Wobbly Astronauts May Recline on Return After Long Space Stay

Astronauts made flabby and wobbly by months on the Russian space station will be able to put their feet up on their trip home next year aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.

Atlantis’ astronauts Friday installed a platform on the shuttle to accommodate recliners.

Atlantis’ next flight after its current 11-day mission is a docking with Russia’s orbiting outpost Mir in June. The shuttle will take home two Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut Norman Thagard, who will ride a Russian rocket to the station in March.

Thagard and his Russian crew mates will need to lie down aboard Atlantis during the jarring trip back to Earth. They will be too weak to sit up after three months aboard Mir.

Muscles become flabby during long periods of weightlessness, and the sudden encounter with gravity sometimes makes astronauts dizzy.

Shuttle astronauts always sit upright on the ride home, strapped in their seats. But they have never spent more than 15 days in orbit at a time.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had the crew install the seats’ platform and mounting bracket in orbit to make sure the hardware fits when the shuttle undergoes structural stress in space. The seats themselves will not be installed until the docking mission.

Atlantis’ astronauts today will capture an ozone-studying satellite they released eight days earlier. Ozone measurements by instruments aboard the shuttle were interrupted briefly Friday when a power converter shut down; the crew switched to a backup converter.