Astronauts Take in View of Earth and Phone Home

After repairing a $1.5-million Coke machine, releasing two satellites, retrieving one and revisiting the other, the astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour took a break Friday.

As the six astronauts reached the halfway point of the 10-day mission, they took six hours off to relax and enjoy the view from the shuttle’s windows.

“Probably the best thing about space flight is being able to look out of the window,” said astronaut Mario Runco in a television interview Friday. “The Earth appears as a beautiful blue sapphire among the heavens. The stars are very, very vivid. They’re very much clearer than they are down on Earth and much more brilliant.”

The astronauts also had a chance to phone home in a private linkup between the shuttle and their families in Houston.

“One of the things that we’ve learned . . . is you are actually more efficient in the long run by providing the crew with a little off-duty time [and] providing the crew with time to talk to their families,” said Jeff Bantle, NASA’s mission operations director.

When the astronauts returned to work, they fired the shuttle’s maneuvering jets to place it on course for a rendezvous with a tiny test satellite released earlier.

The satellite, which was dispatched from Endeavour on Wednesday with a deliberate wobble, is supposed to stabilize itself using the Earth’s magnetic field and the thin atmosphere 176 miles up. An 80-pound brass weight at the front of the satellite is designed to make it fly straight like a dart or a badminton shuttlecock.

The astronauts plan to fly within 2,000 feet of the wastebasket-sized satellite today and Sunday. If it does not show signs of stabilizing today, the next inspection may be delayed until Monday, Bantle said.