allow NASA to resume a regular launching schedule.

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