[TWIAR] CNN/AP - Station crew to spend extra time in orbit, set record

[Greg Williams]

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Texas (AP) -- The astronauts aboard the international
space station will spend an extra month in orbit because of robot arm
trouble, pushing their mission to a U.S. record-setting 189 days.

NASA decided Thursday to bump the crew's ride home from May to June so the
visiting astronauts can replace a wrist joint in the space station's
mechanical arm. The additional 3 1/2 weeks are needed to train the shuttle
astronauts for the repair work and add the spare joint to the mission
payload.

American astronauts Carl Walz and Daniel Bursch and their Russian commander,
Yuri Onufrienko, moved into the space station in early December and logged
their 106th day in orbit on Thursday. Space shuttle Endeavour was supposed
to lift off with their replacements on May 6; that launch is now scheduled
for May 31.

That will keep the three men in orbit until June 12, beating NASA's current
space endurance record by a single day. Shannon Lucid's 1996 Mir mission
lasted 188 days; she still will hold the world's space endurance record for
women.

Even at 189 days, Onufrienko won't come close to surpassing his country's
space endurance record: an incredible 438 days set by Russian
cosmonaut-physician Valery Polyakov aboard Mir in 1994 and 1995.

The space station residents were notified of the shuttle delay shortly after
the decision was made, but had had a hunch they would be staying up longer
than planned because of the robot arm problem.


Station crew, from left, Carl Walz, Daniel Bursch and Yuri Onufrienko
NASA can work around the problem with computer software for the upcoming
space station construction mission by Atlantis, due to lift off April 4 with
a 44-foot (13-meter) girder to be installed on the orbiting outpost.

But managers want to fix the station's robot arm as soon as possible after
Atlantis' flight, by having shuttle astronauts replace one of three wrist
joints in the 58-foot (17.5-meter) Canadian-built crane.

The joint malfunctioned a few weeks ago; the brakes would not release,
possibly because of an electrical short or radio interference. The robot arm
experienced a fleeting problem last summer that engineers now suspect may be
related to the current wrist trouble.

Space station flight director Bob Castle said the space station astronauts
are healthy and in good spirits, and there is no reason why they cannot stay
up for six months.

The astronauts flying up on Atlantis in two weeks already had planned to
take fresh clothes for Walz, Bursch and Onufrienko as well as a country
Western-themed dinner. Shuttle commander Michael Bloomfield said the three
men are welcome to raid Atlantis' pantry since they'll have to wait even
longer now for the fresh pizza, sandwiches and soft drinks they've been
craving.

"They're more than welcome to take any of the food," Bloomfield said. He
added, sympathetically: "That's a long time."