Close in spirit while half a world apart, two female American astronauts prepared Wednesday to command separate missions that should bring them together in Earth orbit.
The encounter between Peggy Whitson and Pam Melroy aboard the International Space Station, tentatively planned for Oct. 25, would mark the first such meeting in 46 years of human space flight.
Whitson thundered away from Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket on Wednesday with cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Malaysian space tourist Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor. NASA reported on its Web site that their craft docked with the space station Friday just before 10 a.m. CDT.
Meanwhile, mission commander Pam Melroy climbed aboard the shuttle Discovery with six colleagues at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday. Melroy’s crew rehearsed the countdown for their Oct. 23 launch on a crucial 14-day assembly mission to the orbital base.
Whitson, who’ll be the first woman to command the space station, and Melroy, the second to command a shuttle flight, will meet in orbit if Discovery’s missions remain on schedule.
“I look forward to their arrival,” Whitson said of Melroy’s crew on the eve of her own launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. “She thinks it will be a special moment.”
Melroy was just as eager about the meeting.
“We are like a family. This is fun for us,” Melroy said.
Whitson, a 47-year-old biochemist with a doctorate from Rice University, was selected for astronaut training in 1996. The 2002 mission was her first.
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Melroy, 46, recently retired from the U.S. Air Force as a test pilot and was chosen for the astronaut corps in 1994. She first flew as the shuttle’s pilot in 2000, a year after Eileen Collins became the first woman to command a space shuttle mission.
During their six months aboard the space station, Whitson and Malenchenko will supervise a critical transformation. Additions of European Space Agency and Japanese science modules late this year and in early 2008 will convert an outpost largely made up of American, Russian and Canadian hardware into a compound representing the efforts of 15 nations.
Discovery’s mission will add a gateway module to which the new labs can be attached.
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An evolving station
The International Space Station is on the verge of a transformation.
Over the next six months, the orbital outpost now staffed largely by rotating three-member crews from the United States and Russia will nearly double in size. Teams of spacewalkers will install new modules housing science laboratories made by the Japanese and the Europeans and new living quarters for more resident astronauts.
When it is built out, researchers from 15 countries will have a stake in the station.
The American and Russian controllers who have guided the station’s astronauts since its creation in 1998 will be joined by smaller, around-the-clock mission-control teams in Germany, France and Japan.
— Houston Chronicle