After Long Walk, Shuttle Crew Enters Space Station

Still elated from their successful work outside, Discovery’s astronauts swung open the hatches of the international space station Sunday night and floated into the chilly but bright outpost.

They were the first visitors in six months.

“Make yourself at home,” radioed Mission Control.

Before the seven shuttle astronauts began opening the doors, flight controllers warned it would be 57 degrees in the first module, the U.S.-made Unity. “You might want to bring a sweater,” Mission Control advised.

They had to pass through six hatches to get all the way in, a drawn-out affair that took more than two hours because of the need to equalize the pressure in the various compartments. Mission Control helped by turning on the lights ahead of them.

American Tamara Jernigan and Russian Valery Tokarev led the way.

“We are absolutely delighted to be aboard,” Jernigan said.

Discovery’s astronauts will spend the next three days making repairs and deliveries to the 240-mile-high station, vacant since another shuttle crew joined the first two components in orbit in December. The work is bigger and far more tedious than what they did earlier Sunday during the second-longest spacewalk ever, rigging cranes and other tools to the exterior.

Among the jobs awaiting them inside: pulling up the floor to replace electrical meters on Russian batteries that aren’t charging properly, trying to fix a broken U.S. communication system and installing mufflers to reduce the noise inside the Russian-built module, called Zarya.

They got started on the repairs within minutes of entering the space station.

NASA estimates 158 spacewalks, totaling more than 1,000 hours, will be needed in the next five years to build and maintain the station.