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Team Of Astronauts Adds Kibo Lab To Space Station

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The Associated Press

Published: June 4, 2008

CAPE CANAVERAL - A team of astronauts working inside and out anchored a giant billion-dollar Japanese lab to the International Space Station on Tuesday, making it the biggest room there.

The moment of contact came as two of the crew were winding up a spacewalk.

Spacewalkers Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr. took care of all the preliminaries, removing covers and disconnecting cables on the bus-size lab, named Kibo, Japanese for hope. They left it to their colleagues inside to do the heavy lifting, by way of the space station's robot arm.

The honor of operating the arm for the installation fell to Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, who accompanied Kibo to orbit aboard space shuttle Discovery.

"We have a new hope on the International Space Station," Hoshide announced.

"Fantastic job," Mission Control replied.

Kibo, a behemoth stretching 37 feet and weighing more than 32,000 pounds, became the largest lab at the space station by nine feet.

It's also more sophisticated. Kibo sports a hatch to the outside and a robot arm for sliding out science experiments. A smaller arm will arrive next spring, along with an outdoor porch for holding the experiment packages.

The first part of Kibo was delivered by the last shuttle crew in March. The astronauts aboard the linked shuttle and station will attach that storage unit to the lab on Friday.
Japanese Space Agency officials estimate more than $2 billion went into all the pieces, which had to be split up to fit into three shuttle missions. The project has been in the works for more than 20 years.

The lab work was just part of Tuesday's spacewalk, the first of three planned for Discovery's nine-day space station visit. Coincidentally, it fell on the 43rd anniversary of America's first spacewalk, by Gemini 4's Edward White.

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