STS-116 Successfully Hardwires Space Station

Space Shuttle Discovery made the first Space Shuttle night launch in more than four years an illuminating experience, leaving a brilliant orange trail in its wake as it blasted off in early December. After 13 days in space, Discovery landed back at the Kennedy Space Center to end one of the most complex Shuttle missions ever.

STS-116/ISS 12A.1 was the 117th Space Shuttle flight, Discovery’s 33rd flight and the 20th flight to the ISS.

“The successful accomplishment of this mission was an excellent finish to an outstanding year for the Space Shuttle team,” said USA Program Manager Howard DeCastro. “Working with NASA and the rest of the Shuttle team, we completed all the necessary work to provide a trained crew and ready vehicle for what turned out to be an exceptional mission.”

During a complex, week-long stay, seven Discovery astronauts and three Space Station crewmembers reconfigured the Station’s electrical power and cooling systems and increased its power supply.

The crew retracted one solar array and installed the 4,000-pound Port 5 (P5) truss element, which extended the left side of the overall truss. The extension allowed a giant solar array joint and the Port 4 (P4) arrays that were installed on STS-115 in September to track the sun. The Station had been running on a temporary electrical system since 1998.

Commander Mark Polansky; Pilot Bill Oefelein; and Mission Specialists Nicholas Patrick, Joan Higginbotham, Bob Curbeam, Sunita Williams and Christer Fuglesang, a European Space Agency (ESA) Astronaut, launched on STS-116. Aboard the Station awaiting Discovery’s arrival were Expedition 14 Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineers Mikhail Tyurin and Thomas Reiter, also an ESA astronaut. Williams and Reiter switched places, with Williams beginning a six-month stay as a Station crewmember and Reiter flying back to Earth on STS-116. Reiter had been on the Station since July.

Curbeam conducted four spacewalks, the first time a Shuttle crewmember has completed more than three spacewalks on a single mission. Fuglesang conducted three spacewalks, and Sunni Williams completed one.

The first spacewalk, a six-hour, 36-minute excursion by Curbeam and Fuglesang required intricate teamwork by the astronauts to accomplish the installation of the P5 truss. The spacewalkers visually guided Astronaut Joan Higginbotham as she maneuvered the truss in place from aboard the Station using the Station’s robotic arm. Curbeam and Fuglesang bolted it in place and hooked up electrical connections.

With the new port truss section in place, the crew moved on to the second phase of the mission – rewiring the Station. That work began when the port solar array on truss segment P6 was partially folded up, enabling the P4 solar arrays to rotate and track the sun.

Curbeam and Fuglesang headed outside on the mission’s second spacewalk to begin reconfiguring the external wiring. Channels 2 and 3 of the Station’s electrical system – one half of its power supply – were turned off to enable the spacewalkers to unplug and reroute power through the main bus switching units. Mission Control and the Station and Shuttle crewmembers also activated the external thermal Control system loop B.

Two days later, Curbeam and Williams conducted a spacewalk to rewire the other half of the ISS power system, channels 1 and 4.

While Mission Control sends 800 commands to the Space Station on a typical day, flight controllers sent close to 4,000 commands during the carefully choreographed power reconfiguration activities.

In fact, Mission Control powered down virtually the entire Station at one point or another to prepare it for the spacewalkers. The results will ready the Space Station for more solar arrays and laboratories to be added next year.

A fourth spacewalk was added to allow the crew to retract P6 solar arrays that had folded improperly. That spacewalk was a historic moment for Curbeam, who became the first astronaut to conduct four excursions during a single Shuttle mission. Another objective of the spacewalk was to collect information that could prove useful when the opposite side of the array is retracted during the STS-117 mission in March.

“Completing three successful missions in 2006 and getting back into an operating rhythm required focus and hard work from the whole NASA/contractor team,” DeCastro said. “2006 was an outstanding year, and the team is poised to make 2007 even better.”

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